The mystery of ‘historical specificity’ or how Geoffrey Hodgson misrepresented Talcott Parsons’ life and theory

Hodgson’s concept of ‘historical specificity’

Since Hodgson’s critique of Parsons is centered on Hodgson’s claim about Parsons’ alleged neglect of ‘historical specificity,’ it is important to start our analysis with a discussion of this concept. Hodgson’s concept of ‘historical specificity’ remains strangely obscure. Yet, essentially, Hodgson’s smooth talk about ‘historical specificity’ is nothing but an attempt to remove the actor as an independent variable from theoretical analysis in the name of ‘history.’ In our analysis, Hodgson’s key concept is based on a fundamental misperception of the nature of general theory. ¹ As a misperception it represents a severe case of empiricist reductionism, which penetrates the whole corpus of Hodgson’s work. In the center of Hodgson’s assessment is the idea that general theory represents an ‘anti-thesis’ to strategies of historical investigation. This is why Hodgson is able to write the following hyperbole: ‘If history matters – at least in the sense of social development being path dependent – then our analyses must explore the particularities of the past. … If history matters in this sense, then general theories have their limits’ (2001: 3). Indeed, whatever limits general theories have, these limits have absolutely nothing to do with the propositions about history which are featured by Hodgson. The logic which Hodgson assumes is based on an insufficient scientific understanding of the nature of theoretical discourse. In style with Veblen, he assumes an all-embracing naturalism which not only penetrates his basic epistemology but also characterizes his general approach to social analysis. It is ‘behaviorist’ in the philosophical sense that it tends to reduce the question of action to sheer environmental responses (dressed up in a rhetoric of ‘habituation’) or alternatively to a metaphysics of ‘instincts,’ which is preprogrammed in the actor. ² In concrete analysis this tendency breaks down into doctrines of ‘interest reification’ not essentially very different from the fallacy of traditional historical materialism. This theoretical position is generally characterized by radical empiricism and a randomness of ends, since the authenticity of the actor is generally denied or ignored. It is characteristic of Hodgson’s point of view that culture as an independent variable (that is, what Hodgson calls ‘ideational’) is rancorously criticized. Culture in this sense is not only ‘mysterious’ but it is inherently illegitimate, since, according to Hodgson (2001: 292–293), it violates the canons of ‘objective’ science. At this point the doctrine of objective naturalism tends psychologically to join forces with postmodernism because the authenticity of the actor is denied in the name of ‘anti-essentialism.’

In its actual function, Hodgson’s concept of ‘historical specificity’ represents what in analytical terms become an absolute, and as an absolute it represents the transformation of theoretical logic into a doctrine of empirical determinism and its psychological functions. The only result from a psychological point of view is a random relativism surrounding the concept of ‘historical specificity.’ And indeed, Hodgson’s concept can mean whatever a user would like to imply. Hodgson appears to be at best epistemologically naïve when he tries to allure the reader to the notion that by the use of the term ‘historical specificity’ he has some particular entitlement to ‘engage the real world.’ Although Hodgson pays lip-service in his book to certain aspects of the critique of empiricism, he still leaves the psychological impression in the reader’s mind that ‘historical specificity’ is some kind of empirical term or some kind of generalized ‘empirical object.’ Especially when he says that historical specificity was forgotten, he certainly produces on the level of general association the idea of something ‘real’ out there which has been left out or ignored. If this was not the case, then the word ‘forgotten’ would be a semantic fallacy.

Obviously, Hodgson has truly never understood the implications of Frank Knight’s assessment that ‘all analysis is inherently unrealistic’ (Knight, 1940: 460). Hodgson avoids any serious discussion of what a scientific construction of the concept of history implies. He simply conceals the irreconcilable differences between his embracement of historicism (as well as radical empiricism) and the question of theoretical reasoning. In reality, he subjugated the question of historical multiplicity to a metaphysical theory of evolution, where ‘history’ only has an auxiliary status as an explanatory variable. Yet, the messianic function of speaking naïvely of ‘historical specificity’ is certainly clear enough. The whole idea, however, is a testimony to the anti-intellectualist psychology ³ which characterizes Hodgson’s epistemic frame of mind. Indeed, his Darwinized science is only the logical endpoint of his radicalized empiricism. It finalized the absolute destruction of the ‘subject’ as an onto-philosophical variable. By this token, Hodgson’s methodology represents a regression into the worst kind of materialistic philosophy. His doctrine represents an endorsement of scientism in its absolute extreme. Indeed, the Marxian sense of scientism is everywhere to be found in Hodgson’s writing. His materialistic philosophy is quite notable in his critique of the historical school, which he blames for giving primacy to ‘ideology, culture and Geist’ (Hodgson, 2001: 289). Naturally, for Hodgson’s point of view, giving primacy to ‘ideology, culture and Geist’ is very, very wrong.

Hodgson’s attempt to pay lip-service to ‘values’ and ‘intentionality’ should fool no one. Indeed, culture in Hodgson’s neo-Veblenian world is subjugated to the tyranny of instinct and habits (Hodgson, 2001: 287–309). Hodgson’s concept of cognitive production, we shall maintain, suffers from a zero-sum assumption of the way general theory ‘relates’ to history. His statement, ‘If history matters in this sense, then general theories have their limits’ (Hodgson, 2001: 3), says it all. What Hodgson has never understood is what Parsons’ old colleague Daniel Bell phrased in the most excellent way when he said: ‘There is no science in the particular’ (cited in Voss and Bell, 1979: 8). Indeed, when one reaches the fullest understanding of Daniel Bell’s assessment, one will also understand why the Hodgson’s complete argument about ‘historical specificity’ is nothing but a house of cards; a quasi-ideological phantom whose scientific core is nil. After all, history is not an official parade for Mr Hodgson. Rather than open the door to a sensitive scientific approach to history, he is nailing the concept of ‘historical specificity’ to his vague and abstract notion of ‘Universal Darwinism.’ He is in reality closing the door to historical specificity, not opening it.

It is through his persistent claim of a ‘forgotten history’ that Hodgson attempts to construct a narrative of some alleged gap between past and present in the development of the social sciences. The result is a crude tale about a ‘lost continent’ of historical awareness, which Hodgson identifies with the German historical school and the institutionalists. ⁴ In line with Hodgson’s narrative, this lost continent was characterized by a ‘positive’ relationship to history, since, according to Hodgson, it was able to reflect ‘historical specificity.’ ⁵ However, unfortunately, owing to new theoretical trends in economics and social science, including orthodox economics, this promising period came to an end and a new period of exaggerated use of general theory resulted in the ‘neglect of historical specificity.’ Hodgson sees Talcott Parsons as the prime ‘evil-doer,’ and reserves his strongest criticism for what he calls Parsons ‘reckless theorizing.’ Hodgson’s aim is to ‘rehabilitate’ the German historical school and American institutionalism and restore them to their rightful positions in social science.

Hodgson’s analysis of Parsons is consumed by his own flamboyant interpretations. Beside repeating the ideas of Charles Camic, he has very little serious biographical material to support his tirades of accusations. Hodgson also ignores Parsons’ strong commitment to empirical research. He only repeats on a grand scale the prevailing misconceptions of Parsons’ theory, especially the allegation that it cannot reflect empirical structure. This allegation has been counter-argued again and again by scholars such as Victor Lidz, Bryan S. Turner, Uta Gerhardt, Giuseppe Sciortino, David Sciulli, Helmut Staubmann, Renée Fox, Robin Williams, Jr., Matilda White Riley, Jackson Toby, Harry M. Johnson, Jesse Pitts, Benton Johnson, Miriam Johnson, and countless others. In an interview with Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen, Clifford Geertz (1988) has said, ‘It is a gross distortion when it is repeatedly claimed that Talcott’s theory cannot deal with empirical structure.’ As Victor Lidz has written,

Parsons designed his mansion as a home for empirical sociology. He tended it to nurture a broad range of empirical research: research on many specific topics; research based on a variety of methodologies, applied research as well as pure and basic research.

For example, we might take the case of Matilda White Riley, who used Parsons’ theory and categories in her life-long, extensive empirical research in the sociology of aging. In same way, Miriam Johnson used important aspects of Parsons’ theory in her empirical study of gender inequalities. In an article from 1986, she and her husband, Benton Johnson, wrote that the Parsons they knew from their student days at Harvard encouraged applied social science as much as ‘pure theory’ and that Parsons’ strong commitment to empirical and historical studies has been completely overlooked by most of his critics (Johnson and Johnson, 1986). Parsons had also a strong direct impact on his student Thomas O’Dea’s very empirical study of the religious socialization of the Mormons (Parsons, 1977b). Perhaps, one also should mention that Chester Barnard, the President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, was a great admirer of Parsons. Barnard, a man dealing with practical problems every day, had no doubt that Parsons’ theory reflected empirical structure and was quite relevant for the complex problems of modern cooperative organizations. Barnard’s view is demonstrated in his life-long correspondence with Parsons but also reflected in his famous work from 1938, The Functions of the Executive.

Certainly, there is little evidence to support Hodgson’s tale that social science was history-sensitive before the 1930s and has been history-neglecting ever since. The history of the social sciences cannot be summed up in such a simple dichotomy. Hodgson’s division builds on obscure assumptions about the extraordinary great ‘historical sensitivity of the German historical school and the American institutionalists,’ with Talcott Parsons and his students representing a wasteland in this regard; we don’t think that it is the case at all. Indeed, how ‘historically specific’ is Veblen’s Darwinist evolutionism or Ayres’ sweeping gospel of technology? What is ‘historically specific’ in the German historical school’s elaborations on Hegel’s Weltgeist, or in Rosher’s concept of cyclical stages of historical evolution, or Karl Knies’ highly philosophical notion of ‘moral progress’ in history? Surely, the dichotomy Hodgson has proclaimed has really no deeper validity.

