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Confrontations and Controversies in the Theory of Talcott Parsons

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Gerhardt U.

Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review

2017

vol. 53

issue 3

437-462

Since the turn of the 1960s, Talcott Parsons’ social thought has met with criticism that his image of society is conservative inasmuch as he places consensus and systematic concept formation over and above conflict and ‘sociological imagination’. The hidden agenda in this criticism is political: the charges are that Parsons supposedly disavows democracy in his implicit or explicit knowledge aim, and that his sociology presumably makes society function even at the expense of freedom of the individual. Here the author argues that these accusations cannot stand if archival materials such as lecture notes, correspondence, and unpublished memoranda are taken into account. She claims that Parsons in his sociology conceptualised society from the standpoint of the real world of the day, including the major historical confrontations from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. The first such scenario and the earliest confrontation that his work faced was in the era of the New Deal and the Second World War as the Anglo-Saxon democracies fought the racist imperialism of Nazi Germany; his ‘middle phase’ from the 1950s to the mid-1960s coincides with the Cold War at its height, the standoff between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union; and his ‘late oeuvre’ has yet another agenda, namely the Watergate Affair, but also the struggle for racial equality and university reform in the United States. In his theoretical positions and in his opposition to his critics, Parsons defended liberal democracy against the powerful social and intellectual forces that put it to the test.

Lewis A. Coser—A Stranger within More Than One Gate

86%

Fleck C.

Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review

2013

vol. 49

issue 6

951-968

This article presents a short portrait of Lewis A. Coser (1913–2003), the American sociologist who became renowned as one of the founders of ‘conflict sociology’. Born in Berlin, Coser had to leave his homeland for political reasons and he spent the years before Nazi Germany’s invasion of France in Paris. Coser then fled to the United States and started his academic career there at the College of the University of Chicago. An abridged version of the PhD thesis he wrote at Columbia University was published as The Functions of Social Conflict, which earned him recognition, a promotion, and made him a figure of authority for sociologists in the 1960s. In this article the author draws on archival materials to examine Coser’s life, major publications and achievements. His intellectual trajectory from Marxism to Mertonian Functionalism, his strong commitment to a Weberian view of the separation of politics from scholarship, the breadth of his erudition in literature and classical sociological theory, and his lifelong place in New York intellectual circles and intellectual magazines made him an extraordinary figure even amongst his contemporaries.

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2 Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review

1 2017

1 2013

1 Fleck C.

1 Gerhardt U.

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Confrontations and Controversies in the Theory of Talcott Parsons

Lewis A. Coser—A Stranger within More Than One Gate