according to the mills reading, in what ways can society affect ones behavior?

Abstract

C. Wright Mills was i of the about of import critics of Talcott Parsons who succeeded in establishing the paradigm of Parsons every bit a bourgeois "yard theorist" out of affect with the real world and its real bug, equally passed on in sociological textbooks. In this essay, it is argued that Mills' "translation of Parsons into English" is a ane-sided interpretation based on his own theoretical premises, which he called the sociological imagination. The mode Mills conceptualized sociological imagination leans towards an ideological world-view with political ambitions just lacks the necessary theoretical differentiation for an adequate evaluation of Parsons' general theory of action and the conceptualization of the social system in particular. Given Mills' bounds, it appeared to him equally if Parsons could not deal with social disharmonize, social change, domination and power relationships, which laid the foundations of a narrative quite distinct from the "real" Parsons. The conceptual deficiencies of Mills' sociological imagination lead into theoretical antinomies and the practical inability to resolve political issues exterior of forceful intervention as suggested in the theoretical tradition of Thomas Hobbes. Independent of a political positioning, Parsons' sophistications in his agreement of power every bit ane of several generalized symbolic media of interaction beyond the Hobbesian utilitarian model are necessary to come to terms with the increased complexity of modern society, both in theoretical and in political terms.

Introduction

"…as from a prophet who comes in from a desert" – such should be the effect of the publication of a manuscript entitled The Sociological Imagination (1959) written in Europe ^{Footnote 1} in 1957, every bit the writer C. Wright Mills noted in a letter of the alphabet to the historian William Miller on March fourteen, 1957 (s. M. Mills 2000: 230). The author'due south wish would become true. This publication eventually turned into one of the virtually powerful books in the history of sociology. In 1997, the International Sociological Association conducted an opinion survey on the about influential books in sociology published in the twentieth century. Mills' The Sociological Imagination reached the second rank later Max Weber's Economic system and Order (2019 [1922]). Talcott Parsons got nearly half every bit many votes every bit Mills for his The Structure of Social Action (1937) and concluded up on rank nine.

Yet, the lasting effect C. Wright Mills has had upwardly to our times might not so much exist based on his original writings which are less received by the younger generation of sociologists than through setting the directions of the discourse at the fourth dimension by coining concepts and labels that were broadly accepted and included in sociology textbooks. We all know that a considerable segment of textbooks has a life of its own, often detached from the real globe they pretend to stand up for (south. Mahlert 2020). Still, textbooks are a sort of RNA of scholarly fields in that they reproduce and spread the information from generation to generation.

The nigh famous of the respective labels coined by Mills is "grand theory" and its attribution to Talcott Parsons equally its foremost representative. With the label of grand theory comes a whole syndrome of unfavorable designations like "fetishism of the concept" (Mills 1959: 35), the disability to deal with social conflicts and societal change, with domination and ability relationships etc. which all, in political terms, translate into an image of Talcott Parsons as a conservative and apologist of the deficiencies of Western modernity and capitalist societies. ^{Footnote two}

Talcott Parsons and his Strawman Double

There is a peculiarity in the assessment of Talcott Parsons' legacy and the political role he played, which, to my cognition, is unique in the history of social thought. The common situation is that artistic thinkers come up up with new ideas that eventually crystallize in schools of idea, gaining permanence if a group of followers is able to position themselves in academic institutions. This kind of tribal arrangement of sociology, as Niklas Luhmann once chosen it with his peculiar irony, is the basis of ongoing controversies over more than or less combative positions similar methodological individualism versus methodological collectivism, or the prevalence of cultural versus "cloth" factors in social life. In the case of Parsons, however, information technology is frequently not so much a matter of conflicting standpoints. The problem is more than disruptive to brainstorm with, since a quite large circle of experts unanimously contests the accuracy of the critics' understanding of what Parsons's theory, and consequently its political implications, are about. In this regard, Harold J. Bershady wrote: "Much of Parsons' work has been contaminated with false and substantially unscholarly accusations. … It is to be hoped that in one case a clearer and more than truthful motion-picture show of him emerges, the theory of social activity will gain greater moral approval…" (2014: xix).

A prime example of a misleading label concerns structural-functionalism and the unshakable conviction that Talcott Parsons was its inventor and foremost representative. The historical fact is that in that location was but a curt period in the early 1950s where Parsons situated himself in the broader current of this methodological position developed and held by a group of anthropologists, ethnologists and sociologists. He later argued against the linking of construction and part and explicitly did not want to be subsumed under the characterization of structural-functionalism. However, it was all in vain. Neither reminders on the historical facts nor Parsons' ain protest sufficed to change the critics' conventionalities.