Yet, in Hodgson’s case matters are even worse. He demonstrates a flamboyant ambivalence on methodological issues. While praising historicist approaches one moment, he pays lip-service as an ‘opponent’ of historicism the next. At the same time although he pokes ridicule at Parsons’ general theory, he himself then embraces gargantuan theoretical schemes. It is not too much to say that Hodgson’s own theoretical house is a labyrinth of ambiguity. Indeed, what Hodgson ‘offers’ with the one hand, he negates with the other. In this regard, one should note the following:

Also, it is not clear whether, with the notion ‘historical specificity,’ Hodgson refers to his own definition or to some kind of (would-be) ‘origination’ definition provided by the German historical school. But certainly, when Hodgson talks about ‘rehabilitating’ the German historical school, he must mean that he wants to ‘rehabilitate’ their concept of historical specificity or else the term ‘rehabilitate’ become meaningless. Indeed, the position Hodgson defends as ‘historical specificity’ appears to be an elaborate concept of his own creation, which really shows no significant loyalty to either the German historical school or the institutionalists but freely manipulates their historical implications.

However, Hodgson embrace of the German historical school is highly deceptive. In reality, his Darwinist-materialist philosophy (in the tradition of Veblen) stands as the absolute counterpoint to the historical school. The two doctrines are arch-enemies, not friends. The historical school (and German historicism in a broader sense) emerged out of the romantic-idealistic and Hegelian German tradition, which represent the logical counterpoint of all the doctrines Hodgson adheres to. Even when one considers various later modifications, the historical school stands in iconoclastic contrast to the core of Hodgson’s philosophy. Therefore, when he pretends to be the ‘friend’ of the historical school, it is a conjuring trick of the greatest proportions; he is certainly their arch-enemy and not their friend. Indeed, although we can’t explore the issue in this article, it is certainly correct to say that Talcott Parsons by many accounts stands much closer to the German historical school – both philosophically and methodologically – than does Geoffrey Hodgson.

In reality, Hodgson’s concept of ‘historical specificity’ is deprived of exact meaning, since his discussion of this concept is extremely muggy and contradictory, and includes a deceptive attempt to rally the German historicists to his side, even if his own methodology is in total contrast with this effort. So the question remains: What exactly is Hodgson really talking about when he speaks about ‘historical specificity’?

The enigma of Hodgson’s concept of ‘particular theorizing’

The enigma of Hodgson’s concept of ‘historical specificity’ is further complicated by the peculiarities of his own theoretical position. Naturally, with Hodgson’s cry about ‘forgetting history’ and his proclaimed adherence to the German historical school, one should believe that he would take a die-hard historicist stand. Still, an investigation of his theoretical statements reveals a different pattern. At least when it comes to official proclamations, Hodgson considered himself to be an enemy of historicism and empiricism. Yet, how these statements chime with his idea of ‘rehabilitating’ the German historical school and institutionalism is anyone’s guess. But this is not the end to the enigma, since Hodgson also wants to portray himself as a sympathizer with what he calls generalized theory. Thus he declares ‘emphatically, the argument in this book is not against the power and value of generalization’ (2001: 21). Also he writes, ‘Science cannot proceed without some general or universal statements and principles. Explanatory unifications and generalizations that explain real causal mechanisms are worthy goals of science’ (Hodgson, 2001: 39). But this is one of the problems with Hodgson’s intellectual enterprise: his work contains a bewildering abracadabra of statements and counter-statements which casts a certain mist over his essentially materialistic philosophy.

Hodgson’s methodological inclinations notwithstanding, there is nothing that indicates a superiority of ‘particular theorizing’ over ‘generalized theory.’ Why should the fall of a particular apple be ‘more powerful and informative’ than the general law of gravity? There is absolutely no evidence Hodgson is universally correct in his statement that particular theories quo modo are inherently more capable of constructing ‘cognitive entities’ than are general theories. His statement, we shall argue, is certainly not true. There isn’t the relationship between the increase in cognitive information and rates of ‘particularity that he believes. Indeed, cognition has an object but it is not of the object. Indeed, the particular is an infinite regress; it has no embedded cognitive location. The house doesn’t say: ‘Hey, I am a particular house.’ Or as Kant has said: ‘Our intellect does not draw its law from nature … but imposes it on nature.’ Behind all this lies, however, an even deeper cognitive flaw, which generally is the effect of Hodgson’s lack of understanding of Daniel Bell’s basic proposition: ‘There is no science in the particular.’ Indeed, Hodgson concept of ‘particular theorizing’ suffers from an epistemic case of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where Hodgson simply confuses the historical object for the configurations of facts in a theoretical system. ⁹

The historical background to Parsons’ intellectual capacities at Amherst

Hodgson’s portrayal of Talcott Parsons is that of a weak, feebleminded person who had no real scholarly integrity but was an opportunist par excellence, ready to sacrifice his intellectual commitment to save his career.

In Hodgson’s tale about Parsons at Amherst College, he is described as a young man with no ideas or values of his own. According to Hodgson, he simply enters Amherst as a blank sheet of paper, ready to be filled up with ideas and values by his teachers. Especially, according to Hodgson, when Parsons entered Amherst he was especially deprived of any idea of culture and it was only through the help from his teachers that he allegedly suddenly discovered that ‘it was culture rather than nature that was decisive and overwhelming factor in explaining human behavior’ (Hodgson, 2001: 182). ¹⁰ According to Hodgson, Parsons had no such idea before he entered Amherst.

What is remarkable in this regard is that Hodgson makes no attempt to investigate what kind of intellectual insight Parsons might have had before he entered Amherst. Hodgson simply assumes that Parsons’ ideas as they became manifest at Amherst were also the product of Amherst. However, Parsons’ socialization story before Amherst undermines Hodgson’s assumptions. In his interview with Parsons, Martin U. Martel asked him whether there were any major intellectual differences between him and his father, to which Parsons replied: ‘Really none to speak of’ (Martel, 1975). Indeed, there can be little doubt that a study of Parsons’ father’s intellectual ideas provides important clues to Talcott Parsons’ intellectual ideas when he entered Amherst. After all, when Parsons entered Amherst, he was 17 years old. Any study of Parsons’ father’s intellectual influence on Parsons will make it abundantly clear that Parsons didn’t need Ayres, Hamilton, or anyone else to tell him that culture and institutions has an ‘over-arching’ role in people’s life. Indeed, the real intellectual foundation for Parsons’ main world of ideas was his father as well as the general intellectual stimuli of his youth at Colorado College. Therefore, when Hodgson pronounces the institutionalists Ayres and Hamilton as Talcott Parsons’ cultural fathers, it is grossly misleading.

Hodgson is unfortunately continuing a trend within current Parsons scholarship, especially promoted by Charles Camic, where the influence of the Amherst institutionalists has been seriously overrated. ¹¹ Since Hodgson has done no biographical research on his own, he relies heavily on Camic’s findings and interpretations (Camic, 1987, 1991). Although Parsons was inspired by and quite appreciative of his teachers, he also showed a great creative independence of mind. Indeed, Parsons’ early towering capacity for independent and original analysis is revealed in his famous term papers written for Clarence Ayres’ class (Nielsen, 1996). ¹² Certainly, Parsons was from the beginning quite skeptical about both Hamilton and Ayres’ radical empiricist approach, which he associated with anti-intellectual psychology, and he was especially quite critical of their guru Thorstein Veblen. Parsons’ concern was on the empiricist tendency in the institutionalists’ methodology and the way their instrumentalism tended to degrade the question of values (Parsons, 1935b, 1976). Hodgson ignored all this and created a fiction of his own.

Parsons’ rejection of the institutionalists did not pop out of nowhere; it was based on the rock-solid foundation of the values with which he had been socialized in his childhood. Indeed, what is remarkable about Parsons’ behavior at Amherst was not the degree to which he was subjugated to the ideas of his teachers but rather the extent to which he rejected it. Therefore, the myth that Parsons first embraced the institutionalists and then ‘betrayed’ them for ‘opportunist reasons’ is a completely fabricated story. Parsons could not ‘betray’ what he never ‘embraced.’

Talcott Parsons’ father, Edward Smith Parsons, was born in Brooklyn on August 9, 1863 during the American Civil War. He was the descendant of a Calvinist, New England family of captains, merchants, preachers, and farmers whose ancestors went back to some of the very first English settlers who set foot on American soil (C. Parsons, 2004). On his father’s side, the first Parsonsians were tough, hard-working settlers in York, Maine. Talcott Parsons’ mother was Mary Augusta Ingersoll, whose ancestors (Avery, 1926) embrace a second Parsons heritage-line through the oldest daughter of Jonathan Edwards, and through this second Parsons line, the Parsons family can be traced back to Beaminster in Dorset, England, to at least 1530. These ancestors would involve some of the leading figures among the first settlers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, including a certain Cornet Joseph Parsons (Burt and Parsons, 1898). By this token, Parsons’ family descended from some of the very first Puritans who set foot on American soil at a time when the number of European settlers in North America could be counted as less than 18,000. The cultural and intellectual significance of his Puritan past, their sense of inwardness and piety, was by no means lost on Talcott Parsons since his father was an enthusiastic genealogist and told his son about his Calvinist heritage in long and insightful conversations. ¹³ Questions of the Puritan heritage and its relation to the cultural function of religion within the main outline of world history never left Parsons’ mind. Indeed, Parsons knew every detail of the Puritan revolution in England by heart, and rather than regarding it as some glorious relic of the past, he viewed it as a unfolding revolution shaping the pattern of modern history in subtle yet persistent ways. In fact, if there ever was a stable and persistent theme in Parsons’ intellectual concern, it was exactly this theme. For Parsons, the ‘Errand into the Wilderness’ was the signifier for the state of mind which continues to shape the American nation. America was relatively ‘free’ in comparative terms because its historical institutions were open and embedded in denominational pluralism (Parsons, 1962). The radical connotation of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which failed in France, was carried by the seed of Calvinist English Protestantism into its Aufhebung in America (Parsons, 2007). Hence, Parsons’ concern with Puritanism was bound by a deep historical awareness which guided his theoretical approach, and not the other way around. ¹⁴ Indeed, there is a direct link between Parsons’ deep awareness of the world-historical functions of Puritanism ¹⁵ and his idea of ‘voluntarist action’ as well as his ardent rejection of behaviorism. For Parsons, these were two sides of the same intellectual question. What has been said about Thomas Carlyle could also be said about Parsons, he was a ‘Calvinist without the theology.’ In Parsons’ case, however, the issue of the function of theology was different. Originally, theology became an important template for a constitution of Parsons’ extraordinary intellectual capacities. Much of theology in those days was extremely sophisticated elaboration, which carried the genius of Western civilization channelized especially in the cognitive expression of Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Johann K.L. Gieseler, Philip Marheineke, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, and Adolf von Harnack. It has often been forgotten how deeply embedded American theology was in the matrix of German theology in the nineteenth century and indeed before that time as well (Dorrien, 2001: xiv; Foster, 1939). Germany in those days was the world’s ‘think tank’ of philosophy, with Britain taking a second place in that regard. Indeed, anyone who scratched American theology in those days would find Germany beneath.

