Talcott Parsons wrote:
Preface
When the editor of the Foundations of Modern Sociology Series, Alex Inkeles, asked the author to contribute a volume dealing with the total society as a social system, it was a tempting assignment, but one that also has turned out to be unexpectedly difficult. It went without saying that the perspective of the book should be comparative, that the theoretical resources of sociology should be mobilized to analyze not only the interconnections of different parts of the same society and the forces operating to change its structure, but also the variations of type as between different societies.
The comparative emphasis, however, confronted one directly with the problem of dealing with societal evolution, and this was accepted as an obligation that could not properly be evaded—all the more so because the recent increase in the concern of social scientists with comparative problems and the resultant volume of research contributions have posed the problems of evolution with a renewed definiteness and urgency. This has also been stimulated by new developments in the unification of scientific theory, particularly in this case between the biological and the social sciences.
These decisions generated severe problems concerning the selection of empirical materials and their theoretical ordering and analysis. Obviously, to do anything like full "justice" to such problems would require a very extended treatise, probably of several volumes. The severe space limitations of volumes in the present series precluded anything like this. Even so, the first full draft far exceeded the limit; the editor and the publisher kindly agreed to permit the material with the appropriate reorganization to be divided between two volumes in the series. The division between them has been made in terms of evolutionary stage. Hence the present volume will stop with a survey of the principal societies which are classified as "advanced intermediate," including the two dealt with in Chapter Six as "Seed-bed" societies, namely ancient Israel and classical Greece. The present volume then will be followed by the System of Modern Societies [1971], dealing with the system which originated only in one time and place, Europe after the Middle Ages, though of course its basic structural patterns have now spread outside Europe.
The two volumes are designed to be sufficiently independent so that each can be read without depending on the other. The author's more general thinking on the problem of comparative and evolutionary analysis of societies, however, can best be understood by taking the two together. …
Chapter One
The Study of Societies
The series of books called the Foundations of Modern Sociology, of which this small book is a part, deals with societies and their constituent parts from a number of viewpoints and at a number of levels. Some volumes deal mainly with small constituent elements such as the family or the local community, others with special topics such as theory and method of study. This book stands at one extreme in that it treats the most comprehensive unit ordinarily studied by sociologists, the total society.
[MGH: ‘Society’, the thing that no sociologist dares define.]
There is, to be sure, an immense variety of types of societies, ranging all the way from extremely small-scale primitive societies to the new supernational societies of the United States and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, at approximately equivalent levels of development, there are also wide ranges of variation, such as from the ascriptive rigidities of the traditional Indian caste system to the relative openness and mobility of the Chinese Empire. In this essay we will try to bring some order to this very complex subject.
Treating societies as wholes by no means exhausts the possibilities for empirical application of the concept of the social system. Many social systems such as local communities, schools, business firms, and kinship units are not societies, but rather sub-systems of a society. Also, in a sufficiently pluralistic world, many social systems, which are "partial" systems in terms of the concept of society, may be parts of more than one society. The simplest cases involve interpenetrating membership. Thus, the emigration of a nuclear family makes it, by stages, a structural unit in the society to which it moves. Many relatives, however, remain in the "old country." Together with the migrating family, they certainly constitute social systems which penetrate or overlap two or more societies. The same can be said of business firms, professional associations, churches, and other organizations which maintain "branches" in two or more countries. There is, finally, a sense in which a society is not the most extensive social system, but is part of a still broader international or intersocietal system. The concept of society will be more fully discussed in the next chapter.
For the moment, it suffices to say that a society is relatively the most self sufficient type of social system. A society internally integrates more of the requisites of independent existence than do units like a business firm, which is too specialized, or "Christendom," which is too loosely organized to function in concert as a single society. Therefore, insofar as they are differentiated or segmented, units of a society are more dependent on other units of the same society than on units of other societies.
For reasons discussed below, a society is in the first instance "politically organized”, to use Roscoe Pound's phrase. It must have loyalties both to a sense of community and to some "corporate agency" of the kind we ordinarily consider governmental, and must establish a relatively effective normative order within a territorial area.
In our study of societies we will be guided by both an evolutionary and a comparative perspective. The former conceives of man as integral to the organic world, and human society and culture as properly analyzed in the general framework appropriate to the life process. Whether the adjective "biological" be used or not, the principle of evolution is firmly established as applying to the world of living things. Here the social aspect of human life must be included. Such basic concepts of organic evolution as variation, selection, adaptation, differentiation, and integration belong at the center of our concern, when appropriately adjusted to social and cultural subject matter.
Socio-cultural evolution, like organic evolution, has proceeded by variation and differentiation from simple to progressively more complex forms. Contrary to some early conceptions in the field, however, it has not proceeded in a single neatly definable line, but at every level has included a rather wide variety of different forms and types. Nevertheless, longer perspectives make it evident that forms apparently equally viable in given stages and circumstances have not been equal in terms of their potentialities for contributing to further evolutionary developments. Still, the immense variability of human patterns of action is one of the most important facts about the human condition.
