skip to Main Content

The Parsons–Voegelin Correspondence: Notes on an Unexpected and Instructive Intellectual Encounter

On January 20, 1940, Eric Voegelin wrote a letter to Talcott Parsons, thus opening an unexpected but highly instructive dialogue between two of the twentieth century’s most penetrating social thinkers.[1] Their twenty-five extant letters were preceded by earlier personal contacts and numerous extended face-to-face conversations, which began during the autumn of 1938, when Voegelin (who had just fled Austria in the wake of the Anschluss) held a temporary post at Harvard, and took place not only in professional contexts, but also in the more intimate settings of the Parsons summer retreat and family home.  On more than one occasion, Parsons served as a professional reference for Voegelin as the latter sought to establish an academic career in the United States. By 1944, however, Voegelin had secured a tenured professorship at Louisiana State University, and the written conversation had apparently stalled; by the mid-1960s, the intellectual friendship – as one of Parsons’ doctoral students later reported – seemed to be a distant memory.

Nevertheless, their letters, which are housed in the Harvard University Archives and the Hoover Institution Archives, stand as testament to a rare meeting of profoundly different minds. Published now for the first time in English, the complete correspondence contains much material to interest a wide academic audience. We hope that the readers of VoegelinView, in particular, will appreciate the depth and breadth of the dialogue. Our edition of the letters, including extensive notes, appears in the August 2013 issue of the European Journal of Sociology, along with a co-authored essay in which we interpret the exchange in its historical and interpersonal context, and assess its present-day implications.

Here we offer only a brief overview, discussing what initially attracted us to the exchange, the circumstances and concerns that brought the two scholars together, and stressing above all the remarkable degree of mutual intelligibility they were able to attain. We conclude with some speculations about why their friendship and scholarly partnership were not longer-lived.

As we discuss at greater length in our article, this was a fleeting but profound intellectual encounter between two very different men and minds.  Though separated by disciplinary and cultural lines, they were drawn together by a set of common interests, which included questions about the origins of totalitarianism and modern anti-Semitism, the legacy of Max Weber, the patterns of secularization set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, and the proper methodology of the social sciences.  Not only did they agree on the questions, but to a remarkable extent they actually agreed on the answers, at least in general terms, even as Parsons was in the midst of an unpleasant exercise in mutual misunderstanding with one of Voegelin’s closest friends, the philosopher Alfred Schütz (1899-1959). The letters are thus not only a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation on a set of central topics in twentieth-century social science, but also an object lesson in the potentials and challenges of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Our interest in this exchange was initially sparked by its serendipitous quality.  The sheer existence of the letters came as a surprise to us: who would have thought that the dean of official, establishment American sociology would be engaged in serious dialogue with the author of speculative philosophical treatises on the mysteries of human participation in divine Being, barely recognizable as the work of a professional social scientist? Who would have thought that Voegelin, a severe critic of secular social science as veiled “gnosticism (a quasi-religious attempt to deify man and create heaven on earth) would be found in genuine and open conversation with one of its greatest twentieth-century exponents?  What could they have had to talk about, how could they have hoped to learn anything from one another?

These were questions we were primed to pursue.  LeQuire had written a dissertation on Voegelin, critically explicating the theological dimensions of his political philosophy as it developed during the 1950s.   Silver had taught a course on Parsons at Chicago and published an essay constructively extending Parsonian ideas about action theory.  We were also surprised to find that the original letters had not yet been published in their entirety.  They had appeared in Italian translation, and most of Voegelin’s letters are available in his Collected Works. But for us a major part of their fascination comes from the back-and-forth of the conversation, as we observe each thinker starting, dropping, and circling around to lines of argument, broaching sensitive personal as well as professional topics, probing areas of disagreement, and, most importantly, looking to learn from one another about topics of shared concern.