Edward S. Parsons was educated at Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute at Amherst and he studied theology at Yale, where he got his BD in 1887. After graduating from Yale, Edward moved to Greeley in Colorado, where he served as priest of the First Congregational Church. Edward stayed in Greeley for four years, after which he joined the faculty of Colorado College as an English professor in 1892, and where he became known as an accomplished Milton scholar. Colorado College, founded in 1874, was under the leadership of William F. Slocum, who had become President of the college in 1888. Edward served as Vice-President of the college (1898–1916) and as Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences (1901–1917). During the period when he worked in Greeley, Edward became strongly influenced by the Social Gospel Movement, which is reflected in the piece he wrote in 1889 called ‘A Christian Critique of Socialism’ (Parsons, 1889). What was crucial for Edward Parsons’ argument in his 1889 piece is the way he warns against the de-personalization of man, which he sees as a component of socialism. Indeed, Edward was greatly concerned not only with the de-personalization aspects of radical socialism but also with its diabolic cult of violence. It is worth noticing that this sentiment was an important trend within liberal theology of the time, articulated especially in the personalistic idealism of Borden Parker Bowne and further reflected in the theologian school known as ‘Boston personalism’ (Dorrien, 2001: 378). As a trend it had its roots in Kant and Schleiermacher and in part in Hegel (Pfleiderer, 2002 [1890]). This branch of liberal theology argued that Ritschlian social gospel theology is too thin as a Christian standpoint because it abandons metaphysical reason. One can detect an echo of the same line of argument in Edward S. Parsons’ 1889 piece, which is more than simply a critique of socialism but also contains an underwritten critique of the Social Gospel Movement, or at least important tendencies within it. As Edward wrote:

Christianity cannot yield the field to Socialism. The two cannot work together as collaborators. Christianity must be the teacher, and Socialism the pupil. Socialism must be Christianized, and it is a question whether Socialism could then exist, whether a Christian Socialism is possible. Can the Christian ideas of the worth of the individual and true cooperation be reconciled with the idea of the Socialistic state?

It is clear that the worth of the individual is strongly connected to Edward S. Parsons’ concept of Christianity. This was in essence the same argument which Talcott Parsons stressed in regard to his interpretation of the function of Christianity in European history. This stress on Puritan religion as the vehicle of individualization is further emphasized in how Parsons interpreted the role of Calvinism. Parsons stressed repeatedly that, in contrast to Lutheranism, Calvinism was that branch of Protestantism which had promoted the issue of individualization to its most developed format. In this way, we find a direct link between the ideas of the father and the ideas of the son as far as the relationship between Christianity and the process of individualization is concerned. Christianity, Parsons maintained, started as an emancipation of individuality emerging out of the ‘traditional’ culture of Ancient Israel; the fact that the redeeming power of Jesus stressed the universal independence of faith relative to ethnic affiliations had the underlying implication that the individual commitment became the central unit of action. In Christianity the notion of salvation was by definition individual salvation (Parsons, 2007: 431–432). This perspective was further enforced by his father’s interest in the poetry of John Milton, and Talcott Parsons would know Milton’s famous poem Paradise Lost by heart.

Edward S. Parsons read extensively in the Social Gospel literature, but his main readings were in general theological literature, especially its liberal part, and in addition he also read widely in topics such as economics and literary criticism. Among the theologians, intellectuals, and cultural critics whom Edward read were Washington Gladden, Horace Bushnell, Charles Kingsley, Francis Greenwood Peabody, Shailer Mathew, Walter Rauschenbusch, Josiah Strong, R.J. Campbell, Richard Henry Edwards, George Adam Smith, William Garden Blackie, William De Witt Hyde, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Thomas Hughes, Charles A. Briggs, Alfred Edersheim, Gerald Dirk Heuver, Gerald Uhlhorn, Theodore Parker, Theodore T. Munger, Henry George, Thomas Carlyle, R.T. Ely, and Emile de Laveleye. Many of these scholars, but especially the theologians, stressed spiritual and cultural issues. Generally, theology in those days was much under the sway of the theology of Albrecht Ritschl, the son of a conservative Prussian Protestant bishop, who was strongly influenced by Kant’s attempt to expunge metaphysics from theology and who generally argued that science explained facts while religion articulated the orbit of values. Ritschl coined the slogan that ‘faith knows God in his active relation to the kingdom’ and is based on the epistemic dictum that ‘we only know things in their activities’ (Mead, 1892; Stuckenberg, 1898; Swing, 1901). Certainly, in addition to this influence, there can be little doubt that the theology of Horace Bushnell was a part of Edward’s heritage during his years at Yale. And his work God in Christ (1849), which actually was a semiotic interpretation of the nature of God (and man in God), was certainly a part of Edward’s general point of reference. Indeed, Bushnell’s concept of Judaism as externality defined and Christianity as internally defined is certainly echoed in Talcott Parsons’ central argument for the function of Christianity as a processual, ‘generative’ institution in his mature theory of social evolution and the rise of the West. We should not forget that much of what today is regarded as early modern American sociology had a long history of intellectual roots which were nurtured within American theology and only stepwise was differentiated out of the motherhood of theological spiritual considerations. What was characteristic for the time of Edward S. Parsons and indeed Talcott Parsons’ early childhood was that this period represented a kind of twilight zone where sociology was in its early stages in its separation from its theological ‘texture’ (Dorrien, 2003; Tröhler, 2006). Indeed, the extent to which modern American sociology emerged out of a unique American Christian colleges tradition is still today poorly understood and poorly researched.

Generally speaking, Talcott Parsons would be socialized in a context where social and cultural events would be codified with a very strong yet ‘latent’ theological meaning, which in Edward was more explicitly spiritually framed while in his son it took form of a kind of higher theoretical codification of culture as a systemic functional process. Indeed, Talcott Parsons’ youthful intellectual playground was theology, which also gave him a true training in the methodological aspects of philosophical thinking. This intellectual understanding was further grounded in a profound understanding of the role of Calvinism in the crucial moments of European history. Edward S. Parsons’ writing, including ‘The Church and Education’ (1904) and ‘The Social Teaching of Jesus’ (1915), strongly emphasized the importance of culture and institutions in social life. In ‘Church and Education,’ we notice an underlining tendency in the thinking of Edward Parsons to take a strong interest in the way Christian institutions had shaped Europe’s culture. For Edward, Christian piety had promoted the growth of knowledge, not, as critics had declared, prohibited it. The Church had been the intellectual vehicle of Europe until at least modern times. As Edward argued, ‘It is therefore true that we owe of the oft-despised monk much what has made our modern progress possible’ (ES Parsons, 1904: 89).

The significance of these issues was simply fundamental for Talcott Parosn’s intellectual outlook long before the days of Amherst. Space will not allow us to argue how Parsons in multiple ways adopted his father’s basic values; this was true in regard to his skepticism toward socialism; this was true in regard to his strong respect for religion as a spiritual and social institution; this was true in regard to the idea that Christianity has promoted science and did not inhibit it; this was true in the way he adhered to the basic dictums of the Enlightenment; this was true of his Calvinist perception on the concept of ‘service’, and so on (Parsons, 1934a). All these values, embodied in the family heritage, would shape Talcott Parsons’ convictions and become a drive for his intellectual interests (Nielsen, 2001). His sense of having Puritanism in his bones was later revealed in his correspondence with Eric Voegelin ¹⁶ and was a key to his friendship with fellow Calvinist at Harvard, Edwin Gay. ¹⁷

Thus, Talcott Parsons’ intellectual world-view was solidly shaped when he moved to Amherst; he carried with him the inherent capital of his Calvinist heritage and a corresponding vision about religion, culture, and social affairs; he did certainly not arrive like a blank sheet of paper, as Hodgson wants us to believe. His intellectual outlook would give him a penetrating capacity to look through the shortcoming of Veblen’s instinct-based psychology and to understand the flaws of his methodology. He would enjoy Walton Hamilton’s jokes about his intellectual opponents, but he would not be carried away by these jokes when questions of reason were evaluated. Also, Parsons would from the beginning instinctively regard Ayres’ behaviorism as something at odds with the spiritual values of his upbringing. He would see it as an approach which reduced the human dimension instead of emphasizing it.

Hodgson’s total dependence on Camic’s position omits any perception of Parsons’ inner capital. Certainly Parsons understood the importance of cultural values long before he met Hamilton and Ayres. To claim that it was the institutionalists who first introduced him to this question is utterly absurd. Naturally, Parsons did benefit from Hamilton’s and Ayres’ classes, but their views did not control his way of thinking in regard either to culture or to basic methodological questions.

In reality, Parsons kept the integrity of his own mind and rejected the theoretical scheme of the institutionalists. It is misleading when Hodgson claims Parsons became an institutionalist sympathizer at Amherst; it is equally misleading when Hodgson claims that Parsons carried an institutionalist sympathy with him to the London School of Economics (LSE), Heidelberg, and Harvard. This tale is nothing but a fabrication. Hodgson ignores the fact that Hamilton’s letter to Parsons of May 15, 1925 already indicated that Hamilton knew that Parsons had not accepted the institutionalist point of view. The tone of the letter reveals a certain irritation on Hamilton’s part while he tries to lecture Parsons about the danger of ‘metaphysics.’ It is quite indicative of Hodgson’s bias that he completely ignores this letter.

