Gunder Frank Contributions to Public Discussions
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Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 21:24:53 -0500 (EST)
From: Andre Gunder Frank
To: franka@fiu.edu
Cc: Albert J Bergesen , Nancy Howell
Subject: order out of chaos? (fwd)
ORDER OUT OF CHAOS?
In setting up my new study in Boston, I have been faced with trying to put into some order
a large number of papers that had not previously been filed and/or became unfiled in the
chaos created by my professional movers who re-packed and jumbled up many of my files
without my consent or knowledge. As chance [?] would have it, the first item I picked up
to file under I don't know what picqued first my curiosity and then held my reading
attention - and now moves me now to write a "response" instead of going on with
my paper mess. Alas, I don't know yet where that will lead, other than probably deeper
into my own mess-mess.
I just read his introductory first chapter in 'Building Social System Theory: A Personal
History' in Talcott Parsons, ed .SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND THE EVOLUTION OF ACTION THEORY. The
original seems to have been written in 1970. I don't know how long I have had it or where
or why. I just picked it up today 30 years later. And I read it in the spirit of what I
oft quote from another Harvarder John K Fairbanks about the writer/writing of history
being part of history and the responsibility of knowing so and eventually telling readers
how "it" came to be. I have myself done so in the prefaces to my last two books
THE WORLD SYSTEM and ReORIENT, as well as in the autobiographical 'The Underdevelopment of
Development' and 'The Cold War and Me', which in turn was picqued by Chalmers Johnson's
'The CIA and Me' [all mine are available on my web-page and his on the the BCAS
issue/web-page devoted to The Cold War and Asian Studies where mine sits. But in all of
these, unlike Parsons, I try to fugure out and state how thge politics of the times led me
to do or chose as I did. Just before, while shelving books, among them was [David]
SCHNEIDER ON SCHNEIDER, who figures in all of the above and vice versa, and who does tbhe
same. And it occurred to me whether now that I am down the road from Harvard, I might get
involved in more navel-gazing as part of a larger social enterprise hereabouts.
This introduction leads me immediately to what should perhaps come at the end of these
reflections - or not at all? Schneider, Johnson and Frank among others - even Bill McNeill
in his 25 years later in 1990 look back at his work in Chicago- take explicit account of
how the cold war impacted on their work. Indeed, they deliberately and studiously situate
themselves and others around them in, as products of and contributors to the Cold War
which surely was a if not THE defining element in their "theoretical" work and
its practical application. Yet Parsons DOES NOT, even though - because? - he was arguably
with What Whitman Rostow one of the TWO [or three if we want to count Kissinger an
academic producer of theory/ideology, or four if we throw in Samuel Huntington] DEFINING
theoretical/ideological leaders with the widest influence on cold war rhetoric and policy
under the guise of social scientific theory. Both Kissinger and Huntington very
self-consciously also know and identify their cold war positions. Note that all were and
interacted in Cambridge! But Parsons makes no real allusion to this problematique, neither
regarding himself, nor regarding any of the many colleagues with whom he interacted, Clyde
Kluckholm and David Schneider among those to whom Parsons credits particular influence on
himself. Yet Schneider is very explicit in going over how his own collaboration with
Kluckholm turned into increasing conflict by DISvirtue of the latter's willing service to
the CIA, including putting others to work for that branch of the state. Along with
Schneider, Parsons also names other younger anthropologists who achieved fame, like George
Homans, Cliff Geertz and Fred Murdock. But unlike Schneider, Parsons does not mention that
Geertz worked for the CIA at MIT on the same project as Rostow and that Murdocks HUMAN
RELATIONS AREA FILES project was financed by the Psychological Warfare Division of the U.
S. Army, both of which spread their wings far and wide - to include even myself as a
sub-sub-contracted graduate student, who also had a brief stint at MIT's CENDES. Indeed,
although Parsons makes some references to his passage through the depression, war, and
post-war periods, he devotes precious little effort to inquiring, let alone answering, how
these helped shape his work or even the changes in his work from one time to another.
A related hole in Parson's account is his relation with his colleague, erstewhile academic
superior, and always competitor at Harvard and in the profession, Pitrim Sorokin. Sorokin
was not friendly to Parsons and his work, so much so that Parsons was obliged to cultivate
others as allies to promote his early career. Parsons does not dwell on the obvious fact
that his career and influence came to outdistance that of Sorokin. That may be to Parson's
credit personally, but it leaves us with the important question of WHY Parson's SOCIAL
SYSTEM took off and Sorokin's SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DYNAMICS did not. [A dynamic and
cyclical paradigm is less programmatically/teliologically useful than a static one?].