Given the stature of the correspondents, leaving the complete correspondence unpublished seemed strange indeed – but this, too, is perhaps symptomatic of the difficulties in finding editors, authors, and readers willing and ready to follow Parsons and Voegelin across lines of sociology, political theory, history, religion, philosophy, and beyond. Parsons’ 1941 controversy with Schütz concerned basic questions in the theory of action. Despite a seemingly shared set of concerns with issues revolving around the role of subjectivity in sociological theories, one of the most noteworthy features of the dialogue between Parsons and Schütz is that it hardly qualifies as such – the two persistently talked past one another, despite both parties’ manifest desire to find a common footing.[2] In his letters to Voegelin, which commenced shortly after the denouement of the Schütz exchange, Parsons expressed regret for this failed communication.  He also indicated that he did not quite understand its sources.  Parsons had, at least in his own self-understanding, made an honest effort to understand where Schütz was coming from.  This was clearly a request for Voegelin to “mediate” between Parsons and Schütz.

Voegelin obliged.  But instead of tracing the source of the dialogue’s failure to some lack of personal effort to understand one another, or even to some fundamental ideational conflict, Voeglin suggests that the immersion of Schütz and Parsons in highly different intellectual cultures and academic milieus generated divergent notions of sociological practice.  In these different contexts, he argued, the same words had deeply different implications.  A case in point is Schütz’s claim that Parsons’ social theory is  “naïve” – a point to which Parsons understandably took great offense.  What Schütz meant by this charge, Voegelin explains, was not that Parsons was a childish naïf, but that his stance did not amount to a transcendental “critique” in the Kantian sense of the term. Parsons sought a direct “theory of society” rather than a theory of the perceptual and cognitive apparatus by which knowledge of society is conditioned. Thus, despite the fact that Schütz and Parsons shared certain technical vocabulary, such as “action” and “meaning,” because Schütz sought a “critical” social theory in his debates with Hans Kelsen and other leading figures of Austrian social science, they ended up talking past one another, much to their mutual frustration.  In essence, Voegelin offered a sociological account of intellectual (mis)communication that situated the semantics of theoretical sentences within the practical context of their deployment.  To understand a theory is to understand how its conceptual repertoire is used.

One indication of the power of this pragmatist approach to the sociology of knowledge is that it can help participants in (difficult) intellectual exchanges to understand themselves better.  Indeed, Parsons immediately credits Voegelin’s astute account, and proceeds to eagerly add new layers to it.  “Possibly one of my troubles in my discussion with Schütz lies in the fact that by cultural heritage I am a Calvinist. I do not want to be a philosopher… By the same token I don’t think [Schütz] wants to be a scientist as I understand the term until he has settled all the underlying philosophical difficulties.”  The two used the same words, but they were doing different things with them.  Knowing this helped Parsons reflexively to comprehend his own theoretical statements by way of the ethical-practical situation in which they acquired their meaning.  Contextual reconstruction is not only a tool for research into intellectual history; it can also stimulate self-awareness of the presuppositions of one’s own scholarly tradition.

Such reflexivity, however, is not a sufficient condition for successful cross-cultural or cross-disciplinary communication. By the time Parsons understood the sources of his misunderstanding with Schütz, he had lost interest in repairing the relationship. Paradoxically, it seems that Parsons’ singular openness to German-language social theory may have been partly to blame. He had earned his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg, and had almost singlehandedly made Max Weber a household name in the English-speaking academy.  Yet as an American champion (to Americans) of one current in European sociology, he seems to have been initially unaware of the range of alternatives to it. The time and difficulty it had taken him to recognize the substance of Schütz’s actual concerns were perhaps a source of intellectual and personal embarrassment, suggesting that his grasp of the European tradition he was attempting to mediate and transcend was less secure than he had presumed. In any event, the failed exchange with Schütz prevented the formation of a personal and intellectual relationship that might have motivated curiosity about larger philosophical questions that had failed to excite Parsons’ real interest when he first encountered them as a student in Germany.