Another place where Hodgson produce a misleading concept of Parsons’ life is where he tries to indicate that Parsons’ stay at the LSE was ‘coined’ in the tradition of the institutionalists and should indicate the continuation of his alleged ‘institutionalist sympathies.’ What Hodgson, however, forgets in this whole deceptive tale was that Parsons during his stay at LSE was least enthusiastic about those elements which were most in accordance with the institutionalist position. In this way, the LSE was not a confirmation of his alleged commitment to institutionalism; it was precisely the opposite. Indeed, Parsons’ greatest disappointment at the LSE was exactly focused on the institutionalists’ greatest hero there, who was Harold Laski.

In one of his articles late in his life, Parsons sums up his main disagreement with Hamilton, Ayres, and the institutionalist school:

I think, in retrospect, that I had two major theoretical objections to the institutional point of view. The first was that, in the name of a generalized radical empiricism, it denied the legitimacy of the analytical abstraction. … The second main objection was the neglect of the cultural-normative factors in the larger picture which transcended the economic perspective … this issue came to a certain kind of head in the strong emphasis which the institutional economists, including both Hamilton and Ayres, placed on technology as almost the institution par excellence.

Within this perspective, Hodgson’s claim that Parsons neglects habits and customs is blatantly false. ¹⁸ His claim that Parsons conflates habits with instinct in his analysis of Veblen is equally absurd. ¹⁹ Claims of this sort demonstrate the desperation of Hodgson’s arguments; they reflect on Hodgson, not on Parsons.

Hodgson’s claim that Parsons distanced himself from psychology

The same goes for Hodgson’s outlandish claim that Parsons ‘distanced himself from psychology in all its existing forms’ (2001: 185). Once again, Hodgson is showering himself in misapprehensions. Any serious study of Parsons’ life will easily document how firmly he was committed to integrating sociology and psychology; indeed it is not accidental that his concept of voluntarism explicitly highlights the ‘subjective’ factor in action. Moreover, any serious reader of the The Social System will be struck by the strong impact of psychological ideas in the core fabric of Parsons’ theory, including the strong emphasis on ‘the cathectic’ and on the concept of need disposition (Parsons, 1951). Certainly Parsons’ concept of psychology is not codified to satisfy the idealistic fringe of modern sociology, but nevertheless his work is deeply committed to the psychological dimensions of human action. It was a fundamental task for Parsons to work toward a constructive integration of both structural and psychological components of action, and he did this through psychologists and psychiatrists such as Gordon Allport, Harry Murray, Charles Morris, Edward Tolman, James Olds, Jerome S. Bruner, Erik Erikson, Jürgen Ruesch, Roy R. Grinker, Alfred L. Baldwin, Urie Bronfenbrenner, and many others. Indeed, psychologists of various kinds were among some of Parsons’ key collaborators and had a strong impact on his work. In fact, Parsons was one of the first at Harvard who became seriously interested in the work of Freud and psychoanalysis at a time when many people there were quite skeptical about it. Could Hodgson explain why Parsons spent years upon years going to seminar after seminar at the Boston Psychoanalytical Institute, inspired his daughter to study psychology, was invited to countless psychiatric conferences by Stanley Cobb, Erich Lindemann, Robert Waelder, and others, and went to psychoanalytical training with no one other than Grete Bibring, and all out of a terrible neglect of and disregard for the intellectual relevance of psychology? If the Social Relations Department was anything, it was an attempt to synthesize sociology and psychology in a fruitful encounter within the same scholarly institution. But all these activities were, according to Hodgson, only a matter of an opportunistic Parsons paying ‘lip-service to the viability of psychology as a science’ (Hodgson, 2001: 185). Indeed, when Hodgson repeatingly claims that ‘Talcott Parsons [1968 [1937]] helped to turn sociology into a science of society where the psychological and biological aspects of human agency were … neglected’ (Hodgson, 2004: 307), he only reveals his own staggering ignorance of Parsons’ work.

Talcott Parsons and the institutionalists

The historical context of Parsons’ rejection of the institutionalists is presented by Hodgson in a distorted manner. This distortion is linked to Hodgson’s attempt to present the institutionalists as the last hope for social science in America. Although there in principle existed important disagreements between the ‘institutionalists’ and Parsons, it wasn’t the kind of absolute divide that Hodgson is indicating. The ‘institutionalists,’ Parsons said, did raise important questions concerning the linking of economic and sociological theory, yet they were never able to provide the answer. In this regard, as Parsons said, Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto came up with much more constructive solutions. As Parsons explained,

In my opinion the then dominant ‘Veblenian’ group among the American institutionalists failed conspicuously to solve these problems, while others like Wesley Mitchell seemed to me to be sheer empiricists who essentially abandoned the attempt at theoretical analysis in favor of description of statistical trends.

By the same token, Hodgson’s attempt to portray Parsons as a defender of neoclassical economics standing iconoclastic against the ‘institutionalists’ is equally flawed. This part of Hodgson’s discussion is linked to Parsons’ analysis of the debate between Robbins and Souter, where Hodgson claims that Parsons in his analysis fundamentally defends Robbins against Souter. This interpretation, however, is grossly inflated.

In reality, Parsons is giving Souter a lot of credit and agreeing with him to an important extent, yet at the same time he defends what is theoretically sound in Robbins’ position (Parsons, 1934b). In his highly biased interpretation, Hodgson sees his advances in claiming that Parsons sided with Robbins against Souter. As Hodgson declares,

Significantly, for Parsons, the greater threat came not from Robbins but from Souter. Parsons rejected Souter’s ‘economic imperialism’ vehemently, in the same way that he had opposed the idea of unified social science that had been frequently proposed by institutionalists and historicists.

Yet, the basic facts from Parsons’ theoretical praxis in these years leading up to the crescendo to his discussion in The Structure of Social Action (hereafter Structure) do not support Hodgson’s interpretation. In all the major writings in this period, including the key discussion in Structure, the main theoretical enemy for Parsons is not the idealist-historicist side of the epistemic spectrum but the utilitarian-positivist tradition and its related derivation into behaviorist approaches of various kinds. This perspective with the positivist-utilitarian position as the main theoretical enemy is clear-cut in a very important article Parsons wrote in the years before Structure, which was published in 1935 with the title ‘The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory’ (Parsons, 1935a). The main antagonist in his article is positivism, and the same was so obviously the case in Structure. Therefore Hodgson’s claim that Parsons in these years saw institutionalism and historicism as ‘the main enemy’ is fundamentally wrong; the exact opposite was the case.

A careful reading of Parsons’ 1934 piece will also reveal that Parsons took a kind of middle position between the institutionalists and the neoclassical school and it is not, as Hodgson depicts, that Parsons blatantly took Robbins’ side. Indeed, Parsons ends his article by writing, ‘Both Robbins’s positivism and Souter’s rather vaguely “organic” empiricism are obstacles to clarity on the basic problems’ (Parsons, 1934b: 545). However, Parsons’ rejection of positivism doesn’t mean that he could accept Souter’s position, since it implied a historicistic fragmentation of the social sciences which Parsons certainly found unacceptable. So it is true that Parsons disagreed with the basic empiricist methodology of institutionalism, with its tendency toward psychologism, and he was also critical of many of the tendencies that defined Thorstein Veblen’s work. But in these crucial years of Parsons’ theoretical journey, institutionalism was not the ‘main enemy.’

The debate between Lionel Robbins and Ralph W. Souter took its point of departure from Lionel Robbins’ An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (Robbins, 1932: 16–17), which was an attempt to identify the discipline of economics within the boundaries of ‘analytical economics’ by defining economics as the study of ‘human behavior as the relationship between ends and scare means [with] alternative uses’ and formulate laws of this ‘particular aspect of behavior.’ Through these demarcations, Robbins was often seen as the key theorist who brought Austrian economic theory and methodology into English economics (Howson, 2004). Souter, in his attack on Robbins’ position, depicts Robbins as a spokesman for ‘abstract exclusionist positivism,’ and by so doing removing the field of economic analysis from the field of concrete phenomena and in this way nurturing an ‘atomistic, mechanical,’ individualistic approach to economic theory’ (Souter, 1933: 94, 109).

In his analysis of this discussion, Parsons (1934b) is critical of Souter’s approach because it removes all ‘a priori methodological limits’ on economics and engages in act of ‘economic imperialism,’ which threatens ‘the territories of social psychology, sociology, industrial technology, etc.’ Parsons warned that the institutionalists would turn economics into ‘a complete philosophy of history,’ where the power of strict economic analysis would disintegrate into jungles of empirical discourses; the result would not be better economics but the triumph of ‘encyclopedic sociology.’

In this way, Parsons supported Robbins’ attempt to keep the boundaries of economics within some relatively well-defined criteria. Also, Parsons supported Robbins on another vital account: by insisting on a distinct analytical approach to questions of economic behavior, Robbins was defending the need to create a highly powered theoretically codified analytical system, which he regarded as the mature sign of a scientific ‘discipline.’ As Parsons was well aware, the empiricist trend in institutionalism tended to slide into historicism and was unable to reach a sufficient point of theoretical comprehension.

Parsons acknowledges the relevance of important parts of Souter’s critique, since Robbins’ concept of ends leaned toward ‘radical positivism.’ However, Souter avoided the inadequacies of positivism only by sliding into an empiricist state of mind. Parsons correctly refused to become a captive of either positivism or empiricism and in contrast stressed the need for a third alternative based on idea of voluntary action. But what was equally important for Parsons was to maintain a reasonable division of labor within the social sciences. By this token, economics should be limited to the intermediate aspects of the means–ends chain, while sociology would concentrate on analyzing ends and the functioning of the value element within the interaction in society but studying the differential nature of normative structure. Souter’s position would jeopardize the birth of sociology by creating an economic imperialism which would threaten to make sociology extinct as an independent analytical unit. Parsons did not believe that this was in the interest of the development of the social sciences. The danger as Parsons saw it was that Souter’s position would result in one muddy field of encyclopedic historicism with no clearly defined boundaries and with no natural center of analytical building blocks. As Josh Whitford correctly has stated it: ‘In opposition to the institutionalists, he [Parsons] did not require that the entire economic system be viewed holistically; rather, he advocated an effective social scientific division of labor’ (2002: 331). However, the fact that Parsons accepted Robbins’ methodological boundaries did not mean that he accepted the reductionism of neoclassical economy. In contrast, he believed that it would become a major role for sociology to counteract these views.

