ABSTRACT
The first version of this chapter was written in 1973 as a paper for a conference in January 1974 on the culture of Unbelief in Vienna that Parsons ended up not attending (Parsons 1974c). For some years, Parsons planned to use a slightly revised version of the text for what was at the time numbered as chapter 9 (Parsons 1975b). At the end of 1975, however, he decided to rewrite it entirely, adding several arguments absent in the original paper. Parsons was satisfied with the result and thought that it introduced “some relatively radical changes in my analysis compared with previous somewhat related attempts” (Parsons 1976c). The chapter was finished and sent to colleagues for comments by March 1976 (Martel 1976; Parsons 1976c). From then on, the chapter was only partly revised, with the addition of some inserts and the updating of some references. Parsons had planned a systematic revision of the chapter (Parsons 1978i), but that was never carried out.—Editor
This book has suggested that the most serious threats to the integrative stability of American society came, not from “structured” conflicts on such bases as religion, ethnicity, region, or social class, but from certain types of individualism, closely associated with Durkheim’s conception of anomie. Conversely, however, we also suggested that the same developments of individualism constituted one of the primary sources of integrative strength of the society. Indeed there is nothing anomalous about the same movements toward change, according to differing balances of circumstances, serving either as disintegrative or as integrative factors in the same society in the same period, or indeed as both.
