ABSTRACT
When Talcott Parsons set forth in Structure his "voluntaristic theory of action," he was responding to the construct of an intellectual tradition he traced to Thomas Hobbes. This chapter explores the consequences of incorporating a plurality of meanings of freedom into the analysis of voluntaristic action. It identifies through an effort in historical semantics, an effort aided by familiarity with what philosophers like Simmel, McKeon, Adler, and Oppenheim accomplished in their pioneering typologies of freedom. Beyond the difficulties posed by confining discourse about action within an opposition between conditional and normative elements, Structure has appeared problematic in another substantive aspect. This concerns its treatment of the notion of voluntarism. Regarding voluntarism, Structure is both arbitrary and inconsistent. Parsons almost never explicates the term, and he subjects it to vague and often contradictory usage, as numerous critics have remarked.
