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Agon (Greek ἀγών) is a Greek term for a conflict, struggle or contest. This could be a contest in athletics, in chariot or horse racing, or in music or literature at a public festival in ancient Greece. Agon is the word-forming element in 'agony', explaining the concept of agon(y) in tragedy by its fundamental characte... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
In one sense, agon meant a contest or a competition in athletics, for example, the Olympic Games (Ὀλυμπιακοὶ Ἀγῶνες). Agon was also a mythological personification of the contests listed above. This god was represented in a statue at Olympia with halteres (dumbbells) (ἁλτῆρες) in his hands. This statue was a work of Dio... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
According to Pausanias, Agon was recognized in the Greek world as a deity, whose statue appeared at Olympia, presumably in connection with the Olympic Games, which operated as both religious festival in honor of Zeus and athletic competition. Agon is, perhaps, more of a spirit than a god in Greek mythology, but was und... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
In Ancient Greek drama, particularly Old Comedy (fifth century B.C. ), agon refers to a contest or debate between two characters - the protagonist and the antagonist - in the highly structured Classical tragedies and dramas. The agon could also develop between an actor and the choir or between two actors with half of t... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
In 1948, Lincoln Kirstein posed the idea of a ballet that would later become known as Agon. After ten years of work before Agon's premiere, it became the final ballet in a series of collaborations between choreographer George Balanchine and composer Igor Stravinsky. Balanchine referred to this ballet as "the most perfe... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
Harold Bloom in The Western Canon uses the term agon to refer to the attempt by a writer to resolve an intellectual conflict between his ideas and the ideas of an influential predecessor in which "the larger swallows the smaller", such as in chapter 18, Joyce's agon with Shakespeare. In "Man, Play, and Games" Roger Cai... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
In sociopolitical theory, agon can refer to the idea that the clash of opposing forces necessarily results in growth and progress. The concept, known as agonism, has been proposed most explicitly by a number of scholars, including William E. Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Claudio Colaguori, but is also implicitly present ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
Words derived from agon include agony, agonism, antagonism, and protagonist. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon |
San Mai (Japanese: 三枚, Hepburn: sanmai), in the context of metal blade construction/metalwork, refers to a knife, blade or sword that has the hard steel hagane forming the blade's edge, and the iron/stainless forming a jacket on both sides. It is also the term used to refer to the technique used to create these blades. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_mai |
"San mai" roughly translates as three flat things, in Japanese (San=three Mai=unit counter for flat objects). The term, and its root honsanmai, has been used to describe that construction method for many hundreds of years, from around 1300 A.D. It refers to when three layers of steel are used. The center is hard, and t... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_mai |
In stainless versions, this technique offers a practical and visible advantage of a superb cutting edge of modern Japanese knife steel, with a corrosion-resistant exterior. In professional Japanese kitchens, the edge is kept free of corrosion and knives are generally sharpened on a daily basis. Corrosion can be avoided... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_mai |
Technically, it is a style of lamination used for blade construction, commonly used on blades that have a symmetrical grind (i.e. the edges are ground down from both sides to expose the edge, which is composed of the inner core material. In Japan, traditionally the steel used for the outer layer is Gukunan-tetsu The te... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_mai |
Antun Bauer (Vukovar, 18 August 1911 – Zagreb, 8 April 2000) was a Yugoslav museologist and collector.He was born in Vukovar. He received a degree in history and archeology in Zagreb in 1935, where he also obtained his PhD in 1937. He served as the director of Gipsoteka (nowadays Gliptoteka HAZU) in 1937–1952, as the d... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antun_Bauer_(museologist) |
The collection "Bauer" is regarded as one of the most comprehensive collections of Croatian art of the 19th and the 20th century. He organized a number of important exhibitions (Zlato i srebro Zadra, "The Gold and Silver of Zadar") and launched numerous museum publications, having contributed to and edited proceedings ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antun_Bauer_(museologist) |
Chartjunk consists of all visual elements in charts and graphs that are not necessary to comprehend the information represented on the graph, or that distract the viewer from this information.Markings and visual elements can be called chartjunk if they are not part of the minimum set of visuals necessary to communicate... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
The term chartjunk was coined by Edward Tufte in his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Tufte wrote: The interior decoration of graphics generates a lot of ink that does not tell the viewer anything new. The purpose of decoration varies—to make the graphic appear more scientific and precise, to e... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
