Review of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils,
Toward a General Theory of Action:
Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences
Harper and Row (1951)
Herbert Gintis
In 1950 Talcott Parsons was at his height in influence in the sociology profession. In this book,
Parsons gathers some of the most influential social scientists of his time (Gordon Allport, Clyde
Kluckhohn, and Samuel Stouffer, among others) to endorse his "general theory" of society.
Despite the august company and a promising opening chapter by Parsons, the book is a failure
and so was Parsons attempt to ground sociology in a generally acceptable theoretical framework.
The various essays in this book, while readable, never go beyond Parsons himself, and are of
marginal contemporary interest.
Parsons opens his introductory essay with these words: "The present statement and the volume
which introduces are indented to contribute to the establishment of a general theory in the social
sciences." Brave words indeed! By 1950 Samuelson's well-know Foundations of Economic
Analysis was revolutionizing graduate education in economics, and biology was unified around
the fundamental synthesis of Fisher, Wright, and Haldane. Parsons, who published his first
synthesizing works in economics journals, had always seen himself as a synthesizer who might
do for sociology what Samuelson did for economics. Why did he fail?
Part of the problem was undoubtedly the mind-set of sociologists of his time (and ours), which
was to attach political messages to rather pedestrian observational and statistical material, and to
reject any notion that there might be a "general theory" of sociology. But part of the problem was
also Parsons' failure to articulate the close affinities of biological and economic theory with
sociology. As for biology, we now know that Homo sapiens is one of several social species, and
the biological/evolutionary analysis of human society is part of a more general scientific agenda,
the study of the emergence and transformation of sociality in the biosphere. By lacking this
broad perspective, sociologists in general were hobbled by a painfully short-sighted notion of the
object of their studies. Indeed, the very idea of anthropology and sociology being distinct areas
of study with virtually no theoretical overlap is a product of this myopic vision (anthropologists
studied primitive society and kinship, while sociologists studied modern industrial society and
social stratification). As a result, young people went into anthropology mostly because they
wanted to preserve "pristine" pre-capitalist cultures, and into sociology mostly because they
wanted to protect the downtrodden and the dispossessed. These are of course noble goals, but
they cannot be achieved without some monumental social theorizing behind them.
Parsons' social theory was at base very simple, and very cogent. Society is a highly differentiated
nexus of "role positions" (husband, worker, voter, hospital patient, subway rider, and so on) each
of which is occupied by a person and a single individual can occupy many different roles. The
rules and norms associated place general requirements of how an individual behaves in a given
role position, and the individual is motivated to behave in this way by virtue of material and
moral incentives. Conformity to moral incentives derives from the way individuals are socialized
to accept the norms and values associated with society in general and specific role positions in
particular.
If we restrict this picture to the economy, we recreate modern economic theory, except that in
Parsons' time it was assumed in economics the people are purely selfish and a process of
socialization could not possible induce rational individuals to forego behaving perfectly selfishly.
The role structure of the economy is the Walrasian general equilibrium system of firms and
households, plus the economic aspects of government. The actors are the employers and
employees who occupy positions in the economy, as well as government actors who are involved
in regulating and policing economic activity. Of course, economists stressed that all of these
positions could be efficiently filled by selfish agents, provided appropriate material incentives
(rewards and penalties) were attached to the various economic roles. We now know that this
assumption of the capitalist economy operating through purely material incentives applied to
self-regarding agents is not true (see, for instance, my book The Bounds of Reason (Princeton,
2009), which supplies the appropriate empirical and theoretical references, and my new book
with Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species (Princeton, 2011), as well as the more
anthropologically oriented Joseph Henrich et al., Foundations of Human Sociality, Oxford, 2005,
for details), but when Parsons wrote, the rationality = selfishness axiom was virtually universal
in economic theory.
Of course, Parsons did say that economic theory is a "subset" of social theory, but he never
managed to articulate how his vision of a theory of action would mesh with the economist's
rational actor model. The answer is that (a) we must extend the goals of rational action to include
moral behavior and non-material ends such as reciprocity, empathy, considerateness, and justice,
even in purely economic transactions, and more so in general social life; (b) general role
performance can be quite nicely modeled using an extended rational actor model, in which
individuals have preferences that they try to satisfy as best they can subject to their material and
informational constraints, and in conformance with their beliefs (called subjective priors in
economics) and moral values.
Parsons' treatment of culture in his theory of action was far in advance of economic theory. In
economics each individual has beliefs in the form of a subjective prior, but there is no formal
way to compare or adjudicate among the beliefs of a heterogeneous set of economic agents.
Economic theory thus was forced to assume "common priors" concerning the relative probability
of various events, with no serious suggestions as to where these common priors might come
from, as well as "common knowledge" concerning the facts of their common situation, without
saying how this commonality might arise. This problem is especially severe in dealing with how
individuals represent the internal states (beliefs and intentions) of others (see my analysis in The
Bounds of Reason, Ch. 8). Parsons alternative, which is really due to Emile Durkheim, was to
posit the existence of a "common culture" independent from and above both social institutions
and individual personalities. This common culture is reproduced by specialized institutions
(ritual, religion, schools, communications media, etc.) that ensure that culture remains common,
changes only slowly under normal circumstances, and is "internalized" by the youth of each new
generation. This common culture provides a common framework of assumptions and
expectations that all social agents share, and provides the conditions needed by game theory to
justify the assumption that agents will coordinate their activities appropriately (i.e., play Nash
equilibria, in the language of game theory).
Parsons' treatment of culture is, however, only partially adequate. Its weakness is not dealing
with the dynamics of cultural change. Culture is an effect as much as a cause and the dynamics
of cultural constitution and change require careful development. The biological/anthropological
treatment of culture in the theory of gene-culture coevolution, as developed by Robert Boyd,
Peter Richerson, Marcus Feldman, Luca Cavalli-Sforza and others (see my review article "Geneculture Coevolution and the Nature of Human Sociality", Proceedings of the Royal Society B
366 (2011):878-888, is a more fruitful starting point
Rather than envision the links between his sociological concerns on the one hand and biological
and economic theory on the other, Parsons insisted on viewing all of social behavior through his
particular lens of structural-functionalism. This was a serious error, because the power of his
theory comes from its synergy with insights from other disciplines.
Why did Parsons take this path? Three key background factors were (a) his ignorance of
mathematical modeling; (b) the extremely underdeveloped state of game theory until the mid1970's, and (c) the inordinate fear Parsons, like most sociologists, had of be "swallowed up" by
economics. This led him to ignore systematically the incentives side of motivating role
performance. Indeed, Parsons learned from Pareto that moral concerns are "nonrational" and
cannot be incorporated into a model of rational choice. We now know that this is simply
incorrect (see my Bounds of Reason, Ch 4.) The importance of the normative side to role
performance is quite compatible with actors caring about material incentives. In fact, the
interaction among agents in role-performance can be modeled as strategic interactions in which
agents attempt to find best responses to the behaviors of others.
For whatever reasons, Parsons did make these mistakes and his critics wrongly criticized his
whole theoretical endeavor. The result is painful to view. Sociology is not at a crossroad, but
rather at a cul-de-sac. We can do no better that to retrace our steps to more solid ground.