Another claim against all evidence, with resulting attacks spanning over decades, is that Parsons did not and could not deal with societal change after he had written several books and a considerable number of essays on the dynamics of societies and later he had analyzed major evolutionary and revolutionary changes in a more elaborate and refined way than those who could only brand out harmony, integration and equilibrium in Parsons' writings. ^{Footnote 3} The reason, as we will argue with the case of C.Due west. Mills, lies in a specific understanding of conflict, domination and social modify inherited from materialistic positions of nineteenth century thought.

These misrepresentations of Parsons' standpoints discover their continuation in the widespread opinion of the incompatibility of theory developments carried out by some of Parsons' students. Harold Garfinkel or Clifford Geertz, for case, were favorably received at their time and upwardly to contemporary folklore. They are presented as Parsons' irreconcilable opponents which is against the facts and against explicit statements, by both Parsons and his famed students. Recently, Anne Rawls published an illuminating manuscript written past Garfinkel in the late 1950ies and early 1960s which Garfinkel had used in his courses. The volume entitled Parsons Primer (2019) displays the deep understanding and appreciation Garfinkel had for his teacher. He makes clear that he had learned the key significant of interaction for civilisation and social systems in collaborations with Talcott Parsons, which led him to develop what became known every bit ethnomethodology (due south. Rawls and Turowetz 2019). Parsons' critics finer could establish the conventionalities of an utter opposition between Garfinkel and Parsons. Anne Rawls and her collaborator Jason Turowetz sum it upwards: "Nosotros argue that these criticisms practice non target Parsons' bodily position, but a misinterpretation of information technology popularized in the 1940's and 1950'due south and later criticized in the 1960'south and 1970's." (Turowetz and Rawls forthcoming) They conclude: "… the version of Parsons these approaches oppose is a strawman."

This means that there is Talcott Parsons and then at that place is, allow'southward say, a persistent narrative most Talcott Parsons which is simply remotely related to the "original". C. Wright Mills was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the establishment of such a narrative. It is this decisive role in creating a distorted image of Talcott Parsons and what consequently turned into a kind of "ritualistic Parsons slaughter," every bit Roland Robertson expressed it aptly, that makes information technology worthwhile looking into how Mills perceived and judged Parsons' work, how he drew his conclusions and, conclusively, why his writings resonated so well with the intellectual climate of the time and fifty-fifty with contemporary sociology. ^{Footnote 4}

Constructivist perspectives suggest that observations are dependent on the observational schemes used; the frames of reference, to put information technology in Parsonian terms. This view will serve u.s. as a starting point to explicate the specific approach Mills led to arrive at his judgments on Talcott Parsons past looking into the presuppositions of his own theory. Nosotros will at first reconstruct Mills' argument and afterward compare the relevant underlying concepts with the ones of Talcott Parsons.

Sociological Imagination: Promises and Disappointments

"The Promise" is the title of the kickoff chapter in The Sociological Imagination. What is the promise about, what part could sociology play and to whom is it addressed? The starting point is the exclamation that society is in a terrible state, haunted past unruly forces, past anarchy, and by alienation, to employ Mills' expressions. The problem, according to Mills, is not bars to American society, since history turned into earth history in the twentieth century. And Mills draws a dismal picture of ongoing developments: colonialism was replaced past less visible forms of imperialism, the majority of people notice themselves excluded from democratic processes, and democracy as such was transformed into mere formalistic procedures. "Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and violence become total in telescopic and bureaucratic in form." (1959: 4) And things might even plough worse: The powers are "concentrating … [their] … about coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Iii" (4) a danger on which Mills had published a book the year earlier (s. Mills 1958).

Individuals are the victims of such societal circumstances without being able to grasp the structural issues in which they are trapped. They feel individual fates, private troubles, but cannot perceive the "real" reasons behind them, which are the "public issues", i.east. the institutions and larger structures of social club that constrain the lives of individuals.

According to Mills, the solution is a new "quality of mind" called sociological imagination. It

"… enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its significant for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, oftentimes go falsely conscious of their social position." … "The sociological imagination enables usa to grasp history and biography and the relations between the 2 inside society. That is its chore and its promise." (Mills 1959: 5–6)

Permit's await into 1 of the examples Mills provided: the example of a failed marriage. Through the lens of a married person, most cases of divorce are undoubtedly troubling personal experiences. Empirical data accumulate these experiences to increasing divorce rates which have structural causes similar concomitantly rising unemployment rates. And then, a divorce appears as an individual problem simply is "in reality" a societal trouble and thus tin can only be resolved by changing the structures of society. "Tracing such linkages" … "is to possess the sociological imagination" (Mills 1959: 11). This instance gives a foretaste of Mills' sociological reductionism, i.east. his attribution of "real causal factors" to social club; a principle, which is a crucial starting signal of his critique of Parsons' theory of social systems.

Mills' ambitions thereby are in no fashion moderate. The claim is that sociological imagination is the intellectual mutual denominator of gimmicky cultural life (s. Mills 1959: 14), a world-view comparable to Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolution theory, which likewise represented the basic intellectual orientation in their time. Co-ordinate to Mills, it is the bones intention of his book to lead the social sciences into fulfilling this cultural task.