The term chartjunk was first coined by Edward Tufte in 1983. The book was developed based on ideas and materials developed for a Princeton statistics course that Tufte co-taught with John Tukey. As a self-published book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte claims that good design is founded in minimal... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
Tufte, through minimalist design principles, was committed to an objective and neutral values of science. Other researchers have argued that minimalism is not objective and is full of its own rhetoric and potential to bias. Tufte, in coining the term chartjunk, also made direct comments about a well-known designer at t... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
Nearly all those who produce graphics for mass publication are trained exclusively in the fine arts and have had little experience with the analysis of data. Such experiences are essential for achieving precision and grace in the presence of statistics... Those who get ahead are those who beautified data, never mind st... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
The term chartjunk is an umbrella term that can be used to describe a variety of visual devices and has been referenced by different terms across research. Stephen Few, a data visualization practitioner and consultant at Perceptual Edge, stated that Tufte's original definition of chartjunk was "too loose" and that "by ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
The information visualization research community has researched the effects of chartjunk on how viewers interpret visualizations. There have been studies that found that chartjunk increases long-term memorability of the chart. A recent study found that chartjunk, in the form of semantically meaningful icons, increased ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk |
Hilling, earthing up or ridging is the technique in agriculture and horticulture of piling soil up around the base of a plant. It can be done by hand (usually using a hoe), or with powered machinery, typically a tractor attachment. Hilling buries the normally above-ground part of the plant, promoting desired growth. Th... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilling |
A common application of hilling is for potatoes. The tubers grow just below the surface, and can produce chlorophyll and solanine if exposed to light (green potatoes). Solanine is toxic in large doses, and can result in nausea, headache, and in rare cases, death. By hilling one or more times during the growing season –... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilling |
In vineyards, at the beginning of the winter period: reduces the risk of damage by frost. Indeed, a heat gradient is formed by the thermal inertia of the earth. It is warmer inside the mound of soil. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilling |
facilitates the flow of water (which presence is important because of precipitation during winter). The evacuation can be done via grooves. destroys weeds. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilling |
Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the f... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. Based on empirical data, Parsons' social action theory was the first broad, systematic, and generalizable theory of social systems developed in the United States and Europe. Some of Parsons' largest contributions to sociol... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Their work heavily influenced Parsons' view and was the foundation for his social action theory. Parsons viewed voluntaristic action through the lens of the cultural values and social structures that constrain choices and ultimately determine all social actions, as opposed to actions that are determined based on intern... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
He was born on December 13, 1902, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863–1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863–1949). His father had attended Yale Divinity School, was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, and served first as a minister for a pioneer community in Greeley, Color... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
At the time of Parsons' birth, his father was a professor in English and vice-president at Colorado College. During his Congregational ministry in Greeley, Edward had become sympathetic to the Social Gospel movement but tended to view it from a higher theological position and was hostile to the ideology of socialism. A... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The father would later become the president of Marietta College in Ohio. Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history. His ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the 17th century. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The family's heritage had two separate and independently developed Parsons lines, both to the early days of American history deeper into British history. On his father's side, the family could be traced back to the Parsons of York, Maine. On his mother's side, the Ingersoll line was connected with Edwards and from Edwa... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
As an undergraduate, Parsons studied biology and philosophy at Amherst College and received his BA in 1924. Amherst College had become the Parsons' family college by tradition; his father and his uncle Frank had attended it, as had his elder brother, Charles Edward. Initially, Parsons was attracted to a career in medic... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Gently mocked as "Little Talcott, the gilded cherub," Parsons became one of the student leaders at Amherst. Parsons also took courses with Walton Hale Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Edwin Ayres, both known as "institutional economists". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Hamilton, in particular, drew Parsons toward social science. : 826 They exposed him to literature by authors such as Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and William Graham Sumner. Parsons also took a course with George Brown in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and a course in modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, w... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons showed from early on, a great interest in the topic of philosophy, which most likely was an echo of his father's great interest in theology in which tradition he had been profoundly socialized, a position unlike with his professors'. Two term papers that Parsons wrote as a student for Clarence E. Ayres's class ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The first was written on December 19, 1922, "The Theory of Human Behavior in its Individual and Social Aspects." The second was written on March 27, 1923, "A Behavioristic Conception of the Nature of Morals". The papers reveal Parsons' early interest in social evolution. The Amherst Papers also reveal that Parsons did ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