The so-called ‘Sombart–Weber’ issue

Hodgson’s next important fabrication is his claim about Parsons’ alleged considerations on the (so-called) ‘Sombart–Weber issue’. In this case Hodgson constructs a non-event. Hodgson creates a fantastic story about Parsons as a full-blooded opportunist. According to Hodgson, Parsons had chosen Weber over Sombart, not because of intellectual engagement but because the choice of Weber would increase his chances for a future promotion in the Economics Department. ²⁰ This idea is based on the peculiar notion that the Department of Economics at Harvard was some kind of a Stalinist prison where individual ideas were damned. There is absolutely no evidence that such an atmosphere prevailed. Harvard Economics Department at the time of the late 1920s and early 1930s was a very complex group of quite heterogeneous people, who certainly did not follow any single line of economic thought (Carlson, 1968; Mason, 1982). To claim, as Hodgson and Camic are doing, that Harvard Economics Department was some kind of bastion of orthodox economics is an unnecessary stereotype; at best a half-truth, but in the context in which Hodgson and Camic present it directly misleading. Indeed, Taussig, who was a dominant figure in the Department, was quite a liberal person, with eclectic interests and known for his tolerance for heterodox ideas in general, who actually preferred a good ‘antagonist’ rather than the opposite (Bruce, 2005). It is apparently true that H.H. Burbank had prejudices against Parsons’ German education, but Burbank, although chairman, was a somewhat eccentric character and by no means represented the overall opinion in the Department in any simple way. The kinds of normative pressure Hodgson stipulates were nowhere to be found. Indeed, the kind of orthodox defense of a would-be neoclassical position which is supposed to have prevailed in Harvard’s Economic Department is a phantasm of Hodgson’s own head. As Schumpeter wrote about Taussig:

The institutionalist opposition that later arose to the type of theory that he taught, seems however to have overlooked that a great part of his work was on institutional lines and that, in important respects, it would have been more correct to claim him as a leader than it was to consider him an opponent.

In contrast to Hodgson’s fabrication, the basic evidence reveals that Parsons chose Weber from very early on. As Parsons told Martin U. Martel, his choice of Weber as his key intellectual project started during his stay in Heidelberg in the year of 1925–1926 (Martel, 1988) and was further intensified during his instructorship at Amherst. In addition, a letter to Parsons from Otto Manthey-Zorn of February 21, 1926 (at the time Parsons was located in Heidelberg) already shows that the focus of Parsons’ attention is directed toward Weber and not Sombart. ²¹ Moreover, in a letter to Paul H. Douglas of November 13, 1927, Parsons explains that ‘for some time I have been engaged in negotiation with German, English and American publishers about the possible translation of the three volumes of Max Weber’s “Religionssoziologie.”’ ²² Parsons explains that during his stay in Germany in the summer of 1927, he had been in contact with Marianne Weber and with Dr Siebeck, the head of the German publisher firm J.C.B. Mohr, in regard to getting Weber’s work published. Thus, Parsons’ decision to get Weber’s work published in English goes back to his conversations with Marianne Weber during his stay in Germany in the academic years of 1925–1926, and his interest in Weber as his main topic of research certainly goes back to the earliest of days during his study in Heidelberg. Indeed, Parsons became strongly integrated in Weber circles at his time in Heidelberg, participating in Marianne Weber’s ‘sociological teas,’ where he also met the Richthofen sisters and got especially close to Else Richthofen. ²³ ‘She was a sparkling conversationalist and hostess,’ as Parsons explained to Professor Martel (1975). There was never such a kind of interaction with anyone associated with Sombart. It can be further added that Parsons’ friendship with Alexander von Schelting, which started from early on in Heidelberg (Martel, 1975), was based on their mutual enthusiasm for Weber; Parsons did not have any corresponding friendship based on Sombart. While at Heidelberg, Parsons had intensive discussion with Karl Mannheim about Weber but does not mention any discussion about Sombart on these occasions (Martel, 1975). In consequence, Parsons’ decision in regard to Weber was taken long before he ever entered the Department of Economics of Harvard. The fact that Parsons had started his work on the publication of Weber in his pre-Harvard period is blatantly ignored by Hodgson, who instead manipulates an impression in the reader’s mind that it was an ‘opportunist’ decision Parsons made after arriving at Harvard. This is a gross falsification of the history of Parsons’ life.

The core of Hodgson’s fabrication is the so-called Sombart-Weber ‘choice.’ Hodgson tries to imply that Parsons ‘choice’ between Sombart and Weber was career opportunistic and not an outcome of an honest intellectual process. Again, this is a blatant fabrication of the worst kind. Certainly, given Parsons’ Calvinist background and his life-long interest in the Puritanist issue, there was no such ‘choice.’ Indeed, Weber was the only one who was interesting from Parsons’ point of view given the way he addressed questions of religion, ultimate calling, and Calvinism; topics which had been fundamental for Parsons since his earliest childhood. Weber, not Sombart, had answers to those questions, which were personally important for Parsons. Thus, Weber addressed the broader civilizational question embodied in the enigma of Christianity while Sombart focused on more trivial questions within the concept of capitalism. There was in Parsons’ mind never any question of who of the two theorists was the most compelling. As Parsons explained at the Brown seminar in 1973, when he arrived in Heidelberg he ‘got extraordinarily interested in Weber very fast’ (1973: 6). He never uttered anything like that about Sombart. The same point was established when in 1959 he gave a talk about his own intellectual development and he mentioned that his thesis in Heidelberg dealt with the work of Karl Marx, Werner Sombart and Max Weber, and then added: ‘Weber was overwhelmingly the most important – for me’ (Parsons, 1959: 5). As Parsons explicitly told Eric Voegelin in October 1941, Weber attracted him because ‘the phenomena he was talking about were central to my own cultural tradition.’ ²⁴ So Hodgson’s so-called ‘choice’ is a sheer fabrication; there was never such a ‘choice’ in Parsons’ mind. Hodgson is simply counterfeiting an event. Short of innuendos, Hodgson has nothing to substantiate his claims.

The general absurdity in Hodgson’s account of Parsons’ alleged opportunistic behavior is further intensified by the fact that he gets the whole time-line of this question seriously confused. Hodgson writes again and again that Parsons took his intellectual position because he attempted to comply with the alleged group pressure at the Department of Economics all to the effect of his narrow career goals (Hodgson, 2001: 184). What Hodgson, however, overlooks is that, with the exception of three items, all the major articles Parsons wrote on the issue of economics were written after he had left the Department of Economics, and for this reason Hodgson’s argument therefore falls totally apart, since he had no career at stake at the Economics Department while he wrote them. As for the other three items, two of these – that is, the two articles based on Parsons’ Dr Phil. dissertation – were essentially written before Parsons arrived at Harvard and indeed before he had any idea that he ever would see the shadow of Harvard. Consequently, this only leaves one single major item which Parsons wrote during the period he was employed at the Economics Department. ²⁵ It is clear that Hodgson’s claim about Parsons’ intellectual ‘corruption’ is based on his general writing at the time and not just on one single item; but his general writing at the time was certainly not written while Parsons was member of the Economics Department. So much for Hodgson’s theory of Parsons’ alleged scholarly ‘opportunism.’

To sum up the problems with Hodgson’s claim about the intellectual ‘corruption’ of Parsons during his time in the department of Economics:

Was Parsons forced out of the Economics Department and did he suffer from a ‘personal and intellectual crisis?’

There is really no end to the claims which Hodgson mobilizes to present a distorted tale about Parsons’ life at Harvard. A part of this tale consists of the claim that Parsons for opportunistic reason decided for sociology as a part of finding a solution to his alleged ‘personal and intellectual crisis’, and Hodgson quote Hans Joas in an effort to produce the association that ‘Parsons realized that he was being forced out of the prestigious discipline he had started his career in. … Sociology offered Parsons a way out of this personal and theoretical crisis’ (Hogson, 2011: 186). This fabricated tale is distorted for at least seven reasons:

Was Parsons an unscrupulous opportunist, as Hodgson tell us?

Generally, the account Hodgson gives of Talcott Parsons is that of an opportunistic, petty, and unscrupulous character who, according to Hodgson, is ready to forsake any element of intellectual integrity for the sake of his career. Yet, nothing in Hodgson’s portrayal of Parsons makes sense. If Parsons really had such an unscrupulous, petty, and opportunist mentality, then there are many events during his life which become inexplicable. Why should Parsons, knowing that his interest in German intellectual thought would put him in conflict with Burbank, ²⁹ continue his commitment to work on Max Weber’s legacy? Also, why should he express strong criticism of the neoclassical approach so dear to his proclaimed ‘mentors’? Why should Parsons go into a heated argument with Lawrence J. Henderson about President Roosevelt and the New Deal? That would certainly not have served an opportunist purpose at the time when Parsons depended on Henderson’s goodwill. In the same way, Henderson was quite unsympathetic to Weber, while Parsons ardently defended him. Again this does not indicate that Parsons’ relationship to Henderson was characterized by purified degrees of opportunism, which Hodgson indicates again and again. Also, the debate between Parsons, on the one side, and Henderson and Brinton, on the other, clearly indicates that Parsons stood firmly on his own ground in his view of the current prospect of sociology and did not simply subscribe to Henderson’s and Brinton’s much more pessimist view. ³⁰ Indeed, Parsons expresses his position in no uncertain terms, which is clear from his letter to Brinton of July 11, 1939. Again, it is certainly a very strange way to be a full-blooded ‘opportunist.’ Also, Parsons showed from early on a strong disagreement with Sorokin’s theories and especially with Sorokin’s view of American civilization. He certainly left no doubt in Sorokin’s mind that he had a radically different view. A real full-blooded opportunist would have praised Sorokin’s writing or have kept a extremely low profile vis-à-vis his own views, while Parsons did do neither the former nor the latter. Again, this is a very strange thing to do for an unscrupulous opportunist only interested in promoting his career.

Is it correct that Parsons first was sympathetic to German historicism and then rejected it?

