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Overview
‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857281838 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2016 |
| Series: | Anthem Companions to Sociology |
| Pages: | 234 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons
By A. Javier Treviño
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 A. Javier TreviñoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-183-8
CHAPTER 1
FIGHTING THE DEADLY ENEMY OF DEMOCRACY: SOCIOLOGY AGAINST NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Uta Gerhardt
Some voices in American sociology maintain to this day, or so it seems, that Talcott Parsons, the staunch defender of American democracy, was apolitical inasmuch as he dubbed himself an "incurable theorist." Critics even accuse him of having been utterly conservative, if not inadvertently a fellow traveler of fascism in Germany. The charge was refuted as preposterous as soon as it was raised (again) in the 1990s, but the label had been given to him just before the 1960s, raised as it was by the then "angry young men," the mentors of The Disobedient Generation.
Parsons, to note, had been horrified by what National Socialism did to German politics and culture, destroying as it did Weimar democracy even prior to the ascendency to power of the Nazis in 1933. In a four-year effort, in The Structure of Social Action, Parsons completed an analysis of anomic society that characterized the Germany of his day, contrasting it with the integrated society of the New Deal in the United States. He opposed Nazi Germany openly when the pogroms of November 1938 made it obvious that the inhumanity of the regime was no mere transient feature but actually threatened the culture of civilization as such:
To mention no other considerations, that which is, as a cultural movement, distinctive about National Socialism is deeply hostile, in particular to the spirit of science and the great academic tradition, and more generally to the whole great cultural and institutional tradition of which these are an integral part. This makes it necessarily a deadly enemy for us. We must oppose it with all our strength.
Six years later, in November 1944, his condemnation of National Socialism had lost none of its rigor, but his sociological understanding of German fascism had gained considerably in conceptual depth and ability to account for historical facts. He jotted down in notes titled "The Case of Germany" the characteristics of the regime whose mass crimes were becoming increasingly undeniable by the day:
Grandest scale movement of violent group prejudice & socially organized hostility to others of which we have record anywhere. Takes German Volksgemeinschaft as a solidary system and puts it in violent conflict with whole range of "enemies" — internally especially the Jews, then Communists etc. Externally national enemies as such, Communism, International Jewry, Democracy, Plutocracy, etc. etc.
Extreme militant aggressiveness, intolerance, intransigence, openly destructive sentiment, break over of the usual ethical rules governing treatment of opposition — fair play, discussion, refraining from coercion, deception etc.
Certain salient traits of the movement's orientation.
Anti-Capitalism. Anti-Leftism esp. Communism. Anti-Semitism.
Individualism, Materialism, Bohemianism.
Nationalism. "Idealism."
General combination of
Extreme revolutionary radicalism
Fundamentalist traits.
It seems naive to assume that a social theorist who so openly condemned Nazism and praised as exemplary the modern America of his day should aid and abet some presumptive effort made by Harvard's Russian Research Center to shepherd a former Nazi into the United States. In other words, the story needs telling yet again, not only in regard to the Parsonian sociological analysis of National Socialism but also in regard to how Parsons "became relatively active as an anti-Nazi" in the years between 1938 and 1945–46 when he was untiring in his opposition to Nazi totalitarianism.
My argument has three parts: Part 1 recapitulates the many activities Parsons engaged in and some statements on which he made as he targeted National Socialism as a political activist, culminating, as I argue, in 1945 in his little-known contribution to postwar planning for the redemocratization of Germany under the (US) military government.
Part 2 reconstructs four theoretical approaches by means of which he explained National Socialism differently at various times during World War II, culminating in the postwar classic The Social System — the theory that reduced National Socialism to one among several structural types of society and a deviant one at that.
Part 3 pulls the two themes together: Modernity, as Parsons explained time and again, signified the "American ethos," the most humanist value pattern in history so far, whereas its opposite was a premodern type of dictatorship such as Germany under fascism. It goes without saying that Parsons's juxtaposition between the two prongs of the structure of social action — the two-type continuum the extremes of which were the United States and Nazi Germany — owed much to Max Weber's classic theory, the model social thought that Parsons emulated throughout his life.
