The Routledge International Handbook of Talcott Parsons Studies

0563816 - FLÚ 2023 RIV GB eng M - Monography Chapter
Balon, Jan
Evolutionary Universals in Czechoslovak Society. Talcott Parsons, the Prague Spring, and structures of interest.
The Routledge International Handbook of Talcott Parsons Studies. London: Routledge, 2022 - (Trevino, A.; Staubmann, H.), s. 308-321. Routledge International Handbooks. ISBN 978-0-367-33667-7
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : convergence theory * Talcott Parsons * Czech sociology
OECD category: Sociology
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429321139-29

Despite ideological obstacles during the Communist regime (1948–1989), there is a vast body of evidence that attests to a lasting preoccupation of Czech sociologists with Parsons’s way of doing sociology. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to the debates within Czech sociology in the 1960s when Parsons’s work found resonance, especially in the account of social structure and the theory of modernization. The most ambitious study of Czech sociologists, Czechoslovak Society (1969), expounded on Parsons’s implication that communist societies deviate from the progressive line of evolutionary development and conveyed a definitive statement regarding sociology's role in relation to its ambition to reconcile science and reform. It is argued that, on the whole, Czech sociologists turned to Parsons not only to unearth synthetic and explanatory perspectives that were found wanting but also to find direction in their understanding of sociological ambition. The chapter concludes with the account of the return to Parsons after 1989 in Czech debates on the transformation of society and social change.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0335727