Talcott Parsons's "Shift Away from Economics," 1937–1946

Howard Brick

Current rhetoric declaring the global triumph of capitalism has obscured a salient fact of the recent past: For much of the postwar period, many social scientists and political observers chose not to debate the virtues or faults of capitalism, since the very term, they felt, no longer adequately described the key traits of social life in the United States or other "advanced" countries. Considering the present assumption that our society is and can only be a capitalist one, we might ask why renowned social theorists doubted precisely that in the years 1945–1970. They preferred other terms for a society changing beyond the limits of old forms: in Western Europe, a few discussed "postcapitalist" society; Americans began talking of "postindustrial" society, which displaced "capitalism" from the center of attention; others settled simply on "modern society," in which the ubiquity of bureaucratic or professional organization carried more weight than property relations. One such figure was the Harvard University sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), dean of his discipline as it reached the height of its status and influence after the war. Parsons offers a case study in the disappearing act of capitalism. He began in the 1920s aiming to understand "capitalism as a social system" yet concluded by the 1940s that "the capitalism/socialism dichotomy" was no longer useful. What changed his mind?1	1
Some historians suggest that the cleavage between democracy and totalitarianism that some social scientists emphasized in the late 1930s overrode the debate between capitalism and socialism, but this explanation begs the question. It is not self-evident why the primacy of efforts to defend democracy against totalitarianism should foster a new social analysis that predicted and usually welcomed the ebbing of capitalism in the West. Political historians and sociologists such as Alan Brinkley and Ira Katznelson have delved deeper by studying a midcentury change in American liberalism perhaps analogous to the disappearance of capitalism as an issue. From the late 1930s on, reform liberalism gave up its ambitions to reshape the economic institutions of capitalism and vested its confidence instead in renewed growth and Keynesian management of federal budgets. Turning attention away from inequalities of class toward divisions of race, such fiscal liberalism hoped federal social services would meet human needs without disturbing the market or redistributing income.2 Perhaps because it no longer seemed in need of fixing, capitalism became harder to keep in the mind's eye. Yet this analysis only guesses the connection between trends in reform politics and significant shifts at the conceptual level in social theory. It is that connection that Parsons's case highlights, since he was both tied to Progressive traditions of reform and devoted to rethinking the conceptual foundations of the social sciences.	2
The linkage of politics and theory has been hard to grasp. Although a new generation of theoretical sociologists has enriched our understanding of Parsons's work, they remain specialists concerned primarily with his role in their discipline rather than in intellectual life at large.3 Intellectual historians have been loath to regard Parsons as a major figure of broad interests and influence, given his reputation for dauntingly complex and arid academic prose. Yet Parsons surely brought to his work enormous intellectual breadth, and the issues he considered were practically important. As C. Wright Mills wrote, "All classic social scientists have been concerned with the salient characteristics of their time—and the problem of how history is being made within it." To grasp the political connotations of theoretical change, I propose that the disappearance or reduced salience of the concept of capitalism was a symptom of a broader change in the conceptual foundations of the social sciences—what Parsons in the 1940s called a "shift . . . away from economics." The "new social sciences" of sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology, he claimed, had gained prominence at the expense of the "old social sciences" of politics and economics, and it was the new fields that he wove together in Harvard's innovative interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, begun in 1946.4	. . .