On the Psychosociology of Knowledge: A Case of Disciplinary Omphaloskepsis

In this second of his four volume series on "The Social Origins of Western Social Theory," Gouldner proposes a unique formulation of and inquiry into the sociology of social theory in the immediate present and future in contrast to his concern with the ancient past in the earlier Enter Plato. This latest work provides a distinctive type of sociological analysis of the origins, tacit assumptions, and decline of (Parsonsian) structural functionalism, the profound implications of which constitute the impending crisis alluded to in the title. Parts Two and Three are the core of the study. The former is concerned with the explanation of the rise and characteristics of Parsons' theory and the latter with its decline. The chapters of Part Two describe Parsons' more immediate social and intellectual contexts; examine the assumptions about the essential wholeness and unity of social reality, system and system analysis, interdependence, moral codes, the self, and a series of equilibrium problems associated with conformity-deviance; consider Parsons' views on religion, morality, and order; and probe his notions of power and prestige. In the chapters of Part Three, Gouldner presents the shift to the welfare state as a contextual change at variance with the assumptions of functionalism, the appearance of different formulations within the functionalist orientation as evidence of efforts to adapt to changing crircumstances; indications of disaffection of sociologists from functionalism, the emergence of competing theoretical formulations; a cataloguing of conservative similarities between Parsons and Plato suggesting the perduring viability of the functionalist assumptions; and finally a survey of the emerging crisis in Russian and satellite Marxism, the appearance of an academic sociology in the U.S.S.R. and allied nations, and the possible bases of a convergence with functionalism. However, Part One is indispensable to an understanding of the distinctive type of sociological analysis of Parsonsian structural functionalism the author undertakes in the subsequent sections of his volume. He is preoccupied with inferring and explaining Parsons' unacknowledged, implicit, or tacit assumptions. To the extent that they are limited to members of a single field or realm, they are designated "domain assumptions." Gouldner asserts that domain assumptions are "resonated by" a set of sentiments and associated with a personalized notion or sense of reality and thus explanation of the former should begin in terms of the latter (two). Together, the domain assumptions, sentiments, and sense of what is real comprise the infrastructure of a theory and mediate "between 6ocial theories and other parts of the social world" (p. 404). The emergence and subsequent fate of a theory are thus conceived to depend both more narrowly on the character of its domain assumptions and the sentiments evoked and the personal experiences of reality aroused in the theorist and his audiences and more broadly on the nature of the larger social and cultural settings (which Gouldner does not systematically consider, delineate, or classify). As an initial study in the sociology of social theory, Gouldner's volume has both its commendable merits and regrettable faults. Certainly, the significance of its problem, the com-