Parsons the Activist
World War II started in Europe in September 1939. Dubbed the European War until late in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, the danger was, Parsons warned, that American isolationism kept the country out of the struggle against the Nazis until all of Europe, including Britain, the one natural ally of the United States across the Atlantic, was being conquered. When Congress passed the Neutrality Act that failed to extend military aid to the embattled Europeans, in a personal letter addressed to both senators from Massachusetts, Parsons urged them to reconsider the policy: "The dangers of a peace at any price have been vividly brought home by the fate of the appeasement policy as pursued by the Chamberlain government" — alluding as he did to the ill-fated agreement of September 1938 between Britain, France and Germany that had not only legitimized German annexation of Czechoslovakia but had also encouraged Hitler to step up his preparations for the invasion of Poland, the event that plunged the world into war.
In April 1940, at a mass meeting in Harvard Yard organized by the Harvard Student Union, which opposed military aid to Britain fearing that such aid would lead the United States into war, Parsons told his audience that American isolationism was a grave mistake. The widely popular stance taken by America First, the social movement with millions of followers that even President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not ignore, Parsons warned, posed more of a threat to American integrity than its academic advocates might acknowledge: "[F]atalistic acceptance of inevitability is heard in many quarters, right and left from the 'wave of the future' to some of our Marxist friends. From this point of view that outcome of the present war is a matter of quite secondary importance, it will make only a superficial difference anyway. The other view is that we may be at one of the great turning points in the history of civilization" — alleging that the Nazis would overrun one nation after another in Europe while the United States remained idle until its splendid isolation might eventually make it an easy prey to German imperialism. This same view inspired a letter by Parsons to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune criticizing the US ambassador to BritainJoseph P Kennedy, who had publicly endorsed appeasement.
Between August 1940 and June 1941 Parsons, in regular WRUL (shortwave) radio broadcasts, commented on the news of the day from home and abroad, interpreting and explaining the impact and salience of contemporary events as they touched upon the world crisis. For example, when Congress debated the Burke-Wadsworth bill in August 1941, which would allow the buildup of a military force of some 900,000 men under the principle of the draft, he called it a "truly historic event" and observed: "Passage of this bill is also highly significant in another way which is of great interest from the British point of view. It is a fundamental step in the process of change from the isolationist point of view toward foreign affairs which was expressed in the neutrality legislation enacted before the war" — reminding his audience that the Republican Party at its national convention had recently repudiated "an extreme isolationist stand in the presidential campaign," when "Mr. [Wendell] Willkie, of all the candidates, had gone farthest in stressing the fundamental character of the present conflict and the extent to which our own interests were bound up with a British victory." When Roosevelt was officially inaugurated for his third term as president in January 1941, Parsons commented on the inaugural address: "It was rather a solemn expression of faith in and promise of the democratic way of life," quoting from the conclusion of Roosevelt's speech: "In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America and the faith of America."
American Defense, made up of Harvard professors and students who combated Nazism by placing their writing and analytical skills in the service of democracy against the totalitarian threat, was the group in whose name Parsons gave his WRUL broadcasts. The group remained an anchor for his anti-Nazi activities until 1945. He chaired their Committee on Morale and National Unity, renamed the Committee of National Morale in 1941, with Edward Y Hartshorne, a younger colleague and an expert on Germany, when together they organized discussions on the German social structure, among other topics, as they raised the urgent question about how Nazi aggressiveness fitted "The Nazi Dream of Victory." About himself and Hartshorne, the chairpersons of the committee who also considered undertaking research on the suffering in countries occupied by the Germans, Parsons wrote to Harvard president James B. Conant in early 1942:
Since we did not feel qualified to attempt direct practical action, our aim was to do an academic job in bringing to bear our own sociological knowledge of and approach to the social situation of those countries in order to clarify some of the principal factors which must underlie any intelligent practical policy.
To place his academic proficiency at the disposal of the nation's war effort was one major activity for Parsons the activist, and another was to join the efforts to convert Germany into a modern democracy, subsequent to victory through Germany's unconditional surrender, the official Allied policy as of January 1943.