One of Hodgson’s claims is that Parsons changed his attitude when he arrived at Harvard, not only to the question of institutionalism, but also to his perception of German historicism. Thus Hodgson writes:

The Harvard environment encouraged Parsons to become more critical and dismissive of both institutionalism and the historical school. … The change in attitude is remarkable. In the late 1920s, Parsons (1928, 1929) was still sympathetic to German historicism, but he criticized it a few years later (1935).

This presentation of Parsons’ intellectual activities is fundamentally flawed on four accounts. First, Hodgson fails completely in providing any conclusive evidence that Harvard in some strict homogeneous manner was encouraging negative attitudes to German historicism; this question is far more complex than the version Hodgson is offering his readers. Second, Parsons’ perception of German historicism was essentially the same both before as well as after he went to Harvard. In this way, Parsons’ interaction at Heidelberg as well as his later discussions with von Schelting, Salin, and others in the following years clearly reveal that he had the basic same perception of German historicism both before and after he entered Harvard Yard. Indeed, from the very beginning of his intellectual life, Parsons’ intellectual attitude was characterized by lack of sympathy with any form for radical empiricism. This was a conviction he had from the first day he entered Amherst and it remained an unshakable pattern throughout his life. Third, it is nothing but a gross misrepresentation when Hodgson claims that Parsons ‘was still sympathetic to German historicism’ in his discussion in ‘ “Capitalism” in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber’ (Parsons, 1991a [1928–1929]). There is not a shadow of sympathy for German historicism in this article, and indeed the article contains a fundamental critique of historicism in regard to both Sombart and Weber, although Parsons finds that Sombart is much more engulfed by historicism than is Weber. Fourth, by the same token, Hodgson’s claim that Parsons was ‘sympathetic’ to German historicism in his 1928–1929 publication while negative in his 1935 writing ³¹ is simply a profound misrepresentation. Parsons’ attitude to German historicism in both these two articles is profoundly negative and represented a consistent point of view. Indeed, if anything was persistent in Parsons’ intellectual outline, then it was his rejection of radical empiricism in all its forms, which certainly included both institutionalism and German historicism.

Hodgson’s misconception of Parsons’ discussion of Pareto

According to Hodgson, Parsons ‘enthusiastically’ adopted Pareto’s ‘non-logical’ actions as his main paradigm. To quote Hodgson, ‘In broad terms, Parsons enthusiastically adopted this approach [Pareto’s approach]. He saw “non-logical” actions, involving ideology and values, as establishing the domain and independence of sociology as a science’ (Hodgson, 2001: 187). However, this assessment is based on careless misconceptions. Hodgson is simply wrong to maintain that Parsons’ theory used Pareto’s theory as a template. ³² In fact, Parsons’ theory had never been based on Pareto’s non-logical scheme. Indeed, Parsons stated repeatedly that Pareto’s non-logical scheme is not a theory in Parsons’ sense and it never served as a template (or, for that matter, ‘a domain’) for his theory. We must conclude that Hodgson simply fails to understand Parsons’ discussion of Pareto. Parsons clearly stated repeatedly that non-logical action, in Pareto’s sense, simply cannot reflect his own concept of ends and values and therefore cannot constitute his theory. First, Parsons maintains that Pareto’s non-logical scheme never was intended to be any real theory but was simply a device to study certain logical components of action. As Parsons writes,

In fact, the theory of the residues as such is not a substantive sociological theory at all, but only a conceptual framework in terms of which the task of developing a theory may be approached. It is rather a method than a theory. It does not even tell us what order of forces are predominant in determining the state of society except negatively – it is not those involved in logical action so far as the residues are important, for they are elements of nonlogical action.

According to Parsons, Pareto’s non-logical scheme was constructed to test scientific theories but ‘not with total complexes of action’ (1991b [1936]: 140). Hence Parsons speaks about Pareto’s non-logical action scheme containing ‘an embarrassing ambiguity which until the analysis is pushed further threatens to develop into a serious contradiction’ (1991b [1936]: 139). Since ultimate ends in Pareto’s scheme cannot be positively defined, the ‘sentiments’ tend to be interpreted as ‘manifested in the residues as psychological drives’ (1991 [1936]: 139). This, according to Parsons, results in a reductionism which misrepresents the actual character of values. The problem with Pareto model, as Parsons saw it, was that the perception of concrete action within this scheme was so devoted to strict scientific logic alone that it ended only accepting objective ends as foci of analysis and not subjective ends. Parsons described the consequences thus:

It follows from this that to conceive concrete action as guided entirely by a scientific theory is to eliminate the role of ends altogether, in fact to eliminate action itself, by making its subjective aspect merely a reflection of the facts of the situation.

These basic points featured in Parsons’ 1936 paper on Pareto were generally sustained in The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1968 [1937]).

Therefore Hodgson idea that Pareto’s non-logical scheme worked as a paradigmatic base for Parsons’ theory or any domain definition of sociology is simply wrong. Although Parsons acknowledged Pareto’ s great work, he also had many reservations about Pareto and his approach.

How plausible is Hodgson’s claim that Kant’s influence on Parsons was very small?

There is another of Hodgson’s sweeping claims that we would like to comment on. Hodgson declares that Parsons’ theory ‘was not very influenced by Kant.’ But how does Hodgson know this? Well, he actually doesn’t know it; he just refers to a claim uttered by Charles Camic (Hodgson, 2001: 192). What is notable here is that Hodgson does not make any further investigation into Camic’s claim; he simply refer to Camic’s assessment as the final, indisputable truth.

Regarding Kant’s influence on Parsons, we would like to draw the reader’s attention to the following facts. During his undergraduate days at Amherst, Parsons followed a course on Immanuel Kant taught by a tiny Scotsman named George Brown, who was a professor of classics and where Parsons together with other students went right through the Critique of Pure Reason. Then when Parsons went to the University of Heidelberg in 1925, he again took a course on Kant, this time with Karl Jaspers, one of the most renowned Kant experts in the world, and he was examined in Critique of Pure Reason by Jaspers himself in the German language. Otto Manthey-Zorn, Parsons’ teacher in modern German philosophy at Amherst, was also a Kant expert who had translated Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten into English. We might also mention Parsons’ interaction with Meiklejohn in his regard, especially because Meiklejohn’s doctoral dissertation from Cornell in 1897 was written on Kant’s Theory of Substance. There can be little doubt that Parsons in these early days of his life was heavily exposed to Kant’s philosophy. Also, in the Structure of Social Action, published in 1937, we find a quite extensive discussion of Kant (Parsons, 1968 [1937]). Indeed, Kant has more references in Structure than Hegel, Hume, and others. Also, Ernst Troeltsch, whose work Parsons cherished, was a neo-Kantian of the Baden School. The same can be said about Parsons’ interest in the work of Adolf von Harnack. When we take a look of the thousands of letters which Parsons wrote during his life-time and which are accessible in the Harvard Archives, then it is obvious that Kant is extraordinarily central among the philosophers Parsons discusses in his multiple correspondences. Another interesting indication is the fact that Parsons’ son Charles Parsons became a Kant scholar. Charles has publicly noticed that his interest in Kant was importantly sparked through the father (C. Parsons, 1988). Moreover, when we look at later work of Parsons, the discussion of Kant is a persistent theme, reaching a climax in Parsons’ last major work, Action Theory and the Paradigm of the Human Condition, where he explicitly acknowledge the great impact of Kant on his own thinking (Parsons, 1977a). Notable also is Parsons’ discussion of Kant in the extraordinary piece written around 1969–1970 called ‘The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Ideas’ (Parsons, 2006).

Furthermore, several scholars, including Bershady (1973), have highlighted the importance of Kant’s philosophy in Parsons’ thinking. The most extensive work in this regard has been the study by Richard Münch. In his analysis of the influence of Kant on Parsons’ work, Münch argues:

Although even a superficial study of Parsons reveals the influence of Kant’s epistemological conceptions, one can in fact go much farther and draw a precise parallel in structure and method between Parsons’s general theory of action and theory of social systems, and Kant’s own critical philosophy. … Parsons’s sociology cannot possibly be understood apart from a consideration of Kant’s critical project.

The absurdity of Hodgson’s understanding of Parsons’ epistemology

Hodgson’s belittling of Parsons reached new heights in a section which he calls ‘a little philosophy is a dangerous thing’, and where he attempts to question Parsons’ intellectual power and philosophical capacity. In one passage Hodgson writes:

At Harvard, Parsons came into contact with the British philosopher Alfred Whitehead, who had been there since 1924. This was the first detailed and sustained encounter with the philosophy of science. ‘Prior to this point the philosophy of science occupied relatively little of Parsons’s attention’ (Camic, 1991, p.xxxiii). Partly under Whitehead’s influence, terms such as ‘organic’ and ‘emergence’ made a confident – if sometimes confused – appearance in Parsons’s work. Nevertheless, despite Whitehead, Parsons’s generally understanding of core philosophical issues remained patchy and incomplete.

First, Hodgson’s claim that Parsons didn’t have a detailed encounter with the philosophy of science before Whitehead is embarrassingly wrong. Indeed, Parsons’ term papers at Amherst clearly reveal that Parsons already at this early point had a powerful command of the philosophy of science, which furthermore is reflected in his Dr Phil. dissertation some years later. Naturally, in both cases the pieces were written long before he saw the shadow of Professor Whitehead. Parsons had already before Amherst got a solid training in the philosophy of science through his father and through his acquaintance with theological literature at the time. Indeed, Jonathan Edwards’ discussion of philosophical problems certainly includes an embedded discourse in the philosophy of science (Hornberger, 1937; Lee, 1988; Zakai, 2009). Also, anyone who read the theology of Albrecht Ritschl will be amazed about the power and superiority with which he discusses the deepest of epistemological issues (Swing, 1901). In addition, in Amherst, Parsons got a deep-seated introduction to problems in the philosophy of science by Otto Manthey-Zorn, an exceedingly able mind, as well as through the reading of Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernuft in the compelling class given by George Brown. A further introduction to the issues related to the philosophy of science he undoubtedly also got from Otto Glaser and Henry Plough, two exceptional biologists. Indeed, too little attention had been paid to the intellectual influence of Parsons’ biology teachers and far too much focus has been placed on the impact of Hamilton and Ayres. Indeed, Parsons’ system-theoretical interest in biology and its trans-disciplinary isomorphic pattern remained a permanent source of inspiration throughout his life.

