The Parsons-Schumpeter Seminar on Rationality in the Social Sciences

• In Event: 571 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Theories of Economic Action and Comprehension

Abstract

In the 1939-40 academic year, Talcott Parsons and the famed Austrian-American economist Joseph A. Schumpeter. co-chaired a faculty seminar at Harvard on rationality. Participants included economists who were already major figures, Schumpeter himself and Gottfried Haberler, as well as several who later became prominent: John Dunlop, a leading labor economist, Abram Bergson, a major scholar of the Soviet economy and limitations of planned economies, Wassily Leontief, Nobel Laureate for the development of input-output analysis, Paul Sweezy, the socialist marginal utility economist who founded the Monthly Review, and D. V. McGranahan, who left academic life for distinguished work on economic development at NGOs.. Wilbert E. Moore, later known for early functionalist analyses of social stratification and the institutional aspects of economic development, Parsons himself, and the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz were principal contributors from sociology. Schumpeter and then Parsons made the initial presentations, followed by several others, notably Schutz, whom Parsons had invited to present as a visitor. Schumpeter and Schutz later published their papers. Presentations by Parsons and a few others have been retrieved from the Harvard Archives. All of the papers focus on the rationality of individual or collective actors and used variations of the concepts presented as the “action frame of reference” in The Structure of Social Action. All took science as the key model of rational action. Economists emphasized rationality in the choice of means to attain ends; sociologists emphasized the norms shaping choices of both ends and means.

Authors

• Helmut Staubmann, University of Innsbruck

• Victor Meyer Lidz, Drexel University