A first appeal taking this vantage point, I think, was the WRUL radio broadcast of 21 May 1942, titled "National Socialism and the German People," where Parsons made it clear that Germany had to undergo major changes if it was to become a civilized nation again. He made "five broad suggestions" that entailed minimum social change: (1) Ousting the Nazis was only the first step, and the United Nations (the victorious Allies) should make every effort to support Germany's economic and political stability in order to preempt those feelings of injustice that the Germans were keen to develop and would use as a pretext for their renewed radicalization; (2) Military government should appear to the Germans as if it preserved rather than annulled their traditions; (3) A firm moral stance should be taken and crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and/or tolerated by the general population should be condemned relentlessly, such that shame and guilt might become prominent in the Germans and restitution could take its course; (4) Prussian militarism as well as the Junker class should be thoroughly uprooted to avoid a return to any semblance of pre-Nazi elitism; (5) The German tendency to romanticize their (crime-laden) nation should be thoroughly discouraged and must disappear.
Undoubtedly, the road to German reconstruction was no easy path. A totalitarian regime marred with atrocities from inhuman warfare and the mass killings of civilians was to be converted into a civilized Western-type of society. Parsons realized, as he wrote in a letter to a former teaching assistant, that "a good deal of pretty tough-minded and realistic thinking is called for," and he detailed what it meant:
I personally feel that order and security will have to be the primary keynotes, and we simply cannot undertake to implement any very large humanitarian ideal. When you add up the terrific disorganization there is bound to be with the fact that every important move in Europe will have to reckon with the sensitivities of the Russians, I don't think we ought to build up the idea that we are going to introduce an Utopia over there.
It is just this kind of realism in his tireless concern for how not only to win the war but also win peace through postwar policy that makes Parsons exemplary as a sociologist turned activist, in a way similar to Max Weber's fight for realism and reason in the early twentieth century.
A major accomplishment of Parsons was that he participated in the founding and later the running of Harvard's School of Overseas Administration, the institution set up for the training of future military government officers for Germany — a venture of ten universities under the guidance of the War Department. Parsons contributed a "Memorandum on a Possible Sociological Contribution to the Proposed Training Program for Military Administration," to state the claim that sociology had much to offer military government training, and in September 1943 shortly after the official opening of the school, he became chairman of the Planning Committee of the Foreign Area and Language Program, Central European Program where he was responsible for instruction, as well as for personnel, in this most important branch of the school. As he detailed in a letter to the dean of the faculty at Harvard, he devoted five-sixths of his time to the military government training programs, occupying himself with no other theme than Germany (and Japan) in the winter of 1943–44 when he wrote nothing sociological during that entire year. His lectures in the Area Specialized Training Program covered the Mediterranean area but even more extensively Germany where he dealt with a wealth of historical, sociological, political and ideological issues that he had to cover for the first time in his academic career. As it happened, he lectured on the following themes: the institutional structure of Europe (seven lectures); German universities; the Protestant church, the Catholic church; the press in Nazi Germany; public meetings in Germany; anti-Semitism (three lectures); etiquette in personal relations; etiquette in business and official relations; family observances; social and psychological aspects of authority; the special role of authority (in human relations); why the Nazis won (two lectures); the German people and their character; as well as family, tradition and customs in Italy (together with Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist).
In 1944 Parsons combined his activism with sociological expertise, as he participated in three events: From April to June, the conference series "Germany after the War" was the venue for discussion that included his memorandum on intervention in Germany, later to be elaborated in the manuscript on how to deal with Germany. Parsons's work (if in three fragments) found its way into the conference report, soon to be distributed in large numbers not only in government circles in Washington, DC but also among planning personnel in London. Another event was a conference on anti-Semitism organized by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in May 1944 where 30 prominent social scientists accounted for recent outbreaks of anti-Semitism in the United States, and AJC chairman John Slawson would later thank Parsons warmly "for the time and attention you gave to the Conference." For the third event — the 1944 meetings of the Conference of Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relationship to the Democratic Way of Life — Parsons chose as his topic the prejudice that not only had engulfed Germany in the form of genocidal racism but also, in certain outbreaks, troubled the United States at the end of World War II. The subject matter he proposed was racial and religious prejudice, the scourge that marred the epoch soon to end. In his lecture at Wellesley College in January 1945 on "Social Reconstruction in Germany," he focused on The Nazi Movement and Consequences of its Collapse, Pre-Nazi Structures as Sources of Instability and Aggression, and The Problem of Democratization of German Society When his notes referred to his essay written for the "Germany after the War" conference, suggesting that the "permissive control of the situation," which is the "blocking of certain lines of development," might automatically bring changes in the desired direction in German social structure and mentality, he added: "Occupation + position of women the critical points for control."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons by A. Javier Treviño. Copyright © 2016 A. Javier Treviño. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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