Set against the grinding of intellectual gears between Parsons and Schütz, the fruitfulness of the dialogue between Parsons and Voegelin becomes all the more striking.  What stands out here is how little the two shared by way of terminology, yet how much they shared by way of substance.   Voegelin, simply put, was not in the business of constructing an empirically grounded theory of social action; Parsons, for his part, was not aspiring to elucidate the basic structure of human consciousness.  And yet their different professional projects led them to share a deep interest in similar substantive issues, which notably included the causes and legacies of the Protestant Reformation and the religious roots of contemporary anti-Semitism.  Without a shared theoretical vocabulary to which either was professionally committed, their discussions of these topics are marked by a rare degree of focus on the matters at hand.  A shared language set in different practices can be a source of confusion; a shared object can be a source of communication across different backgrounds. Even their extensive discussion of methodological issues was not carried on in the abstract, but had the tangible goal of resolving a particular, personal misunderstanding (between Parsons and Schütz).

Of course, Parsons and Voegelin did have some common intellectual touchstones.  But the most important was not a set of ideas or propositions to which they both assented but rather an intellectual model according to which they organized their behavior: Max Weber. Parsons and Voegelin each followed in Weber’s intellectual footsteps by insisting on the role of values in human agency, and by emphasizing the role of “secularized” religious belief in shaping modern society. While they interpreted Weber’s work differently, both regarded it highly, though neither accepted it uncritically. Decisive for both was how they first encountered Weber. Too young to have studied with Weber in person, they were educated in a world where his charisma lived on.  Both had studied (at different times) with Alfred Weber, Max’s brother, and Parsons in his Heidelberg days was invited to “sociological teas” hosted by Marianne Weber, Max’s widow, with whom Voegelin prided himself on having once corresponded. Especially with these personal connections, they were as young scholars awed by Weber’s ghost.  They continued to emulate his greatness and his commitment to scholarship as a calling throughout their careers.

Yet if Weber provided not so much a shared conceptual framework, but rather served as an intellectual exemplar, this charismatic figure proved to be a tenuous basis for a long-lasting dialogue. For as the exchange unfolds it becomes clear that working in the wake of Weber implied very different types of intellectual practice for Parsons and Voegelin.  For Voegelin, Weber’s writings are essentially fragmentary: “he never placed himself in the center of systematic thought in order to organize the materials from such a center” (9/24/1941). For Parsons, in pointed contrast, Weber’s fragments haltingly pointed the way toward a unifying analytical scheme for the social sciences.

The divide that opened up between Parsons and Voegelin over the practical meaning of Weber’s legacy would only deepen in later years.  It may have been a key factor in their growing personal and intellectual distance. In 1952, Voegelin published The New Science of Politics, his first book in English. Its introduction examines the current state of social-scientific methodology, and centers around a nuanced portrait of Weber’s foundational contribution. Tellingly, his former correspondent Talcott Parsons is not cited. Somewhat strangely, though, in the final chapters of this work, which are targeted at political and academic ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Voegelin draws a withering portrait of the radical English Puritan of the sixteenth century as the typical “gnostic” intellectual (rather than, as one might have expected, Nietzsche or Heidegger). Without direct evidence, we nevertheless suspect that this is a veiled barb at Parsons the cultural Calvinist, or at least toward the approach to social science he represented.

Whether or not Voegelin registered his disagreements with Parsons in this veiled fashion, the Parsons-Voegelin exchange constitutes an episode in the history of the social sciences that teaches us about the challenges of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue, then and now.  To the extent that such dialogue, like Weber’s charismatic leadership, occurs at the limit edge of established intellectual norms, generating renewed attention to “the things themselves” and new opportunities to work without the net of shared disciplinary conventions, it also, again like Weber’s charismatic mode of authority, is hard to sustain in durable institutions.  If such moments occur, however, they provide opportunities for disciplinary and personal renewal, not so much through translating one theoretical language into another, but through, at least for a time, relaxing their strictures and allowing the matter itself to predominate.  The publication of the Parsons-Voegelin correspondence makes available one such moment for a wider audience.

Notes

[1] A slightly different version of this article appeared in Timelines: Newsletter of the ASA History of Sociology Section, no. 22 (December 2013): 1-5. Permission for online republication is gratefully acknowledged.

[2] The Parsons-Schütz correspondence and related documents were published by Indiana University Press in 1978 as The Theory of Social Action, edited by Richard Grathoff.

Avatar photo

Peter Brickey LeQuire is Lecturer in the Core Texts Program and the Department of Political Science at Samford University; Daniel Silver is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

Back To Top