ABSTRACT
As I now move beyond Simmel, Durkheim, Weber and the close of the Sociological Tradition of the late nineteenth century by the 1920s to the twentieth-century sociology of Parsons, Dahrendorf, and Berger, the tradition of the return to Kant is of course not at its end. The grand programmatic gesture of being a science, as against becoming a science, that marked the Sociological Tradition of Comte, Marx, and Spencer seemed thus to have bypassed having to take up the problem of phenomenal determinism and transcendental freedom. This, we’ve seen, was not so for Nisbet’s second half of the Sociological Tradition, for, precisely because at that historical moment Simmel, Durkheim, and Weber understood that modern sociology had to become a science before it could make the pronouncements of science, the Kantian challenge was indeed taken up. But with the end of that classical moment of sociology there came to an end, it appears, a fresh and original substance in their response to the problem of structure and agency tucked away in the conceptual thicket of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Caught up as Parsons, Dahrendorf, and Berger were in the Science and Humanism debate that they themselves were participating in as important players, in order to retrieve some kind of a conception of freedom in the service of their variety of the sociological imagination they returned to Kant. Concerning the issue of a substantive return that was so clearly in evidence in Simmel, Durkheim, andWeber, I have come to think that Talcott Parsons is a transitional figure in this regard; although he indeed struggled with the spirit and somewhat with the letter of the “law” of Kant in a serious effort to forge a theory of freedom for his vision of sociology, yet I find him somewhere between substance and ritual in this regard. And perhaps that was exactly as it should have been, since at a time completely dominated by the history of positivism that culminated in the formidable forms of logical positivism and logical empiricism, there simply was no voice of the realism of science to be heard in the philosophy of science. And of course, what a shame: after Durkheim, Parsons himself made it modestly clear that he recognized the realism of
science, although in his reference to it as a sociologist, “analytic realism,” it did not stand out in relation to the problem of working out a theory of freedom before the structures of social life. For example, in the comment below, the realism of science is blandly presented, and it is not explicitly tied to either causality or to the ontological nature of theory. And, unfortunately, but understandably, Parsons’s emphasis on the match-up between human logic and natural order, ends there.