After Amherst, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year, where he was exposed to the work of Bronisław Malinowski, R. H. Tawney, L. T. Hobhouse, and Harold Laski. : 826 During his days at LSE, he made friends with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth, who all participated in the Malinow... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
At LSE he met Helen Bancroft Walker, a young American, and they married on April 30, 1927. The couple had three children: Anne, Charles, and Susan and eventually four grandchildren. Walker's father was born in Canada but had moved to the Boston area and later become an American citizen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In June, Parsons went on to the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in sociology and economics in 1927. At Heidelberg, he worked with Alfred Weber, Max Weber's brother; Edgar Salin, his dissertation adviser; Emil Lederer; and Karl Mannheim. He was examined on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by the philos... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons wrote his Dr. Phil. thesis on The Concept of Capitalism in the Recent German Literature, with his main focus on the work of Werner Sombart and Weber. It was clear from his discussion that he rejected Sombart's quasi-idealistic views and supported Weber's attempt to strike a balance between historicism, idealism... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The most crucial encounter for Parsons at Heidelberg was with the work of Max Weber about whom he had never heard before. Weber became tremendously important for Parsons because his upbringing with a liberal but strongly-religious father had made the question of the role of culture and religion in the basic processes o... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons decided to translate Weber's work into English and approached Marianne Weber, Weber's widow. Parsons would eventually translate several of Weber's works into English. His time in Heidelberg had him invited by Marianne Weber to "sociological teas", which were study group meetings that she held in the library roo... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
One scholar that Parsons met at Heidelberg who shared his enthusiasm for Weber was Alexander von Schelting. Parsons later wrote a review article on von Schelting's book on Weber. Generally, Parsons read extensively in religious literature, especially works focusing on the sociology of religion. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
One scholar who became especially important for Parsons was Ernst D. Troeltsch (1865–1923). Parsons also read widely on Calvinism. His reading included the work of Emile Doumerque, Eugéne Choisy, and Henri Hauser. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In 1927, after a year of teaching at Amherst (1926–1927), Parsons entered Harvard, as an instructor in the Economics Department, where he followed F. W. Taussig's lectures on economist Alfred Marshall and became friends with the economist historian Edwin Gay, the founder of Harvard Business School. Parsons also became ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
He looked for other options at Harvard and gave courses in "Social Ethics" and in the "Sociology of Religion". Although he entered Harvard through the Economics Department, his activities and his basic intellectual interest propelled him toward sociology. However, no Sociology Department existed during his first years ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The chance for a shift to sociology came in 1930, when Harvard's Sociology Department was created under Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin. Sorokin, who had fled the Russian Revolution from Russia in 1923, was given the opportunity to establish the department. Parsons became one of the new department's two instructors, al... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons became part of L. J. Henderson's famous Pareto study group, in which some of the most important intellectuals at Harvard participated, including Crane Brinton, George C. Homans, and Charles P. Curtis. Parsons wrote an article on Pareto's theory and later explained that he had adopted the concept of "social syst... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The relationship between Parsons and Sorokin turned sour. A pattern of personal tensions was aggravated by Sorokin's deep dislike for American civilization, which he regarded as a sensate culture that was in decline. Sorokin's writings became increasingly anti-scientistic in his later years, widening the gulf between h... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Sorokin also tended to belittle all sociology tendencies that differed from his own writings, and by 1934 was quite unpopular at Harvard. Some of Parsons' students in the department of sociology were people such as Robin Williams Jr., Robert K. Merton, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, Edward C. Devereux, Logan Wilson, Ni... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Later cohorts of students included Harry Johnson, Bernard Barber, Marion Levy and Jesse R. Pitts. Parsons established, at the students' request, a little, informal study group which met year after year in Adams' house. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Toward the end of Parsons' career, German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann also attended his lectures. In 1932, Parsons bought a farmhouse near the small town of Acworth, but Parsons often, in his writing, referred to it as "the farmhouse in Alstead". The farmhouse was not big and impressive; indeed, it was a very humbl... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Still, it became central to Parsons' life, and many of his most important works were written in its peace and quiet. In the spring of 1933, Susan Kingsbury, a pioneer of women's rights in America, offered Parsons a position at Bryn Mawr College; however, Parsons declined the offer because, as he wrote to Kingsbury, "ne... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In the discussion between neoclassical economics and the institutionalists, which was one of the conflicts that prevailed within the field of economics in the 1920s and early 1930s, Parsons attempted to walk a very fine line. He was very critical about neoclassical theory, an attitude he maintained throughout his life ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
He was thus unable to accept the institutionalist solution. In a 1975 interview, Parsons recalled a conversation with Schumpeter on the institutionalist methodological position: "An economist like Schumpeter, by contrast, would absolutely have none of that. I remember talking to him about the problem and .. I think Sch... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons returned to Germany in the summer of 1930 and became an eyewitness to the feverish atmosphere in Weimar Germany during which the Nazi Party rose to power. Parsons received constant reports about the rise of Nazism through his friend, Edward Y. Hartshorne, who was traveling there. Parsons began, in the late 1930... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
One of the first articles that Parsons wrote was "New Dark Age Seen If Nazis Should Win". He was one of the key initiators of the Harvard Defense Committee, aimed at rallying the American public against the Nazis. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons' voice sounded again and again over Boston's local radio stations, and he also spoke against Nazism during a dramatic meeting at Harvard, which was disturbed by antiwar activists. Together with graduate student Charles O. Porter, Parsons rallied graduate students at Harvard for the war effort. (Porter later bec... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In the spring of 1941, a discussion group on Japan began to meet at Harvard. The group's five core members were Parsons, John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, William M. McGovern, and Marion Levy Jr. A few others occasionally joined the group, including Ai-Li Sung and Edward Y. Hartshorne. The group arose out of a str... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons, however, was eager to learn more about it and was "concerned with general implications." Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Parsons wrote in a letter to Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) that the importance of studies of Japan certainly had intensified.In 1942, Parsons worked on arranging a major s... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In early 1942, Parsons unsuccessfully approached Hartshorne, who had joined the Psychology Division of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) in Washington to interest his agency in the research project. In February 1943, Parsons became the deputy director of the Harvard School of Overseas Administration, w... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
One scholar Parsons came to know was Karl August Wittfogel and they discussed Weber. On China, Parsons received fundamental information from Chinese scholar Ai-Li Sung Chin and her husband, Robert Chin. Another Chinese scholar Parsons worked closely with in this period was Hsiao-Tung Fei (or Fei Xiaotong) (1910–2005), ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons met Alfred Schütz during the rationality seminar, which he conducted together with Schumpeter, at Harvard in the spring of 1940. Schutz had been close to Edmund Husserl and was deeply embedded in the latter's phenomenological philosophy. Schutz was born in Vienna but moved to the US in 1939, and for years, he w... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Schutz was fascinated with Parsons' theory, which he regarded as the state-of-the-art social theory, and wrote an evaluation of Parsons' theory that he kindly asked Parsons to comment. That led to a short but intensive correspondence, which generally revealed that the gap between Schutz's sociologized phenomenology and... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
For Parsons, the defining edge of human life was action as a catalyst for historical change, and it was essential for sociology, as a science, to pay strong attention to the subjective element of action, but it should never become completely absorbed in it since the purpose of a science was to explain causal relationsh... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