Then, at Heidelberg, Parsons was exposed to the deepest issues of the philosophy of science through his encounter with Karl Jaspers, who was a towering philosopher of his time. In addition, Parsons had elaborate discussions with Emil Lederer and Edgar Salin, the latter the author of Plato und die griechische Utopie; certainly, both exceptional thinkers would also have discussed issues of the philosophy of science with Parsons as a natural part of the methodological and epistemological discourse linked to his Dr Phil. dissertation. A particular radiant influence for Parsons in this period was his conversation with the young von Schelting, with whom Parsons discussed problems of the philosophy of science intensively. Indeed, Parsons encountered the influence of Schumpeter and Henderson at Harvard before he focused attention on the insights offer from Whitehead. Given this long-term build-up of Parsons’ philosophical capacity, Hodgson’s statement that Parsons ‘first detailed and sustained encounter with the philosophy of science’ was his encounter with Whitehead is simply a misrepresentation. Although Parsons often referred to Whitehead, it is most certain that the impact of Henderson, Jaspers, Manthey-Zorn, and von Schelting, as well as his Amherst biology teachers, was much more enduring than his encounter with him. Thus, Parsons had profound face-to-face encounters with Henderson as well with Schumpeter, with whom he conducted a seminar on the concept of rationality, but there is no real evidence that he had a similar engagement with Whitehead. Although there is no doubt that he benefited greatly from Whitehead’s insight, the significance of this issue has developed into a overrated caricature in Hodgson’s highly ignorant discussion.

Hodgson (2001) then proceeds with a terribly tortured discussion where he tries to persuade the reader about Parsons’ alleged ‘obscure and idiosyncratic use of philosophical terminology.’ A case of hubris if there ever was one. In this discussion, Hodgson presents himself as the ‘correct’ spokesman of what he calls ‘the standard philosophical meaning,’ while Parsons’ discussion in The Structure of Social Action is accused of representing a ‘illiterate’ use of the word ‘positivism.’ Then, in cavalier fashion, this ‘wisdom’ from Hodgson’s side ends up in an argument, where Parsons is declared to be a positivist and an empiricist himself, despite his critique of the two directions. About these matters, the following points need to be stated. There is no revelation in the fact that Parsons’ theoretical building contains positivist elements; of course, it does. Indeed, Hodgson misunderstands the epistemic discussion which Parsons conducts in The Structure of Social Action. Parsons is not conducting any warfare against natural science as such, which certainly by some standards is based on a system of positivistic axioms. What is Parsons’ concern, however, is the absolutization of positivism, which naturally is a different matter. One might even say that Parsons is a ‘moderate positivist’; indeed, he certainly is. But Hodgson is not revealing anything which the enlightened reader would not have known for years. So Hodgson is again smashing in open doors and making a great drama out of utter trivialities. Certainly, there is nothing ‘idiosyncratic’ in Parsons’ use of the term ‘positivism,’ but Parsons is breaking new ground in our theoretical understanding of the term. ³³ The claim about empiricism in regard to Parsons’ theory, however, is certainly a very different type of question. Again, Hodgson’s claim is that the actual ‘standard philosophical meaning of empiricism’ is based on what he calls the reference to ‘experience,’ yet it is obvious that he grossly misrepresents the point Parsons is making in this regard (Hodgson, 2001: 193). Indeed, Hodgson’s idea that ‘knowledge is based primarily on experience rather than on any body of theory’ is the archetypical empiricistic fallacy par excellence. In general, Hodgson’s confusion is indicative of the limitations of his theoretical anti-intellectualism and its underlying ultra-positivism. And indeed, whose ‘standards’ is Hodgson actually claiming? Plato? Occam? Berkeley? Spinoza? Bacon? Kant? Hume? Schelling? Duhem? Carnap? Popper? Bachelard? Heidegger? Suppes? Indeed, were Occam’s epistemic ideas in accordance with the standards of the time? Were Heidegger’s? Or perhaps Bachelard’s? Indeed, Hodgson’s desperate plea to ‘standards’ reveals a peculiar conservatism, and had it prevailed, the orbit of the philosophy of science would have castrated, killed, and perverted any creativity and originality in the realm of philosophy and science.

Setting the record straight

In one important statement, Hodgson writes, ‘Turning to Parsons’s second criticism, it is blatantly untrue that institutional economists have neglected cultural and normative factors in the analysis of human agency and social structure’ (Hodgson, 2001: 190). This statement on behalf of Hodgson adds up to another important misrepresentation. First, he grossly over-exaggerates the extent to which cultural phenomena were factors of importance in institutionalist analysis. It is not accidental that Ayres had become widely known as the prophet of technology (McFarland, 1986), and, indeed, it is clear that culture essentially, as in the case of Marx, is an epiphenomenon (or at best a residual category) in the theoretical universe of Ayres. Naturally, Ayres mentions institutions, but they are, theoretically speaking, rather structural ‘extensions’ in the historical manifestation of the main drive, which in Ayres case is all-prevailing power of technology. As Ayres reassured Frank Knight, not the market but technology is the mother of all things (Samuels, 1977). Naturally, both Ayres and Hamilton would talk about culture usually in terms of habituation and ceremony and so on; yet, despite much talk, it is quite certain that culture as an independent theoretical category was very much a residual term in both of the two scholars’ analytical approach.

The same was true in regard to the scholarship of Veblen. Culture had never any truly independent theoretical status in Veblen’s analysis: that is, it is essentially within the scheme of Veblen’s logic an epiphenomenon of materialistic (evolutionary) causality. ³⁴ It was typical for him that he referred to major cultural institutions of his time as ‘imbecile institutions’; this expression was quite symptomatic of his level of understanding. In other words, there is nothing in Veblen’s theory which corresponds to Parsons’ cultural system; there is not even one iota of such a system. Indeed, the titles of some of Veblen’s ‘cultural pieces’ are symptomatic of this state of affairs. His so-called ‘cultural analysis’ would feature titles such as ‘the technology of the Predatory culture,’ ‘the economic theory of women’s dress’, and things to that effect. Indeed, culture is generally in Veblen’s account something ‘habitual’ and ‘conservative,’ which exists as a kind of residual anti-stuff in the never-ending Darwinist process of natural selection. As a analytical factor, the function of habituation as an explanatory device, in the prototypical analysis of Veblen, is a kind of ‘negative’: that is, some kind of anti-thesis to the ‘real’ process, which, in Veblen, is a vague, metaphysical actus purus called ‘Darwinist evolution.’ It is notable that Veblen considered evolution within a hard-core positivist methodology: that is, evolution was essentially mechanical. As Veblen writes: ‘It [evolution] is a scheme of blindly accumulative causation. … The sequence is controlled by nothing but the vis a tergo of brute causation, and is essentially mechanical’ (Veblen, 1907: 304). Despite Hodgson’s elaborations to the contrary, Veblen’s concept of society rid human agents of intentionality, autogenesis, and purpose. It is clear that for Veblen, human intentionality is considered as an ‘intermediate ground’ which is reduced to a subsidiary of a higher objectivism, where human consciousness is always-already subjugated. That is, in epistemological term, Veblen rejects a dualist ontology, so that human intentionality had no self-regulating status, no freedom and integrity, independent from matter and materialist causality. Within this meager theoretical landscape, culture is perceived as an ‘item’ of this selection process (featured through the concept of ‘the leisure class’), but it is in and by itself only a derivation or an ‘externalization’; indeed, normally in Veblen’s narrative something rather useless, childish, or unproductive (like religion, women’s dress, hunting, stupid dogs, and other bourgeois things). No wonder that C. Wright Mills praised Veblen’s ‘style.’ Indeed, according to Hodgson, Veblen has the most sophisticated cultural analysis. ³⁵ In reality, however, Veblen’s cultural analysis is deeply ideologically biased. Like another Julius Evola, Veblen’s books vibrate with absolute contempt for the foundations of Western civilization. According to Veblen, Christianity is inept, capitalism predatory, and Western civilization is archaic and, yes, of course, barbaric. They are in sum what Veblen calls ‘these imbecile institutions.’ Given the state of Veblen’s mindset, it is perhaps of no surprise that months before his death he declared that the genocidal Communist revolution in Russia was the best hope he saw for man (Dorfman, 1934: 500). Veblen’s embrace of the most morally wicked and genocidal modern political regime is not simply a case of ‘bad judgment,’ it rather lay implicit in the radical logic embedded in the objectivism inherent in his theoretical approach, with its neurotic hatred of a demonized bourgeois, which always played on – and indeed was a victim of – a dichotomic societal analysis. Theoretical objectivism has always had the tendency to view culture in a demonic light or alternatively as an ideational ‘mystification,’ which ‘true scientists’ always rise above. Veblen’s proclaimed ‘humanism’ is only the Janus-face of a Jacobinic mentality, which always has used ‘objectivist causality’ as a pretext for its crimes. But what is at least as disturbing by theoretical measure is that in all of Veblen’s work, there is no concept of culture to be found in the sense of a general value-scheme because the true transformative elements in Veblen’s universe are ‘instincts’ and not the cultural system as such. It is symptomatic in this regard that aesthetic ‘play’ is not a transformative evolutionary factor in Veblen’s account but an ineptly twisted, habitualized obstacle, which at best is a sign of sublimated barbarism.

The consequence, however, is that this ideological distortion seriously apprehends the level of sophistication of Veblen’s analysis. By the same token the cultural sphere, which Veblen in part characterizes as a ‘teleological aptitude,’ is fundamentally subjugated, or, as Veblen phases it, ‘this teleological aptitude is itself reducible to a product of unteleological natural selection’ (1909: 625). As a part of the evolving cult around Veblen, Hodgson does his best to sanitize Veblen’s bizarre world, and especially he tries to sweep Veblen’s contempt for the masses and his concept of a technocratic elite under the carpet. Indeed, what Popper (1957) characterized as ‘historicism’s unholy alliance with Utopianism’ has not only terrible political implications but theoretical implications as well.

