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Toward a General Theory of Action*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

W. W. Rostow
W. W. Rostow
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Extract

This book is a highly professional effort to move toward a unification of concept in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology. The reviewer is an economic historian who, at the limit of generosity, can be described as an interested observer of these fields.

The reviewing procedure raises some difficulties. Although the obscurity of the contributions to the volume varies, it is only with sustained effort that the amateur can come to believe that he has conquered the barrier of private vocabulary which the behavioral scientists have erected, no doubt for good and sufficient reasons. But one trained in modern economics least of all has a right to complain.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , July 1953 , pp. 530 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1953

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References

1 See especially Parsons, T., Bales, R. F., and Shils, E. A., Working Papers in the Theory of Action, Glencoe, Ill., 1953.Google Scholar

2 It should be immediately noted that general equilibrium analysis in economics (like cultural anthropology at its present stage in relation to society) cannot now lay claim to explaining fully all the determinants of economic action, partly because those determinants lie substantially outside the terrain of economics, conventionally conceived, and await the development of more general dynamic approaches to the analysis of whole societies. See below, section VII.

3 Professor R. K. Merton has explicitly compared dialectical materialism with the approach of the functional analyst, of which the present volume is roughly representative (Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, III., 1949, pp. 40–43). Like the authors of Toward a General Theory of Action, Professor Merton urges the importance of analyzing change without getting far beyond the general prescription that change will result from lack of integration. It should be noted, however, that he has made several distinguished contributions to dynamic analysis, dealing with narrow problems, historically defined.

4 I would have reservations about the adequacy of this interesting but drastically simplified hypothesis.

5 There appears to be a view among certain behavioral scientists that only propositions statistically verifiable can be truly scientific. This misconception may deny those who accept it access to many important problems of human behavior. It seems quite possible that a wide range of complex questions can be handled in terms which are, in essence, quantitative, permitting statements of relationship and of direction and degree of change. It may be that only limited aspects of human behavior will lend themselves to precise measurement; and that the achievement of some statistical reflection of aspects of human behavior may be confused with analysis and understanding.

6 It should be noted that further development in the work of Professors Parsons and Shils (Working Papers) is toward a type of dynamic analysis, concerned with the process of adaptation of small groups. Their first formulations bear a family resemblance to the treatment of comparative statics in economics; that is, a new variable is introduced into an equilibrium position and the adjustment to a new and different equilibrium is examined.

7 Efforts to avoid the arbitrariness of value judgments are likely to be illusory and simply involve implicit arbitrariness. See, for example, the effort of D. Gregg and E. Williams to define “good” and “bad” in terms of efficiency and inefficiency (“The Dismal Science of Functionalism,” American Anthropology, October-December, 1948).

8 Robbins, Lionel, The Theory of Economic Policy, New York, 1952.Google Scholar

9 Professor Tolman's brief but theoretically explosive comment on the contribu tion of “nonintegrated personalities” to the “on-goingness” of a social system (p. 354) should be noted; also, Mr. R. F. Bales' study of “The Equilibrium Problem in Small Groups,” Working Papers, ch. 4.

10 The Process of Economic Growth, New York, 1952.

11 I sense that Professors Parsons and Shils, in their more difficult terrain, are groping toward some equivalent hypotheses of substance in the pattern variables and developments from them in the Working Papers. In fact, it seems possible that they may emerge in time with some more generalized version of diminishing relative marginal utility and of diminishing marginal productivity, of which the economist's version may stand as a special case. For some tentative reflection along this line, see the reviewer's Process of Economic Growth, p. 37.

12 Just as, in conception, the cultural anthropologist can be regarded as the general theorist of societies, the historian might be described as the cultural anthropologist of highly differentiated dynamic societies: a definition, I daresay, that will please the practitioner of neither art.

13 Avenues of History, New York, 1952.