However, the two men shared many basic assumptions about the nature of social theory, which has kept the debate simmering ever since. By request from Ilse Schutz, after her husband's death, Parsons gave, on July 23, 1971, permission to publish the correspondence between him and Schutz. Parsons also wrote "A 1974 Retros... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons had probably met Voegelin in 1938 and 1939, when Voegelin held a temporary instructor appointment at Harvard. The bouncing point for their conversation was Parsons' manuscript on anti-Semitism and other materials that he had sent to Voegelin. Discussion touched on the nature of capitalism, the rise of the West,... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The key to the discussion was the implication of Weber's interpretation of Protestant ethics and the impact of Calvinism on modern history. Although the two scholars agreed on many fundamental characteristics about Calvinism, their understanding of its historical impact was quite different. Generally, Voegelin regarded... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The two scholars also discussed Parsons' debate with Schütz and especially why Parsons had ended his encounter with Schutz. Parsons found that Schutz, rather than attempting to build social science theory, tended to get consumed in philosophical detours. Parsons wrote to Voegelin: "Possibly one of my troubles in my dis... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
I do not want to be a philosopher – I shy away from the philosophical problems underlying my scientific work. By the same token I don't think he wants to be a scientist as I understand the term until he has settled all the underlying philosophical difficulties. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
If the physicists of the 17th century had been Schuetzes there might well have been no Newtonian system. "In 1942, Stuart C. Dodd published a major work, Dimensions of Society, which attempted to build a general theory of society on the foundation of a mathematical and quantitative systematization of social sciences. D... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons discussed Dodd's theoretical outline in a review article the same year. Parsons acknowledged Dodd's contribution to be an exceedingly formidable work but argued against its premises as a general paradigm for the social sciences. Parsons generally argued that Dodd's "S-theory", which included the so-called "soci... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In April 1944, Parsons participated in a conference, "On Germany after the War", of psychoanalytical oriented psychiatrists and a few social scientists to analyze the causes of Nazism and to discuss the principles for the coming occupation.During the conference, Parsons opposed what he found to be Lawrence S. Kubie's r... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons argued that it would fail and suggested that Kubie was viewing the question of Germans' reorientation "too exclusively in psychiatric terms". Parsons was also against the extremely harsh Morgenthau Plan, published in September 1944. After the conference, Parsons wrote an article, "The Problem of Controlled Inst... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons' situation at Harvard University changed significantly in early 1944, when he received a good offer from Northwestern University. Harvard reacted to the offer by appointing Parsons as the chairman of the department, promoting him to the rank of full professor and accepting the process of reorganization, which l... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Langer proposed for Parsons to follow the American army in its march into Germany and to function as a political adviser to the administration of the occupied territories. Late in 1944, under the auspices of the Cambridge Community Council, Parsons directed a project together with Elizabeth Schlesinger. They investigat... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
This study was a reaction to an upsurge of anti-Semitism in the Boston area, which began in late 1943 and continued into 1944. At the end of November 1946, the Social Research Council (SSRC) asked Parsons to write a comprehensive report of the topic of how the social sciences could contribute to the understanding of th... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons became a member of the Executive Committee of the new Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1948, which had Parsons' close friend and colleague, Clyde Kluckhohn, as its director. Parsons went to Allied-occupied Germany in the summer of 1948, was a contact person for the RRC, and was interested in the Russian re... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons' fight against communism was a natural extension of his fight against fascism in the 1930s and the 1940s. For Parsons, communism and fascism were two aspects of the same problem; his article "A Tentative Outline of American Values", published posthumously in 1989, called both collectivistic types "empirical fin... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
One can thus understand Parsons' statement late in life that the greatest threat to humanity is every type of "fundamentalism". By the term empirical finalism, he implied the type of claim assessed by cultural and ideological actors about the correct or "final" ends of particular patterns of value orientation in the ac... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons' rejection of communist and fascist totalitarianism was theoretically and intellectually an integral part of his theory of world history, and he tended to regard the European Reformation as the most crucial event in "modern" world history. Like Weber, he tended to highlight the crucial impact of Calvinist relig... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons defended American exceptionalism and argued that, because of a variety of historical circumstances, the impact of the Reformation had reached a certain intensity in British history. Puritan, essentially Calvinist, value patterns had become institutionalized in Britain's internal situation. The outcome was that ... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The settlers established something unique in the world that was under the religious zeal of Calvinist values. Therefore, a new kind of nation was born, the character of which became clear by the time of the American Revolution and in the US constitution, and its dynamics were later studied by Alexis de Tocqueville. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The French Revolution was a failed attempt to copy the American model. Although America has changed in its social composition since 1787, Parsons maintained that it preserves the basic revolutionary Calvinist value pattern. That has been further revealed in the pluralist and highly individualized America, with its thic... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In contrast to some "radicals", Parsons was a defender of modernity. He believed that modern civilization, with its technology and its constantly evolving institutions, was ultimately strong, vibrant, and essentially progressive. He acknowledged that the future had no inherent guarantees, but as sociologists Robert Hol... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