The social scientists, however, to the dismay of Mills, have followed quite different imaginations and taken different paths. In the eyes of Mills, some simply pursue the development of a "set of bureaucratic techniques" (Mills 1959: 20). In doing so, they distort the "existent" knowledge about society, which he calls bathetic empiricism, while "some – being addicts of the high ceremonial of theory – associate and disassociate concepts in what seems to others a curious manner" (Mills 1959: twenty) – all this in association with abstruse and static views. Although the first names Mills mentions hither are interestingly Georg Simmel and Leopold von Wiese, nosotros have finally arrived at the section entitled chiliad theory, a affiliate dedicated to a critique of Talcott Parsons.

"Grand Theory" and its Discontent

The vocabulary Mills uses to characterize Parsons' work is not very flattering: arid formalism, void phrase mongering, dislocated verbiage, endless elaboration of distinctions, drunk on syntax – blind to semantics, splitting of concepts and countless rearrangement; although nosotros could go on we want to stop hither. In a relatively sober formulation, "grand theory" is defined every bit "the associating and dissociating of concepts "(1959: 26).

Mills elaborates his objections to Parsons by scrutinizing mostly The Social System (1951). The subtitle of the book, which Mills does non mention anywhere, is: The Major Exposition of the Author's Conceptual Scheme for the Analysis of the Dynamics of the Social Organization. The publication includes two chapters exclusively dedicated to the dynamic processes and processes of change in social systems. To exist able to judge Mills' verdict of the book in contrary, we need to keep the two claims expressed in the book championship in heed: firstly, the elaboration of a conceptual scheme (not the analysis of an empirical, historically given social system, an analysis of whatsoever societal state etc.) and secondly, a focus on the dynamics of social systems.

Before going into the specific objections of Mills against The Social Arrangement, we need to clarify the concept and role of theory in social sciences every bit such. Theory is one of the two pillars sociological research rests on, the other ane beingness methodology. There are two basic tasks or, I hesitate to say, "functions" of theory. The nearly important 1 is the construction of the basic concepts that give the subject area its identity. Allow's phone call it the a-priori office. Here, the founders of sociology had to overcome the "raw" and undifferentiated kind of everyday life-globe understanding of social phenomena and thus took upward the burdensome attempt of what sometimes appears to some immature sociology students as an "endless" arrangement of concepts. Max Weber's essay on "Basic Sociological Concepts", included in Economy and Club (2019 [1922]), is a conspicuous example thereof. The classical founders had to do so because commonsense life-earth concepts with their lack of composure soon lead to aporias, equally all undifferentiated concepts eventually consequence in defoliation. Thus, there are good reasons for splitting concepts and (re-)arranging them into a coherent arrangement. Talcott Parsons dedicated his first masterpiece, The Construction of Social Activity (1937), to the job of refining the theoretical traditions, precisely to overcome "barren" controversies over idealism and materialism and, closely related to the effect, reductionisms of all sorts. The increasing complexity of the theoretical system – and Parsons' further refinements led to an undoubtedly high degree of sophistication – is demanding, just the alternative is the regression into a pre-disciplinary social science guided by everyday life-world concepts and driven by mostly political calendar. Expressed with reference to Mills' words: sometimes information technology pays to concentrate on syntax, leaving semantics aside. The development of the field of study of semiotics illustrates this betoken.

Even so, Mills is totally correct in his assertion that "semantics" is indispensable afterwards all. This leads us to the 2nd meaning of sociological theory: its a-posteriori function. Based on well-defined concepts, as Emile Durkheim had demanded as the commencement and foremost dominion of sociological research (1982 [1895]), we now tin use them to empirically explore the social and cultural world. This eventually leads to "substantial" or "empirical" theories, like Weber's theory of modernity or Durkheim's theory of suicide, to name just two of the about prominent examples. These "concrete" applied theories are, equally Parsons repeatedly stated, the ultimate test and ultimate goal of whatsoever theoretical scheme.

The dividing line between Mills and Parsons in purely theoretical terms is the sophistication of the theoretical frame. Generally speaking, we can say that the complexity of a theory correlates with the possibility of differentiated cognition, or, using Factory's terminology: the more advanced the syntax of a linguistic communication, the more than options there are for semantics and consequently for thinking and for communicating. Insufficient conceptual differentiation leads to blindness in empirical terms, equally we have known always since Immanuel Kant'due south famous formulation. And Mills provides ample prove thereof in what he afterward calls a translation of Parsons into English.

Indeed, many experience that Parsons' formulations could be improved stylistically; even Parsons himself. However, Mills' translation did not make information technology easier to understand what Parsons had to say. Instead, it was a translation into his own thinking, the limitations of which led on the one hand to what Parsonians perceive as a distortion, the kind of simplified strawman edition Rawls and Turowetz described. Marx might have used the word phantasmagoria here. On the other manus, Mills' translation brought forth the sharp contrast between his fashion of thought and Parsons' theoretical organization. Or, put differently, Mills used Parsons' general theory of action as a sort of projection screen, somewhen making his own theoretical shortcomings visible.

