Talcott Parsons - Biography - Retired From Harvard, 1973

Retired From Harvard, 1973

He retired from Harvard in 1973, but continued his writing, teaching and other activities in the same rapid pace as before. Parsons also continued his extensive correspondence with a wide group of colleagues and intellectuals. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. At Parsons' retirement banquet held on May 18, 1973, Robert K. Merton was asked to preside, while John Riley, Bernard Barber, Jesse Pitts, Neil J. Smelser and John Akula were asked to share their experiences of the man with the audience.

One scholar who became important in Parsons' later years was professor Martin U. Martel of Brown University. Martel and Parsons made contact in the early 1970s, the occasion was a discussion of an article, which Martel had written about Talcott Parsons' work. Martel arranged a series of seminars at Brown University in 1973-74, where Parsons spoke about his life and work and answered question from students and faculty. Among the participants at the seminars were Martin U. Martel, Robert M. Marsh, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, C. Parker Wolf, Albert F. Wessen, A. Hunter Dupree, Philip L. Quinn, Adrian Hayes and Mark A. Shields. In February–May 1974, Parsons also gave the Culver lectures at Brown and spoke on the issue "The Evolution of Society." These lectures as well as the seminars were videotaped.

Late in life Parsons began to work out a new level of the AGIL model, which he called "A Paradigm of the Human Condition." This new level of the AGIL model crystallized in the summer of 1974 and the ideas of the new paradigm he worked out with a variety of people but especially with Victor Lidz, Renee Fox and Harold Bershady. The new meta-paradigm featured the environment of the general action system, which include the physical system, the biological system and what Parsons called the telic system; the latter system represented the sphere of ultimate values in a sheer metaphysical sense. Parsons also worked toward a more comprehensive understanding of the code-structure of social systems and on the logic of the cybernetic pattern of control facilitating the AGIL model, where he among many things worked out a bulk of notes, he called "Thoughts on the linking of systems" and another memo he called "money and time." He had also extensive discussions with Larry Brownstein and Adrian Hayes concerning the possibility of a mathematical formalization of Parsons' theory.

Parsons had during his lifetime worked intensively with questions of medical sociology, the medical profession, psychiatry, psychosomatic problems and related issues with the questions of health and illness. Most of all Parsons had become known for his concept of "the Sick role." This field of social research was an issue, which Parsons constantly developed through elaboration and self-criticism. Parsons participated at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in August 1974, where he presented a paper called "The sick role revisited: a response to critics and an updating in terms of the theory of action," which was published under a slightly different title in 1975. In his essay Parsons highlighted that his concept of "sick role" never was meant to confine this category to "deviant behavior," although as he stated it: "its negative valuation should not be forgotten." It was also important to keep a certain focus on the "motivatedness" of illness, since there always is a factor of unconscious motivation in the therapeutic aspects of the sick role.

In 1975 Robert N. Bellah published his book called The Broken Covenant. "The Covenant" Bellah speaks about refers to the sermon delivered by John Winthrop (1587–1649) to this flock on board his ship 'Arbella' on the evening of the landing in Massachusetts Bay in the year 1630. In his sermon Winthrop declared that the Puritan colonists emigrating to the New World was part of a special pact (Covenant) with God to create a holy community. Winthrop used the phrases: "For we must consider that we shall be a city on the hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." Parsons disagreed strongly with Bellah's analysis in The Broken Covenant and insisted that "the covenant" was not broken. Parsons later used a major part of his influential article, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild" to discuss Bellah's position in The Broken Covenant. Parsons found that Bellah unduly trivialized the discussion of the tension and problems involved in questions of individual interests and collective interests on the level of total society by reducing them to the concept of "capitalism." Parsons find that Bellah in his characterization of the negative aspects of American society is compelled by a charismatic based optimalism and he declared that Bellah's position in The Broken Covenant is that of moral absolutism.

In 1975 Parsons responded to an article by Jonathan H. Turner called "Parsons as a symbolic interactionist." In his response Parsons acknowledged that action theory and symbolic interactionism should not be regarded as two separate, antagonistic positions; in contrast they have overlapping structures of conceptualization. Parsons regarded symbolic interactionism and the theory of George Herbert Mead as valuable contributions to action theory specifying certain aspects of the theory of the personality of the individual. Parsons, however, criticized the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer, since in Blumer's theory there is no end to the openness of action. Parsons regarded Blumer as the mirror image of Claude Lévi-Strauss who tended to stress the quasi-determined nature of macro-structural systems. Action theory, Parsons maintained, represented a middle ground between these two extremes.

In 1976 Parsons was asked to contribute to a volume celebrating the eightieth years birthday of Jean Piaget. Parsons contributed with an essay called "A few considerations on the place of rationality in Modern Culture and Society." Parsons characterized Piaget as the most eminent contributor to cognitive theory in the Twenty Century. However, in his article, he also argued that the future study of cognition had to go beyond its narrow encounter with psychology and aim at a higher understanding of how cognition as a human intellectual force was entangled in the processes of social and cultural institutionalization.

In 1978, when James Grier Miller published his famous work Living Systems, Parsons was approached by Contemporary Sociology who asked him to write a review article on Miller's work. Parsons had already complained in a letter to A. Hunter Dupree that American intellectual life suffered from a deep-seated tradition of empiricism and he saw Miller's book the latest confirmation of that tradition. In his review article called "Concrete and "Abstrated" systems, he generally praised the hercules task behind Miller's work but he criticized Miller for getting caught in the effort of hierarchize concrete systems while underplaying the importance of structural categories in theory building. Parsons was also concerned about Miller's lack of any clear-cut discrimination between cultural and non-cultural systems.