When asked at the Brown Seminary in 1973 if he was optimistic about the future, he answered, "Oh, I think I'm basically optimistic about the human prospects in the long run." Parsons pointed out that he had been a student at Heidelberg at the height of the vogue of Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, "a... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
At Harvard, Parsons was instrumental in forming the Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary venture among sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The new department was officially created in January 1946 with him as the chairman and with prominent figures at the faculty, such as Stouffer, Kluckhohn, Henry... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The new department was galvanized by Parsons' idea of creating a theoretical and institutional base for a unified social science. Parsons also became strongly interested in systems theory and cybernetics and began to adopt their basic ideas and concepts to the realm of social science, giving special attention to the wo... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Renée Fox, who arrived at Harvard in 1949, would become a very close friend of the Parsons family. Joseph Berger, who also arrived at Harvard in 1949 after finishing his BA from Brooklyn College, would become Parsons' research assistant from 1952 to 1953 and would get involved in his research projects with Robert F. Ba... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
In the fall of 1938, Parsons began to offer a series of non-credit evening courses on Freud. As time passed, Parsons developed a strong interest in psychoanalysis. He volunteered to participate in nontherapeutic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, where he began a didactic analysis with Grete Bibring in Se... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Insight into psychoanalysis is significantly reflected in his later work, especially reflected in The Social System and his general writing on psychological issues and on the theory of socialization. That influence was also to some extent apparent in his empirical analysis of fascism during the war. Wolfgang Köhler's s... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
During the late 1940s and the early 1950s, he worked very hard on producing some major theoretical statements. In 1951, Parsons published two major theoretical works, The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action. The latter work, which was coauthored with Edward Tolman, Edward Shils and several others, was t... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
He discusses the basic methodological and metatheoretical principles for such a theory. He attempts to present a general social system theory that is built systematically from most basic premises and so he featured the idea of an interaction situation based on need-dispositions and facilitated through the basic concept... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The work also became known for introducing his famous pattern variables, which in reality represented choices distributed along a Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft axis. The details of Parsons' thought about the outline of the social system went through a rapid series of changes in the following years, but the basics remai... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
According to Parsons, its key idea was sparked during his work with Bales on motivational processes in small groups.Parsons carried the idea into the major work that he co-authored with a student, Neil Smelser, which was published in 1956 as Economy and Society. Within this work, the first rudimentary model of the AGIL... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The real innovation in the model was the concept of the "latent function" or the pattern maintenance function, which became the crucial key to the whole cybernetic hierarchy. During its theoretical development, Parsons showed a persistent interest in symbolism. An important statement is Parsons' "The Theory of Symbolis... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
The article was stimulated by a series of informal discussion group meetings, which Parsons and several other colleagues in the spring of 1951 had conducted with philosopher and semiotician Charles W. Morris. His interest in symbolism went hand in hand with his interest in Freud's theory and "The Superego and the Theor... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons was an early subscriber to systems theory. He had early been fascinated by the writings of Walter B. Cannon and his concept of homeostasis as well as the writings of French physiologist Claude Bernard. His interest in systems theory had been further stimulated by his contract with L.J. Henderson. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
Parsons called the concept of "system" for an indispensable master concept in the work of building theoretical paradigms for social sciences. From 1952 to 1957, Parsons participated in an ongoing Conference on System Theory under the chairmanship of Roy R. Grinker, Sr., in Chicago. Parsons came into contact with severa... | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talcott_Parsons |
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