Revolution, Reaction, and Reform: the Change Theory of Parsons's Middle Period

The “conflict school” in contemporary sociology emerged in large part as a critique of the theory of social change that Talcott Parsons developed during his middle period, which began with the empiricallyoriented essays that appeared after The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, I937), and extended through the simultaneous publication of Towards a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951) and The Social System (Parsons, 1951). The conflict critique, now enshrined in textbook lore and highbrow writing alike, accused Parsons of a static, idealist bias that ignored issues of process, conflict, and change. While Parsons’s attitude toward change, during this and later periods of his development, was complex and often ambiguous, this evaluation was certainly incorrect. I will demonstrate, in fact, that in this middle period Parsons actually produced a more systematic and compelling approach to conflict and change than the theories produced by the conflict critics themselves. In the first part of this paper, I will present the formal elements of Parsons’s change theory. The second part will add substance to this theory by showing how Parsons applied it to the empirical problemutics of recent Western development. In the third section, I will relate this formal and substantive theorizing to the vastly misumkrstood deviance paradigm from The Social System. In conclusion, I will return to the question with which I began: What is the real relationship between the conflict theorists and their very useful straw man, “Talcott Par~ons”?~ The Formal Theory: Towards B Synthesis of Ideallrm and Materialism, Conflict and Equilibrium The most general treatment of conflict and its repercussions in the middle period work occurs in Parsons and Shils’ Towards a General Theory of Action (1951 ) , This discussion, indeed, can be read as a powerful argument against the reductionist notion that a given theoretic-epistemic, or formal, position implies either empirical c d i c t or cooperation. To the contrary, Parsons and Shils argue that the very social processes that meet functional needs-particularly the allocation of facilities and rewards and the maintenance of cultural orientations-become the sources of instability both in the genesis of conflict and in its control. They emphasize, in fact, the lack