Mills begins his argumentation with an extensive sample quote, his aim being that the readers would self-evidently perceive this as void phrase mongering. This quotation technique itself is somewhat questionable, as any small portion of text taken out of the context of a circuitous statement poses difficulties to readers. Besides such stylistic bug, however, the deviation lies in two concepts/conceptual differentiations completely alien to Mills' thinking: 1 is the double contingency of interaction, and the other the clear stardom and supposition of the structural independence of a personality, a social arrangement and a cultural system. This conceptual differentiation is indispensable for the understanding of the stability or instability of social systems.

The Hobbesian Problem of Anarchy

The famous expression "the Hobbesian problem of lodge" is rather misleading. What Hobbes tried to resolve in practical and in theoretical terms was not order, it was chaos. The question arose in the context of a highly disordered cultural and political state of affairs in seventeenth century England. Based on what we now call the utilitarian model, which assumes that humans "naturally" inherit egoism, causing "war of all against all" – as Hobbes had interpreted his observations at the fourth dimension – he saw the solution in a sovereign, an "accented" ruler who is able to control the situation in a way that everyone is better off when conforming with the government, the ways of which could ultimately only exist force. Such a view, however, covers only a very limited range of empirical cases. Luckily, humans are not hedonistic creatures triggered by situational pleasure or hurting causing factors. As social beings, they have not only egoistic impulses merely also altruistic ones; they orient themselves towards others and their expectations, as well equally committing themselves to social norms and cultural values, and then that Parsons, based on a more than realistic albeit complex model, could write: "The problem of order … thus focuses on the integration of the motivation of actors with the normative cultural standard which integrate the action organization…" (quoted in Mills 1959). While Mills, quite in line with Hobbes, perceived a kind of primordial opposition between social structure and individual agency, Parsons conspicuously identified the balancing mechanisms and pointed to common culture, norms, value orientations and shared symbols, all of which link individual motivations and social structure. This is by far non trivial. At least Mills did not seem to understand it. Information technology is important to stress that Parsons thereby identified the preconditions of social club, while explaining social disorder at the aforementioned time and to the aforementioned extent.

When Mills narrows his objection down to the assertion that "an establishment is a gear up of roles graded in authority" (1959: 30), implying that some assert their ability over others, he fully stands on the grounds of Hobbes' utilitarian model. Despite the fact that he is indeed right to draw attending to armies, factories or families – to take up Mills' own examples – where some exert force over others in the sense of the Hobbesian model, we would not have families, factories or armies if this were essentially the "normal" case. On the contrary, as Parsons would formulate later, deflationary forms of authority, the regression to means of force, lead to unstable situations. The minimum conceptual differentiation necessary to see the problem is the structural independence of individuals with their need dispositions, of culture and of social institutional structures. This is the basis of a theory of the dynamics of social systems that is anything but static, as Mills erroneously concluded. Mills should take taken the Parsons-quotes he himself had selected for his affiliate to heart:

"That the stability of whatever social system … is dependent on a degree of such integration may be said to be the primal dynamic theorem of sociology. It is the major point of reference for all assay which may claim to be a dynamic analysis of social process." (Parsons in Mills 1959: thirty–31)

Since Mills interpreted this quote from the perspective of his societal force versus individual fate distinction, it appeared to him as if Parsons demanded conformity to societal rules from individuals, in order to give the social organisation unchangeable stability. The entire declared "over-socialized man" model (Incorrect 1961) in Parsons' theory is based on such a misreading. Nevertheless, it was not meant this way. An unprejudiced reading of The Social System would have fabricated clear that the relationship between order and individuals is a co-evolutionary one in which mutual adaptation, for which Parsons used the word integration, is a major cistron in the dynamics of action systems. And then Mills' exclamation that "no explicit pregnant is lost" in what he called his "straightforward translation" (p. 31) of parts of The Social System into English has departed far from the text's actual stated intention. And so is his conclusion that Parsons is unable to explain disequilibrium and social change in empirical terms.

The Self-Reference Paradox of Mills' Sociological Imagination

From a political perspective, a sociological imagination is extremely express if it but attributes the causes of "individual troubles" to the structure of lodge. Who would be able to make the desired changes, the reforms or maybe fifty-fifty revolutions? This exposes a cocky-reference paradox that is well known from all materialistic theories oscillating between the thought that humans are the product and thus mere victims of circumstances, while at the aforementioned time demanding political activeness from exactly these "products". In the end, such a model requires a deus ex machina, or, in the words of Mills, "a prophet that comes in from a desert".

