On Teasing out Sociology from Economics: A Brief Note on Parsons and Schumpeter

At several points in his 1973 Brown Seminar, Parsons mentions events and people that may help us to get a better understanding of his life and work. This is also true, on a minor scale, for his relationship to Joseph Schumpeter, his colleague and (distant) friend at Harvard for some 20 years. One of Parsons's comments on Schumpeter has a broader bearing for economic sociology; and this is another reason for this brief comment. Let me begin by telling what sources other than the Brown Seminar tell us about the relationship between Parsons and Schumpeter. Parsons was an instructor at the Economics Department at Harvard when Schumpeter first arrived. The meeting with the Austrian economist was of great importance to Parsons's intellectual development: "For some years, " Parsons also confirmed in a letter, "I stood rather close to the conception of pure economics which I first learned from Schumpeter" (Parsons 1941). Schumpeter was one of the original reviewers of Parsons's famous work The Structure of Social Action (1937). In his report to the Committee on Research in the Social Sciences, which had funded part of Parsons's research, Schumpeter wrote, tongue in cheek: "The author has in fact so deeply penetrated into the German thicket as to lose in some places the faculty of writing clearly in English about it, and some turns of phrase become fully understandable only if translated into German" (Swedberg 1991: 221). There were at least two more points at which Parsons and Schumpeter intersected. The first of these was at a seminar on rationality that Schumpeter organized at Harvard in 1939-1940; and the second was in 1948, when Schumpeter was the president of the American Economic Association. The story of Schumpeter's seminar on rationality at Harvard, in which Parsons participated, still remains to be written (e.g., Swedberg 1991: 279; Schumpeter 2000: 324). In the meantime, the following can be said. Schumpeter's decision to have a Seminar on Rationality in the Social Sciences (as it was called) was triggered in 1939 by a paper on rationality by Chester Barnard. The participants came primarily from different departments at Harvard, and it is clear that Schumpeter wanted an interdisciplinary group. The members included Parsons, Wilbert E. Moore (sociology), David McGrannahan (psychology), Gottfried Haberler (economics), Wassily Leontief (economics), and Paul Sweezy (economics). There were about 10 meetings, starting in October 1939 and ending in April 1940. An attempt to put together a book from the papers that were presented at the seminar failed, partly because Parsons, who had been appointed co-editor by Schumpeter, lost interest. "In fact I let it die, " he later would put it (Parsons 1970: 834). Schumpeter's paper from the seminar, it may be added, was many years later published as "The Meaning of Rationality in the Social Sciences" (Schumpeter 1991: 316-338). Parsons's paper, on the other hand, remains unpublished as far as I know. It was entitled "An Approach to the Analysis of the Role of Rationality in Social Action" and was nine pages long. The last scholarly interaction between Parsons and Schumpeter probably took place in 1948, when Schumpeter was president of the American Economic Association. Schumpeter was very interested in improving the relationship between economics and the other social sciences, including sociology. The result was a number of joint sessions at the annual meeting that took place in December 1948 in Cleveland, Ohio. There was, for example, a roundtable in commemoration of the centenary of the Communist Manifesto ("The Sociology and Economics of Class Struggle"), in which Parsons participated (e. …