ABSTRACT
There are two aspects to Parsons’s sociological theory which permit it to be regarded as an application and extension of Husserl’s programme. First, Parsons assumes that essentially subjective human action can be understood objectively, i.e. with no reference to the truly individual ‘psychological events’ taking place in the author’s psyche, if only the effort of understanding concentrates on the necessary structures which must underlie any contingent, phenomenal form this action can historically take; these necessary structures, as they are timeless and transcendental, can be grasped by equally timeless and apodictic reason. The result is, by the same token, exempt from the work of history and can be viewed as truly absolute and immune to the plague of historical relativism; indeed, the validity of knowledge so produced is solely a function of method, i.e. the self-discipline and coherence of analytical reason. Second, the method Parsons applies in pursuit of such knowledge (in practice, in spite of many misleading comments as to the ‘empirical’ character of his work-made perhaps to appease the American sociological audience oblivious to the long history of German idealism) is one of phenomenological insight. Phenomenological inquiry into the transcendental structures of the human action supplies the only, but solid, foundation to the whole of Parsons’s model of social system. The totality of Parson’s description of the social system makes sense in as far as one remembers that the true object of Parson’s investigation was never this or that specific form social action could historically assume, but the possibility of social action taking place at all, and the transcendental conditions of that possibility. One could say that Parsons’s ‘objective theory of social action’ is the theory of its objective possibility.
