Working through Contradictions: Parsons and the Harvard Intellectual Community during the Late 60s and Early 70s
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Working through Contradictions: Parsons and the Harvard Intellectual Community during the Late 60s and Early 70s Mark Gould 1 Accepted: 8 October 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper illuminates, in a discussion of my relationship with him, how Talcott Parsons acted out his commitment to the values of cognitive rationality, how he implemented those values when working with students who did not share his liberal politics. I illustrate how students may learn not only from divergences in perspective with one professor, but also from the contradictions between their teachers’s work. There are two contentions here. One concerns the importance of professors encouraging students to encounter points-of-view divergent from the professor’s viewpoint, and then the significance of supporting them when they do so. This is possible only when the values of cognitive rationality regulate activity within a university setting. I illustrate these contentions in a discussion of my work with the political sociologist, Barrington Moore, Jr., the economic theorist, Kenneth Arrow, and the political philosopher, Judith Shklar, each of whose work diverged greatly from Parsons’s theoretical perspective. Lastly, I contend that an understanding of our teachers’s work is manifest in our extension of it, not in criticisms of their ideas, their texts. I show how this was the case in my own work. Keywords Cognitive rationality . Talcott Parsons . Barrington Moore Jr. . Kenneth Arrow .
Judith Shklar This paper derives from a request I received to write a paper about Talcott Parsons’s relationship with the student movement of the 1960s and 70s. I had no desire to revisit Parsons’s academic writings about either the university or the student movement; it seemed to me that doing so would not get to the question implicit in the request, what I took to be an inquiry into how Parsons functioned within the university. I suggested, instead, a characterization of my relationship with Parsons; this made sense because I * Mark Gould [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041, USA
The American Sociologist
had been Parsons’s graduate student during this period, because my politics during this period were left-wing, and because, in writing more personally, I might be able to illuminate how Parsons acted out his commitment to what he called the values of cognitive rationality, how he implemented those values when working with students who did not share his liberal politics. I decided to expand my narrative a bit to discuss three of my other Harvard teachers, three others with whom I worked very closely: the political sociologist, Barrington Moore, Jr., the economic theorist, Kenneth Arrow, and the political philosopher, Judith Shklar. This will enable me to illustrate how students may learn not only from divergences in perspective with one professor, but also from the contradictions between their teachers’s work. There are two contentions here. One concern
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