Seen in this light, there are four interdependent yet in certain respects independent aspects of the theoretical problems facing us. First, we must use the general conceptual scheme of the social system which underlies all socio logical analysis, whatever the size and functional importance of the system of reference relative to other systems.
Second, we must consider the problems of the society that arise from its being a type of social system which is more inclusive of controls over action than all others and which hence has special features requiring special analysis. The study of societies, which is our subject matter, is not identical with the study of social systems generally.
Third, we must be concerned with the evolutionary development of societies, both as wholes and in their principal structural parts. We are concerned with the sequences of changing structural patterns which characterize societies as social systems in the course of their evolution and, as far as limitations both of knowledge and of space permit, with the processes by which the transitions have occurred. We hope to delineate certain fairly coherent patterns of order in these respects.
Finally, we must also consider variability as a problem distinct from—but interdependent with-that of evolutionary stage and sequence. The mere fact that the cultural, physical, biological, psychological, and social environments of societies, as of other social systems, are highly variable is reason enough to expect that the societies, being interdependent with these environmental factors as well as autonomous, will also vary considerably. Some attempts to specify the variations found at different stages of evolution, the reasons for them, and the potentialities for their further development are essential to an investigation such as this
[MGH: Luhmann made advances beyond Parsons in the variability dimension.]
The next chapter will present a very broad-and tentative-schema that divides the evolution of societies (so far) into three stages: primitive, intermediate, and modern.
[MGH: Uh-oh. There is no need to speak of ‘stages’.]
The substantive analysis of this book will treat only the first two categories. Moreover, its bulk will be devoted to intermediate societies, partly because they show a wider and more significant range of variation than primitive societies and partly because our neighboring discipline, social anthropology, has studied primitive societies so extensively and intensively. There are many anthropological studies that approach primitive societies in comparative and evolutionary terms. But intermediate societies have been studied mainly by archaeologists, historians, linguists, and other specialists who are oriented more to particular civilizations or to particular aspects of socio-cultural structure than to very general comparisons.
The present author is preparing a sequel to this volume that will appear in the Foundations of Modern Sociology Series under the title The System of Modern Societies.
[MGH: Unfortunately even I cannot get hold of an electronic copy of this 1971 book, though it can be borrowed—without download—at the Internet Archive for 14 days. Nevertheless, it seems to me that this 1st volume is the more important one.]
The two books are designed to be read separately, but they are both conceived, very largely, in relation to one broad empirical problem. Thus it will help those who may read both volumes to make certain features of that problem explicit here. Also, it will clarify the grounds for dividing the general consideration of social evolution into two works.
In the author's view, the main organisational patterns of societies of the type justifiably considered modern share a common origin. This origin was. comprised of the societies of Western Europe as they developed from the mediaeval base which emerged after the decline of the western Roman Empire. So far, the main structural features of other modern societies are based upon diffusion from this point of origin, though they often involve very important structural innovations (variations) not found in the older West European systems. The most "developed" of such societies are the United States and the Soviet Union, the European origins of which are evident, and Japan, the modernization of which has clearly been a reaction to the impact of the European-American system, however important the influence of indigenous elements may have been.
This thesis, which emphasizes the uniqueness of the original development of the modern societal type in the West, poses certain problems of objectivity for a student who is part of the system he is trying to evaluate. However that may be, our emphasizing the fact of common origin also presents an opportunity—namely, to treat the principal modern societies as constituting a system; i.e., a social system more extensive and differentiated than any one society [MGH: another Uh-oh].
It does not seem that the varieties of primitive and intermediate societies can generally and usefully be regarded as comprising larger systems in the sense of the modern system. This difference provides a natural break between the subject matters of the two books. Furthermore, it provides a challenging set of interpretive problems which will guide our discussion of the more advanced intermediate societies, problems whose significance was classically demonstrated by Max Weber.
The range of variation among advanced intermediate societies was very wide—think of the contrasts between the Chinese Empire at its height, the Indian caste system, the Islamic empires, and the Roman Empire! All these societies contained very highly developed civilizations. Why, then, did the breakthrough to modernization not occur in any of the "Oriental" advanced intermediate civilizations?
[MGH: There is a simple answer to that question, but not from within the Weber-Parsons-Luhmann conceptual schemas. At ‘retirement age’ I am now finally working on it full time, and eventually there will be a book.]
Conversely, what constellation of factors were involved in its occurrence against the background of the most radical structural regression in the history of major societies—namely, the "fall" of the western Roman Empire and the reversion of its territories to more or less "archaic" social conditions in the "dark ages"? This is the historical-interpretive perspective, as distinct from that of systematic theory, which will guide the analysis of the present book as well as its sequel.
The Source:
Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Prentice-Hall 1966
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.