Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Social order is synonymous with both society and social science. People do not regularly live in chaos, even when they are the denizens of postmodern societies that characteristically exacerbate the already chaotic tempo bequeathed by modernity. Regardless of whether it is edifying to accept, ritual and routine, not rebellion and revolution, absorb the lion's share of everyday energies. Likewise, apart from whether society is conceived theoretically as organism or system, language game or mode of production, interaction ritual or ethereal spectacle, the essential notion of “society” is scientifically and practically meaningful only when it refers to routinely observable phenomena about which lasting statements are possible. Without social order, social science would dissolve into the ephemeral study of ephemerality. Probably no figure in the history of sociology more clearly represents the concern for theorizing the practical achievement of social order than Talcott Parsons. Parsons self-consciously built an integrated theory of social order through synthesis of previous ambitious attempts to grasp the totality of human society, including via the work of Herbert Spencer, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, Alfred Marshall, and Max Weber. Indeed, the last four are the principal subjects of Parsons's classic The Structure of Social Action (1937), which he famously inaugurated with ... log in or subscribe to read full text