In line with Mills, intellectuals at the time tried to outdo each other in attributing the discontents of life – of alienation – to some exteriorly conceptualized gild or some concrete or generalized "other". Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom Mills had close contact, ^{Footnote five} epitomized it with the famous dictum: "Hell is other people". An upright sociological imaginative heed immediately sees the self-reference outcome associated with this proffer because it merely tin can be truthful if an individual, allow's telephone call her/him ego, is ready absolute. From an individual perspective, this might announced as fully accurate but for a sociological observer, information technology is clear that ego and alter perspectives are interchangeable. Therefore, ego must conclusively be hell for change in contrary, and the ultimate conclusion then is that ego is hell for her/himself, which at times comes closer to the truth anyway. Even so, the fallacy lies in the theoretical model on which the contention is based with its lack of differentiation. For it might also be true that "sky is other people", ultimately making information technology an empirical question, whether the one or the other is the example or some state in between which is, in the long run, the normality. This is just some other example that the sheer "endless elaboration of distinctions" (Mills 33) bears fruits at times, as without the distinctions 1 is stuck in a one-sided and often improbable dismal moving-picture show of reality.

The self-reference issue in Mills' case gets even worse when we consider what happens if this prophet finds followers and gains power – power and potency the manner it was defined beforehand. Hobbes' conclusion was clear: the solution is an accented sovereign who rules the people with the ever-nowadays strength as the base of operations of her/his power. A look into history teaches us that this really sometimes did happen with disastrous consequences. Given the theoretical bounds of Mills' theory, nosotros could never escape the ordeal of "unruly forces" and would be trapped in a choice between being ruled by capitalist power elites or a left-wing power government. All the same, at that place is adept reason to believe that the premises are wrong and that pursuing theoretical and applied alternatives is worthwhile.

Double Contingency

Closely associated with the consequence of a blind spot for self-reference in mechanistic thinking is the difference in Mills' and Parsons' conception of the most basic sociological concepts, those of communication and interaction. A mechanistic understanding, as is common in everyday life, attributes the causality to i side of the individuals involved in these processes. In communication, the "sender" of information ordinarily bears the burden of causality. As for the case of interaction, the one who "wants" or "demands" something is thus deemed "dominating" or "superordinate" over the one who gives something or provides a service. The result is a splitting of the mutuality of communication and interaction into i-way units which in summation is taken as the whole communication or interaction procedure. Such an understanding misses the systemic quality of social processes for which Parsons coined the term double contingency, a functional source for an emerging common culture. It is implied that both sides are "to the same extent" causally involved. Ordered and "successful" communication and interaction processes are – equally the concept has information technology – contingent on both or all sides involved and thus could not occur otherwise. "To the aforementioned extent" only means that they are both indispensable conditions for the interaction to occur and thus a quantification of the extent of the causality makes no sense.

Georg Simmel's concept of social interaction, literally translated every bit "social mutuality of crusade and effect" (soziale Wechselwirkung) precisely captures this signal. That is why he came to the same conclusions; e.g. in his essay on domination and subordination [1908] he argues that a mechanistic understanding erroneously attributes the causality in such relationship types to the apparently dominating function. The expression "apparently dominating" refers to the fact that information technology oft cannot be decided if someone is in a dominating or sub-ordinate position. For example, journalists exert influence on the audience and at the same time try to write what the audience wants to hear to be successful. In the more than abstract conception of Talcott Parsons it reads: "What are expectations to ego are sanctions to alter and vice versa" (1951: 40). Such an insight into the mutuality in interaction is completely alien to Mills and this might explain why he aligns Simmel with Parsons in the k theory chapter. His assessments of the conditions of club brandish a strict 1-way causality, particularly of socioeconomic and political processes.

Mills actually provides a quote that includes the term double contingency (1959: 25) just obviously did not see its relevance and thus paid no further attention to it in his "translation" endeavors. Again, the reason is obviously a blind spot based on Mills' blueprint of a sociological imagination.

Power

"Interaction" based on pure force is a limiting instance. Strictly speaking, it is not "inter"activeness at all but action exerted past someone on some other, only contingent on the person having the means of strength. Unfortunately, this occurs from time to fourth dimension but to generalize such cases every bit being the essential form of interaction in modern society is far from reality. This also applies to interaction in connexion with political goals. Hither nosotros have the most obvious opposition of Mills confronting Parsons, which crystallizes around the concept of power.

A first divergence lies in Mills' conceptualization of power as a means for some to pursue cocky-interested goals over others, while Parsons conceptualized power as a medium for the attainment of commonage goals, a functional trouble that needs to exist resolved in all social systems. The basic issue is consensus, not on the specific conclusion but on the legitimacy of the decision, for which the circulation of power equally a symbolic medium is a decisive prerequisite (s. Lidz and Staubmann 2020). It is clear from the onset that these definitions of power are incompatible. For Mills information technology is a matter of a one-sided exertion of the will of some on others, for Parsons it is a phenomenon anchored in the mutuality of interaction.