Indeed, the young Parsons at Amherst had a well-developed sense of the basic flaws of the institutionalist project. He realized that it represented (1) a radical form of empiricism which was (2) ill defined and theoretically weak. And he saw very clearly that (3), given its instincts-oriented, behaviorist, and materialist forms (in whatever variation), it tended to underplay and even seriously pervert a scientific account of culture and human values. It was notable that at least Ayres among the institutionalists clearly acknowledged many of the fatal flaws of the institutional project and especially acknowledged its weak theoretical base (Samuels, 1977). As Ayres wrote to Frank Knight,

I always found Veblen’s controversial articles quite unsatisfactory. They attack; they stigmatize; but they give little or no clue to what other concepts Veblen would lay down as fundamental, let alone how he would build up from them a systematic understanding of industrial society.

However, despite moments of critical self-reflection, Ayres is nonetheless profoundly committed to the institutionalist concept, which he primarily associates with some objective socio-technology process. Indeed, Parsons was correct in assessing that the institutionalists were weak on the issue of culture and human values. Geoffrey Hodgson’s claim to the contrary, the cultural insight of Ayres and Hamilton was theoretically meager and basically shaped by economism and various layers of naturalist reductionism. Captive of Veblen’s hardcore negativism, Ayres and Hamilton were never able to deal with cultural issues in a non-reductionist way. Parsons observed this and didn’t want any stake in it. As he wrote,

Veblen’s principal catchword for use against the older economics is ‘institutions.’ Nowhere to my knowledge does he clearly define the concept, usually employing such vague expressions as ‘habits’ and ‘modes of activity.’ Where does it fit into his general theoretical scheme?

Parsons at Amherst was far too bright for his teachers; he saw a theoretical horizon which they were too blind to see. He was the giant, and they were the dwarfs. In this way, he never adopted or subscribed to institutionalism (which Camic and Hodgson wrongly claim). Parsons saw the basic fallacy of institutionalism from the first moment he encountered it; his own intellectual baggage which he had brought with him from Colorado provided him with the tools to codify the question of culture in sharp contrast to the position taken by Hamilton and Ayres. In consequence, the whole way Geoffrey Hodgson describes the Amherst event is grossly distorted; there is close to nothing he says which makes sense. The truth is simply that Hodgson is staggeringly ignorant about Parsons’ life; he only parrots what he has heard from Camic he best he can.

Some concluding remarks on Hodgson’s interpretation of Parsons

Indeed, Hodgson’s knowledge about Parsons’ life is quite amateurish and stands in sharp contrast to the iconoclastic arrogance which characterizes his claims. He even accuses Parsons of insufficient compassion for refugees from Nazi persecution (Hodgson, 2001: 199–200). In this way, there are really no limits to Hodgson’s catatonic accusations. More generally, his basic information depends excessively on Charles Camic’s interpretations, whose claims he uncritically repeats. Like Camic years before (Alexander and Sciortino, 1998; Gould, 1991), Hodgson blatantly reduces Parsons’ intellectual ideas to a socially conditioned pattern of self-serving ‘interest’ motivation. It is social interest reification at its worst.

Hodgson grossly overstates the influence Hamilton and Ayres had on Parsons, and especially misrepresents their influence on Parsons’ concept of culture. As we have argued, Parsons’ concept of culture was highly developed long before he entered Amherst and reflected, among others, the advanced state of American liberal theology, which was fundamental for the intellectual atmosphere in his childhood home. In that home, theology, philosophy, and culture became ‘constitutive’ for Parsons intellectual world-view, representing an integral system of mutually reinforcing elements. In this way, Parsons’ early idea of culture was deeply rooted in his Calvinist background and was especially reflected in his paramount interest in religion. It was exactly this intellectual foundation which he brought with him to Amherst that provided him with the opportunity to question the theoretical validity of the institutionalist approach. Parsons had little sympathy for the institutionalists’ wholesale rejection of the theoretical fundament of classical and neoclassical economics. In addition, on a deeper level of comprehension, the institutionalists, in Parsons’ eyes, presented a caricature of religion which paralyzed the question of its wider role in world-history and therefore for Parsons was a blind alley for any deeper understanding of the category of culture. Also, in Parsons’ perception, Veblen and the American institutionalists simply didn’t match the level of sophistication presented by scholars such as Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto. As Parsons wrote about the institutionalists, ‘The combination (to us) of not very good sociology and a negative attitude toward economic and almost any other theory made this movement a poor entering wedge for exploring interdisciplinary relations on a theoretical level’(Parsons and Smelser, 1956: xviii).

What made Parsons especially disillusioned about the institutionalists was their stubborn refusal to accept higher-order analytical schemes (Parsons, 1968 [1937]: 125). By this token, Parsons’ rejection of the institutionalists was primarily one on methodological and epistemological grounds. Also, we believe that Parsons was well advised to oppose Souter’s encyclopedic sociology. Little will be gained by the cancelling of disciplinary boundaries, which safeguard a certain division of labor. At the end of the day, Parsons’ solution is far preferable.

Thus, Parsons’ decision to leave the institutionalists behind and move on to higher ground was generally sound. His general theory established a much more sophisticated tradition that the one the institutionalists could accomplish. The institutionalists represented a far too empiricist position, which social science would have been ill advised to embrace. Hodgson’s current attempt to revitalize the institutionalist tradition under the pretext that economics and social science has ‘forgotten history’ is equally misguided and unworthy of support. Indeed, the very idea that Parsons ‘forgot history’ is bizarre. In contrast to Luhmann, Bourdieu, and Habermas, Parsons developed an actual world history, and, indeed, history was the ‘inner’ drive in all his theory. Although Parsons certainly was an ‘incurable theorist,’ he was also an astute historian, always very sensible in his understanding of historical facts and processes. What most people have importantly misconceived is that Parsons was a great historian in addition to his accomplishment as a general theorist; indeed, those who have taken the effort to go deep into his theoretical ideas have certainly discovered that his gigantic work is facilitated by a rich elaboration of actual historical processes, which has been in the center of world history. It is not accidental that he became a close intellectual friend with Benjamin Nelson, Shmuel Eisenstadt, A. Hunter Dupree, Reinhard Bendix, David Little, Thomas F. O’Dea, and Edward Y. Hartshorne, all of whom were strongly devoted to historical and civilizational analysis. Professor Martel recalls from his many interviews with Parsons that ‘historical questions were always central to Parsons’ mind’ (Martel, 1988). One should certainly also take note of the fact that the course which Parsons appeared to like the most during his student days at Horace Mann was a course in American history (Martel, 1975). Indeed, the most beloved course Parsons gave for decades at Harvard was called ‘comparative institutions’ and was essentially a comparative presentation of the history of world’s major civilizations. The last thing which was ‘forgotten’ in Parsons’ theory was certainly history.

Generally, Mr. Hodgson’s approach in his analysis of Parsons is characterized by the triumph of advocacy over meaning. Thus, the fact that Parsons had a long interest in the question of the relationship between biological and social systems and that he had intensive discussions with Henderson, Wheeler, Emerson, Mayr, Olds, Bonner, Pribram, Wimsatt, Kety, Miller, Dupree, and countless others, as well as devoted many of his writings to the issue, is totally ignored by Hodgson, who portrays Parsons as one who excluded biology from social analysis, a operation which, according to Hodgson, is supposed to have happened when Parsons ‘began to broadly identify “Social Darwinism” with almost any application of idea from biology to the study of human action’ (Hodgson, 2004: 83; see also Hodgson, 2006). Indeed, Hodgson is hilarious in claiming that Parsons doesn’t discriminate between Social Darwinism and Darwinism. Thus, Hodgson come close to depict Parsons as a bogeyman who almost has invented Social Darwinism through his ‘defective analysis’ (Hodgson, 2006: 48–49). ³⁶ In reality, these misrepresentations are indicative of Hodgson’s own shabby insight into Parsons’ life and theory.

Methodologically, Hodgson is a jack of all trades. Or as they say in Spain: Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada. What can we say about a man so wrapped in his own contradictions? For the historicists, Hodgson promises to ‘rehabilitate historicism,’ and for the general theorists, he speaks reassuringly about ‘meta-theoretical frameworks.’ For the biologists, he declares himself to be a ‘Darwinist,’ and for the anti-biologists, he declares with equal confidence that ‘Darwinism is not enough.’ He is a man who in one moment speaks about the German historical school’s devastating methodological failure and in the next moment wants to ‘rehabilitate’ it. Hodgson condemns in the strongest terms Parsons’ ‘reckless theorizing’ and in the next he declares with prophetic certainty that there exists no alternative whatsoever to Darwinist explanations in the social sciences (Hodgson, 2002; Hodgson and Knudsen, 2006). Like another Dr Moreau, Hodgson is attempting in the name of a ‘forgotten history’ to reconstruct the social science, which is his declared purpose at the end of his book. According to Hodgson, ‘both economics and sociology have lost their bearings, unable to redefine their role and position within the social sciences as a whole,’ and ‘the rehabilitation of historicism and institutionalism’ is part of an overall strategy of theoretical redemption (Hodgson,2001: 354). Hodgson even argues for the creation of a new wonderful discipline he calls ‘thesmology,’ which should initiate an ‘institutional science’ and presumably is aimed at studying society as a whole. His attack on Parsons shall be viewed within this light. In reality, Hodgson is repeating that same mistake as Souter, just on a much grander scale and with an unspeakable arrogance. His goal is to uproot social sciences and reconstruct them through a ‘rehabilitation of historicism and institutionalism,’ all baked into a titanic evolutionary theory based on what Hodgson calls ‘generalized Darwinism’ as the new archa mentis of social science. The kind of ‘encyclopedic project’ which Parsons warned about has reached its full-blown scale in the swelling vision of Hodgson’s biologistic reductionism. Hodgson represents the ultimate extreme, and, indeed, a very sad regression, of the conspicuous effort to substitute a serious study of society with the sociology of institutionalism, a terribly ill-conceived and inadequate platform for any theory about society. ‘Institution’ as a categorical gestalt is not any answer to the master questions of social science. After the Marxist wasteland and the postmodernist wasteland, Hodgson is now preparing social science for the wasteland of a Darwinist institutionalism. Bon appetit, we will certainly say. However, our aim in this essay was not to analyze the full implications of Hodgson’s project but to set the record straight in regard to the caricature Hodgson presents about Talcott Parsons and his life.