Prima facie, it seems likely that the reasons were political/ideological in all senses of
the word/s, that is local politics at Harvard, national politics in the United States, and
world political as well. Perhaps biographers of either or of the social sciences in the
United States have explored this important question. If Parsons himself has - and it is
not credible that he could have been altogether naively innocent - he does not own up to
that in these reflections.
What Parsons does do in some detail is to explore his theoretical and personal - in some
cases he even says political - relations with other luminaries in the social sciences and
how they helped shape his own work. He is less explicit about how he in turn shaped their
graduate student and later work, except in the cases in which they co-authored or edited
joint books. The list reads like the Social Science Who's Who, from the classical Marx,
Durkheim, Weber and Freud, but also including Pareto, Marshall, Taussig, Schumpeter,
Whitehead, to generations of luminaries to be in the post World War II, but during the
Cold War, era. Among many others in addition to the already afore-mentioned, these include
Edward Shils, Robert Merton, Kingsley Davis, Florence Kluckhohn, David Stouffer, Henry
Murray, E.O.Wilson, Carl Friedrich, Marion Levy, Neil Smelser, Robert Bellah, David
Aberle, Alex Inkeles, Ezra Vogel, Bernard Barber and many others.
Parsons also delves into the tension between the NOT planned and back-and-forth turns in
the topical and theoretical focus and output of his work and the prior or simultaneous
influential inputs of the above named and others into the same. But he attributes the
latter muchly to very substantial theoretical AND PERSONAL influence of colleagues and
students here and there, with whom he was fortunate to have contact in the US, then
Germany and England, and again in the US, primarily at Harvard. It is less than clear to
what extent this influence on Parsons was the result of these people being around and
available and to what extent at each stage of the progress/regress of his own work he
sought them out for personal or theoretical reasons. And except for the two or three
"applied" social science fields that he selected fro his own attention, medical,
education, and the Rise of the West, Parsons says little about the use to which he, and
even less others, put his THEORY OF SOCIAL ACTION and SOCIAL SYSTEM. That is despite his
proposal to do so, Parsons does not tell us all that much about WHY he did WHEN he did it,
nor HOW he selected his INPUTS or intended or achieved his OUTPUTS, that is his own input
into the work and policy formation of others. Apart from any direct links, we must suppose
that these and other people like them were available to and had links with Parsons and
each other at least in important part because their own work and career was also done in
and furthered by the Cold War circumstances of the time. Surely it was not accidental that
so many of them - and above all Parsons himself but not his rival Sorokin - were also
institutional part and parcel of the most prestigious and elite - as well as well funded -
academic institutions and working environment in the United States and the world.
I don=t want here to review all of Parson's life and work there, but permit me to draw
some parallels and comparisons with my own experience while I was reading about his.
Curiously and in ignorance of his, I myself worked out a research project to apply the
Parsonian 4 pattern variables to the study of medical and penal institutions. I even meant
to get the research funded by a foundation. That was part of my structure-functionalist
[Parsonian!] phase, which included giving a graduate course on cross- cousin marriage that
was critical of Homans and Schneider. Too bad that I never wrote it up, since later Ward
Goodenough did so. But like he, I jumped from this to that in response to the occasion
and/or my perception of 'what needs to be done'. For many years I thought that was rather
abstract theory, structure-functionalist and economic like Parsons, but modified to admit
and better deal with CONFLICT, which rather fell through the Parsonian cracks. For a time
it was Soviet economic organization and the derivation of a self-invented theory of social
organization in which change was derived from conflict, some published in HUMAN
ORGANIZATION. Robin Cohen and I long worked on an application of my theory to his field
material on Northern Nigeria, and he eventually published it alone - after I had gone off
to another world. That is because what I had done for a time on 'third world development'
became my mission to change, not only the theory but also the policy and reality. Here too
I was Parsonian, but Parsonian [self]trained, soon to turn anti-Parsonian.
Arguably "development" was the field in which Parsonianism became the most
influential, even though it was rather far removed from his own immediate concerns. It was
Parsons who translated Weber into American [even if the literal translation was by my
friend Hans Gerth], and it was post-War but Cold War America that used Parsonized Weber to
conquer the post-colonial Third World in apparent competition with the Soviet Union and
China. That is where the CIA and the Psychological Warfare [as well as other] Division/s
of them U.S. Army came in. And Parsonianism with them. How concerned Parsons was with this
problematique himself, I do not know. But it cannot be accidental that among the by him
above-named, Geertz, Bellah, Levy, Kluckhon, Homans et al made direct inputs into
development theory and policy. And they all had an institutional physical, financial,
social, personal and other infrastructure in and with which to do so.