A consequence of the mutuality is that it creates an overall surplus then that the gain of one party does not equal some other's loss. The motive to appoint in an economic commutation is the expectation on both sides to have more afterwards and the aforementioned is valid for other types of interaction, e.g. in commonage determination making. In all such cases, interaction does not equal a zero-sum game. Parsons explicitly referred to Mills in his essay on ability, ^{Footnote 6} to signal out the difference:

"The dominant tendency in the literature, for example in … C. Wright Mills, is to maintain explicitly or implicitly that power is a zippo-sum phenomenon, which is to say that in that location is a fixed 'quantity' of power in any relational arrangement and hence any gain of power on the part of A must by definition occur by diminishing the power on the office of other units, B, C, D,… There are, of course, restricted contexts in which this condition holds, only I shall debate that it does non hold for total systems of a sufficient level of complexity." (1969: 353)

Such a conceptualization of ability every bit a generalized symbolic medium of advice and interchange does not mean to neglect many of the issues Mills refers to. There indeed is bear witness of forceful domination occurring in circuitous societies, much of which is actually deemed deviant or criminal behavior. Still, these problems would exist unresolvable if interaction were essentially one-sided and a zero-sum process. Marx was theoretically consistent in that he suggested reversing the "unruly force" of the suburbia into a dictatorship of the proletariat, but since the times When Marx Mattered (Bershady 2016), history suggests to better pursue other solutions. As Parsons wrote in a personal history, he held the view that it could no longer be a thing of the substitution of the capitalist pursuit of cocky-interest by a "rigidly centralized control by government in the public interest". The overcoming of "the rigid capitalistic – socialistic dichotomy" (Parsons 1977: 57) is possible on the basis of a broadening of a sociological imagination by taking other factors into account, such as voluntary associations, normative structures linked to cultural values and constitutive-religious beliefs.

Parsons especially emphasized what Durkheim had chosen solidarity, its "melancholia grounding … in the motivational attachment of individuals to roles, to the collectivities in which they participate, and to their fellow members" (1977: 57). In dissimilarity, for Marx and his followers, solidarity was clearly a utilitarian concept where people unite based on the same cocky-interest, as they share similar social conditions and status, but merely if they plow from a class in itself to a form for itself, which once again requires some external political agency.

Another feature associated with the cypher-sum suggestion for commutation in Mills' sociological imagination is the equation of power "with all forms of chapters to gain ends" (Parsons 1969: 297). If all give and accept were a zero-sum phenomenon, so indeed it would non matter if a "transaction" were based on force or love or religious behavior. In each of these cases it would hateful the exploitation and subjugation of i person, or group of persons, by some other. The ability to admit altruistic affective attachments, which in larger social systems lead to solidarity in Durkheim'southward sense, is continued with differentiations for the description of forms of substitution. Parsons' media theory discerns specific media for what he called subsystems of the social system and of the general action organisation. This conceptual refinement is indispensable, to run into the difference in whether the goals in interaction are reached by threatening the other person, by like-minded consensually on common goals, by offering money, or past highly-seasoned to their solidarity, responsibility and shared values. Mills, as his fellows in "disquisitional theory", conclusively "deconstructs" all these different means equally "in reality" equaling "in the last case" tearing ways of power. This becomes particularly clear in the passages Mills wrote on "the symbol sphere".

To sum up, the differences of Parsons' concept of power in dissimilarity to Mills' can be cleaved down into iii cardinal points: 1) power is a discrete mechanism unlike from money and influence and embedded in dissimilar institutions; 2) power has the potential for transcending nada-sum relations; and iii) power is a facility or ways of commonage goal attainment, not just a way of securing personal interests.

"Symbol Spheres": Culture equally Mere Legitimation of Domination?

The utilitarian power concept Mills advocates is continued in his judgments on civilisation, "the symbolic sphere", every bit he calls it, with its "alleged autonomy" (1959: 36). Consequently, for Mills, values and normative structures are the "chief symbols of legitimation" of domination. Culture is simply used by "those in authority" to justify their rule.

"Such symbols … do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of ability and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful…" (1959: 37)

For Parsons, in contrast, orientation towards culture as such plays an of import role for the understanding of the structures of social systems. He understood information technology equally a differentiated subsystem with moral-evaluative culture every bit having a special importance for social normative order. Structural units, such every bit roles and institutions, integrate interactional expectations with cultural patterns. This is the case in such diverse areas as the institution of individual property or the institution of marriage. The result is the emergence of social norms for concomitant interactions. These cultural and normative references suggest a dynamic in social systems independent of coercion, since commitments to civilization and sensitivity towards the attitudes of others are decisive principles when engaging in interaction. This is the basis of Parsons' assertion that there is a cultural component inherent in every interaction, implying that there are powers in human life, which are entirely singled-out from any pursuit of egoistic interests and striving for domination.

