The Routledge International Handbook of Talcott Parsons Studies

0563820 - FLÚ 2023 RIV GB eng M - Monography Chapter
Holmwood, John
The Problem of “Race” in Talcott Parsons’s Account of the Citizenship Complex.
The Routledge International Handbook of Talcott Parsons Studies. London: Routledge, 2022 - (Trevino, A.; Staubmann, H.), s. 206-217. Routledge International Handbooks. ISBN 978-0-367-33667-7
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : race * Talcott Parsons * citizenship complex
OECD category: Sociology
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429321139-19

Recent commentaries have downplayed Parsons’s arguments about the importance of social rights of citizenship in the organization of civil society, or what he called the societal community. In doing so, they have failed to acknowledge his fears that full citizenship might be denied to African Americans as a consequence of right-wing reaction. In this chapter, it is argued that Parsons believed that the African American civil rights movement was the agent for American “social-ism” and, as such, would develop positive benefits for all Americans. The corollary of the argument is that any push-back against that movement would have negative consequences for all, including the practice of sociology itself. In the light of the history of civil rights since Parsons wrote and, of Black Lives Matter in particular, it appears that Parsons’s pessimistic coda to his generally optimistic account of the United States as the lead society of modernity is a better description of what transpired. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of Parsons’s argument for sociology.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0335724