Parsons reviews the theoretical/ideological infrastructure half way through his
auto-biographical essay on the period following the 1937-1951 one, that is the old War,
which he does not mention. He refers to three major revolution in the West, industrial,
democratic, and educational, and adds that they all rested on a common, that is fourth,
base: d cultural and social milieu ... to lay the foundations common to all three@ [p.54]
- that had been identified and prioritized by Max Weber. Parsons writes, A in
developmental terms, it became clear [to him] that...the fundamental contributions of
seventeenth century society were the associational-pluralistic character, notably ascetic
Protestantism, common law, and parliamentarism as well as science and the rapid
development of a market economy in nits capitalistic form...'[p 56]. Never mind that
Parsons himself observes some 'exception;' that became the basis of the 'European
Miracle', which was based on 'European exceptionialism' and which, never mind the further
oxymoron, need now be copied by all others under the guise of 'modernization.' That
is where the Weber/Parsonian disciples came in droves to dangle the 'Stages of Growth' to
Paradise in front of all and to push that theory and policy down the throats of all
recalcitrants, in Rostow's personal case by nuking the Vietnamese back into the stone age
should it be necessary to destroy them in order to save them. But Parsons makes no mention
of this or why or how it may have furthered his career.
In contrast, personally my own career was not to have one. It was instead to exit from
this academic establishment - never to be able to return again even when I eventually
tried - in order to devote my efforts to laying bare the sham of this
"exceptional" theory, nay ideology, to denounce the use of Parsonian
pattern-variables in 'The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology'
in the service of the few who benefitted most from "development" and at the cost
of the many who suffered - and still do! - 'the development of underdevelopment.' That was
40 years ago and with regard to the 'Third World.' Since then, I have taken on Parson's
own 'developmental terms' at home as well. And so Albert Bergesen and Pat Lauderdale
write:
Frank gained his world wide fame by making an argument that caused a revolution in
thinking about Third World Development. Well, the same thing is about to happen again,
except this time the stakes are much higher. Now it is the theories of the endogenous
nature of change in the West that is being challenged. The Wallersteinian world economy
did not give rise to the world-system, Frank argues, but the Afroeurasian world system
gave rise to the European world economy. To correct the historical fact is to challenge
the theoretical scaffolding of everyone from Marx to Weber to Braudel to Wallerstein.
Frank shows how [they] got it all wrong.
Gunder Frank does it again. He turns standard Eurocentric historiography and social theory
upside down, as he did many years ago in exposing the facade of economic development. He
challenges the experts again, but this time they are quite a different group at least in
terms of theory, e.g., ranging from Marx to Braudel. They all got it wrong because they
did not see the whole picture, especially how the whole is much more than the sum of its
parts. Once again, his argument is clear, organized, and often exciting.
Or more explicitly, Lei Guang writes:
The book is iconoclast to its core. It takes on the entire tradition of modern
historiography, western and non-western, left and right, on the world economy. Among the
revered he attempted to knock down in his new book are Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl icons
Polanyi, Talcott Parsons, Arnold Toynbee, Charles Kindleberger, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel
Wallerstein and most other contemporary social theorists such as Perry Anderson and
Benjamin Barber on the left and W. W. Rostow, Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama on
the right. The thesis of the Re-Orient is quite straightforward: a truly global
perspective is needed in studying macro-historical changes in the world--the rise and fall
of empires, the industrial revolution, the decline of the East and the corresponding rise
of the West, colonialism in India and American revolution, etc. The whole is greater than
the sum of its parts, as Frank repeatedly tells us in his book, the parts can only be
understood in relation to the whole.
So perhaps I still have not shed my Parsonian structure-functionalist upbringing.
STRUCTURE MATTERS , as I emphasize in the Preface of ReORIENT. But that also means that we
are not at liberty to pick and chose structure here and there in our analysis or to forget
about THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION in THE SOCIAL SYSTEM as a whole. Or to be more
precise and ironical, those who are well esconsed in Talcott Parson's Social System ARE at
liberty to pick and chose as they have throughout their careers. But it seems to take an
exceedingly insecure position OUTSIDE the system to see it as a whole. Talcum Powder, as
we fondly called him, seems never to have troubled to inquire into the function/ality of
his own and his esteemed colleagues avoiding holist analysis from WITHIN of his whole
SOCIAL SYSTEM in maintaining, if not its equilibrium, then at least their position in the
structure of the same.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
Senior Fellow Residence World History Center
One Longfellow Place
Northeastern University
Apt. 3411
270 Holmes Hall Boston, MA 02114 USA Boston, MA 02115 USA
Tel: 617-948 2315
Tel: 617 - 373 4060
Fax: 617-948 2316
Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/
e-mail:franka@fiu.edu |
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