The Rise of Structural Functionalism

For roughly a quarter century after the Second World War, structural functionalism was the closest thing Anglophone sociology had to a ruling paradigm. Between about 1945 and 1965, introductory textbooks were organized around its concepts, graduate programs were shaped by its research agenda, and the discipline's self-understanding took much of its shape from it. The story of how a single theoretical tradition came to occupy that position, and how it then lost it, is one of the clearest case studies the discipline has in the sociology of its own knowledge (Gouldner 1970, pp. 138-144).

The institutional center was Harvard's Department of Social Relations, founded in 1946 under Talcott Parsons's organizing influence. Social Relations was a deliberate interdisciplinary enterprise that bundled sociology, cultural anthropology, and social and clinical psychology into a single department on the theory that a general science of social action required integrating them (Parsons 1937, pp. 3-12). The scale of that ambition is important. Parsons did not propose to add another school to the discipline; he proposed a general framework within which the accumulated findings of the social sciences could be organized. Few theoretical programs in twentieth-century sociology aimed so high.

Several conditions help explain why structural functionalism became hegemonic rather than merely influential. First, the paradigm offered methodological coherence. Where the interwar Chicago School had been productive but theoretically eclectic, Parsons's framework promised a single conceptual vocabulary that could organize research across substantive areas — family, education, religion, stratification, economy. Second, it came with institutional prestige. Harvard's departmental structure, the Russell Sage and Ford Foundation funding that flowed to quantitative social research in the 1950s, and the proliferation of new doctoral programs staffed by Parsons-trained sociologists gave the framework extraordinary reach (Alexander 1982, pp. 22-31). Third, it was politically congruent with its moment. The post-war American settlement — expanding welfare institutions, labor peace, rising middle-class consumption, Cold War ideological self-confidence — looked more like a system in equilibrium than one in crisis, and a theoretical paradigm that modeled social systems in terms of integration and equilibrium fit that self-understanding comfortably.

The intellectual inheritance drawn upon was ambitious and selective. From Durkheim, functionalism took social facts — the thesis that social phenomena are real, external to individuals, and explicable by reference to other social facts rather than psychology — and functional explanation, the move that treats an institution's contribution to social integration as part of what explains its persistence (Parsons 1937, pp. 301-450). From Weber, the tradition borrowed ideal-typical analysis, the concept of social action oriented to subjective meanings, and a vocabulary of institutional forms (bureaucracy, authority types) that Parsons systematized for his own purposes (Parsons 1937, pp. 500-686). From Pareto, it took the model of equilibrium systems in which elements adjust to disturbances and return to a steady state, and the methodological discipline of treating such systems abstractly.

What the young Parsons proposed, in his first major work, was a convergence thesis: Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and the British economist Alfred Marshall, despite working in different traditions, were converging on a common analytical scheme for understanding social action. The thesis was sharply contested in its particulars — Weber scholars have argued it simplified Weber's own positions to fit the frame — but as a programmatic move it set the agenda for a generation. If the classical tradition pointed toward a unified theory, then building that theory was a coherent project (Parsons 1937, pp. 697-775; Alexander 1982, pp. 111-115). That project is what Parsons spent the next three decades pursuing.