ABSTRACT
In chapter 2 I argued that the central focus of ‘The Structure of Social Action’ was the utilitarian dilemma, not positivism and idealism. Starting from the Hobbesian problem of avoiding a war of all against all, Parsons goes as far as to define sociology in relation to it (SSA, p.768):
If this property (common-value integration) is designated the sociological, sociology may be defined as the ‘science which attempts to develop an analytic theory of social action systems in so far as these systems can be understood in terms of the property of common-value integration.’
