ABSTRACT
This chapter is a late addition to the American Society project. Parsons first mentioned his intention to write a separate chapter covering style of life and kinship in the summer of 1975 (Parsons 1975b). Systematic work on this chapter, however, seems to have started only in the summer of 1978, after the new versions of chapters 6 and 7 had been completed (Parsons 1978d, 1978e, 1978h). He then decided to write a new “chapter on other sectors than the ethnic of what I shall call the Gemeinschaft complex. It will include something about family and kinship, local community, education, the communication system and religion” (Parsons 1978h). The goal of the chapter was to provide an adequate treatment of the articulation of the societal community with the fiduciary system (Parsons 1978k). The chapter was completed by the first half of October 1978 (Parsons 1978c) and only very slightly revised since then. Parsons regarded the chapter as “an exceedingly important part of the analysis” (Parsons 1979c). It is likely, however, that he planned a further revision of the chapter, as he wrote to a colleague that some conceptual issues on these topics had “become clarified since I finished the draft” (Parsons 1978i).—Editor
The reader will remember that in Chapter 6 we suggested that the development of the division of labor in the industrial revolution led to a new phase, in the development of the structure of industrial societies, and that Tonnies’s book has come to form a major symbolic reference point. Chapter 6, on the modern economy dealt with the most important focus of the Gesellschaft side of the differentiated structure, except certain aspects of the polity, while the
last chapter, on ethnicity, and the present one deal with the Gemeinschaft side. Parallel to the way in which we have treated the economy as focused in the adaptive subsystem of the society, we will treat the core of the Gemeinschaft complex as focused in the fiduciary or pattern-maintenance system.