To contest this insight, Mills attacks the idea of the cultural quality of institutions. For him, social structures defined in this way obscure their "real" significant: "The result, I think, is to transform, past definition, all institutional structures into …. what has been called 'the symbol sphere'. "(1959: 36) And this symbol sphere serves no other purpose than the justification of authority and power, eastward.thousand. in the cases of "widely believed-in moral symbols, sacred emblems … god or gods … 'vote of the majority'" etc. Capitalists, according to Mills, utilize such ideas to disguise their self-interest – since "the former self-interest motives and reasons may pb to guilt or at least to uneasiness among capitalists" (36–37). Conclusively, Parsons' "value-orientations and normative construction has mainly to practice with principal symbols of legitimation."

The provided quotes include the curiosity that a "vote of the bulk" is deemed equally mere means of the rule of authorities. Even if from time to time 1 hates the upshot of such majority votes, the question is what an culling would look like. A comprehensive sociological imagination only brings upwardly scary scenarios.

Also such open up republic deficit issues, Mills' view on the part of culture in society comes down to a rough form of functionalism. Hither, once again, nosotros come beyond a paradox still living on in the context of what now is called cultural sociology. ^{Footnote seven} In line with Mills, a broad current of "critical" thought criticizes functionalism in abstract terms and at the same time adheres to a reductionist functionalist interpretation of culture as "in the last instance" serving economic and political interests. Culture is oft directly equaled with economic capital and ability, and a plethora of cultural studies outbid each other in "deconstructing" cultural preferences and activities, as motivated by the pursuit of economic self-interests.

The result is a bullheaded spot for i of the virtually powerful phenomena in private and in social life, namely the contents and forms of civilisation every bit such. Civilisation tin can indeed be used for all sorts of purposes, no doubtfulness likewise for the ones Mills pays attention to, which I have suggested be called the "heteronomous function" of culture (Staubmann 2005). Still, much more important, both for individuals and for society, is the role culture plays as such, its "autonomous part". A specification of the latter for social systems theory is the idea of the fiduciary part of a subsystem, the roles and institutions responsible for the preservation and furtherance of culture. Parsons' and Platt's study on the American university system (1973) shows how rational culture interpenetrates with all parts of what Parsons calls the general actions organisation, the enormous meaning of rational noesis and values for social and private life and even for an overall characterization of modern society.

Mills' repudiation of the democratic role of civilization leads him to deny that social structures are inherently too cultural phenomena. He repudiates Parsons' social structures concept but does not explicitly ascertain what he calls "the structural features of human society" anywhere. We can only guess when he refers to a "set of institutions" that "controls the total lodge and superimposes its values by violence and the threat of violence" (1959: 39). This reminds 1 of a number of totalitarian communist states, which Mills most probable did not have in mind. However, even in these cases, sheer violence would non exist sufficient to explain their temporal stability.

Disharmonize and Social Modify

Given Parsons' extensive writings on social and cultural change, the persistent narrative of his lack and incapability to bargain with the outcome is stunning. Here again information technology is a affair of undifferentiated conceptions that account for a distorted perception of his work, one of which is the a-priori linking of social change with conflict. In Mills' words it reads: "The magical elimination of disharmonize, and the wondrous achievement of harmony, … remove from this 'systematic' and 'full general' theory the possibility of dealing with social change …" (1957: 42). Such a "conflict perspective" – every bit it is called – is limited past the fact that disharmonize and change are "contained variables".

With the help of Parsons' theory technique of crosscutting such variables, nosotros get a fourfold table in which, let's say, the rows represent the presence and absence of conflict and the columns show the presence and absence of social change. In assessing the 4 fields of our table with empirical/historical data, nosotros realize that the presence of disharmonize in no way necessarily induces social alter. On the opposite, a certain level of conflicts is a prerequisite of a stable social system. Niklas Luhmann, one of Parsons' most accomplished students, even saw conflicts as a sort of immune system that prevents social systems from falling apart, thus contributing to their immovability. Expressed in Parsonian terms, conflicts are, to a degree, indispensable for the homeostasis of social systems. In proceeding to the next field of our fourfold scheme, we sometimes find that conflict indeed may lead to social change, which Parsons best-selling in his writings accordingly.

Finally, we accept the important cases where social alter occurs without being induced by whatsoever conflict at all. Historically, this is especially the case with cultural innovations that influence social structures and processes. To proper name 1 instance, there is vast literature on the far-reaching impact of the invention of the internet and concomitant technologies on the change of advice and interaction patterns, both on the macro level also equally on the micro level. These technologies are, in turn, based on prior scientific innovations that, at the time of their invention, appeared to have no businesslike use at all, for example the binary algebra George Boole had elaborated.

Within the complexity of Parsons' general theory of action, we can conclude that any part of the general action system may induce social modify. Social conflict is neither a sufficient nor a necessary status for social change.

