Ideology and General Theory: The Case of Sociological Functionalism

Abstract

It is a commonplace of our recent past that functionalism and the second system of Talcott Parsons (a distinctive version of functionalism) rose to power or attained hegemony in American sociology shortly after the end of World War II, retained this hegemony through the 1950s and 1960s, and lost a near-exclusive hold in the early 1970s when many of the younger sociologists abandoned a holist or transindividual perspective in favor of an interpersonal face-to-face context (associated with the social psychological concerns of symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology). What accounts for this? Why did functionalism and the second system of Parsons capture the intellectual allegiance of so many intelligent men and women in American sociology precisely at the end of World War II? What explains the almost total hegemony of this persuasion of general theory for more than two decades? Finally, what accounts for the fact that many younger sociologists withdrew their allegiance to these views at the end of the 1960s or early 1970s?