Conclusion

In ane of his first publications, Talcott Parsons wrote that distortions in the characterization of society are rooted "in the isolation of one attribute of social evolution" (1991 [1928]: 35). Some 50 years later, in looking back to his achievements and the challenges he had to face, he summarized: "A big function of the hierarchy – power preoccupation of then much generalized social thought of the concluding century or so I attribute to ideological factors." (1977 [1970]: 57). In between, he dedicated his life to overcoming ideological i-sidedness and reductionism of all sorts in human sciences, which he accomplished by theoretical syntheses and conceptual differentiations. The result is a highly complex multi-dimensional "frame of reference" for achieving empirical knowledge of society.

In his review of Mills' The Ability Elite, Parsons started his argument on the shortcomings of Mills' analysis by stressing the importance of such differentiated "technical theoretical schemes" (1956: 124) in society to forestall "ideological distortion" (125) in the interpretation of empirical data. Mills' interpretation of Parsons as a chiliad theorist is an ideological distortion, in this sense grounded in a deficient theoretical scheme he charmingly had called the sociological imagination.

The "prophet who came in from a desert" found many followers. His polemical writing style resonated well with the emerging political civilisation with its predilection for "style over substance, outrage over objectivity…" (Goertzel 1989: 244–5). His theoretical core displays a close affinity to the theories of the stylites of contemporary folklore, such as Pierre Bourdieu or Michelle Foucault. Seymour Martin Lipset, in his essay on the state of American folklore, elaborated on the thesis "that the parlous country of sociology … (is) related to its vulnerability to politicization" (1994: 199). What he manifestly referred to was non the political utilise of sociological knowledge simply the usurpation of the sociological imagination by political interests. Perhaps political agendas do require simplifications, such equally the isolation of specific goals for their effective pursuit. Nevertheless, imposing the simplifications and concomitant restraints on scholarly reasoning leads to its plummet. For the tree of knowledge does not resemble an upright sailing mast, merely rather a widely ramified plant that requires abundant free infinite for further growth. It will be one of the virtually of import criteria for any hereafter sociological imagination to procure such a prospect.

Notes

1. In March of 2018, Kathryn Mills, daughter of C. Westward. Mills, gave a lecture at the Academy of Innsbruck in which she talked about details of her and her family's time in Innsbruck, Republic of austria. According to her, large parts of the manuscript of The Sociological Imagination were written hither during a difficult familial situation (s. K. Mills 2018; Staubmann and Treviño 2018). Having Kate Mills as a guest in my department was a great laurels and touching experience. Since then, we have maintained a cordial exchange and friendship.

2. Talcott Parsons, in "The Distribution of Ability in American Society" (first published in 1957), had written a profound critique of Mills' The Power Aristocracy well before Mills critiqued his work in The Sociological Imagination.

3. A expert example is Parsons' business organization with the political situation in Germany, particularly the rise of National Socialism as documented by the essays "Republic and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany" and "Some Sociological Aspects of Fascist Movements" included in Essays in Sociological Theory (1949, first edition) along with other essays dealing with social change and conflict like "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change", "Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World", or "Social Classes and Class Conflict in the Lite of Recent Sociological Theory". Furthermore, Parsons served equally scientific advisor for the Council of Democracy, voicing concern nearly changes in Federal republic of germany as well equally in Nippon towards post-war democracy.

4. There are more than sophisticated critiques of Parsons'work, that would exist worthwhile responding to, simply information technology was precisely Mills' bold style that resonated well and thus contributed more than effectively to the distortion of Parsons' image.

5. In particular, they shared a common interest in the Cuban revolution. In the summer of 1961 Mills met with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris (s. Treviño 2017: ix and Thou. Mills 333f). A review of Beauvoir's 2d Sex past Mills appeared posthumously under the title "Women: The Darling Little Slaves". (s. K. Mills 333)

6. Talcott Parsons' famous essay "On the Concept of Political Ability" appeared at first in 1963, a twelvemonth after C. W. Mills had died and Parsons' review of The Power Elite appeared the same year as The Sociological Imagination. Therefore, the quoted references of Mills to Parsons and vice versa cannot be interpreted as an substitution between the two. The section on power in this essay is intended as a reconstruction of their opposing views and their critique of each other.

7. Similarly, Lidz' critique of the strong program of cultural sociology (2019).

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Acknowledgements

I desire to thank Victor M. Lidz, Lawrence T. Nichols, A. Javier Treviño, Bruce C. Wearne, and two anonymous reviewers for their critique and helpful comments on a prior version of this essay.

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   Helmut Staubmann

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Correspondence to Helmut Staubmann.

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Staubmann, H. C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination and the Construction of Talcott Parsons as a Bourgeois Grand Theorist. Am Soc 52, 178–193 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09463-z

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• Accepted: 25 September 2020

• Published: 10 October 2020

• Effect Date: March 2021

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09463-z

Keywords

• Conflict
• History of sociology
• Philosophy of the social sciences
• Power
• Social theory

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