International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol 7, No. 3, 1994

Sociology in the Throes of Fascism: Parsonian Meliorism and Myths of Triumphalism

Larry Carney

All things always work together for good from the divine point of view; and whoever can make this divine point of view in any sense his own, just in so far sees that they do so, despite the inevitable losses and sorrows of the temporal order.

--Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual

Efforts to identify the moral and political implications of sociological thought and practice have foundered on the shoals of the dissonances and heterodoxies of its practitioners, no less than have the grand designs to define the scope, theoretical content, and methods of the discipline itself. No Sociology of the upper case emerges from the analyses of the historical and contemporary products of those who have worked in the name of so- ciology; and, despite valiant efforts, no theoretical "paradigm" has plausibly established its parameters as a science. Likewise, all programmatic attempts to configure for the discipline what it politically must "do," "stand for," or "stand up for" (or, alternatively that it should resist all these temptations) have yielded to the exigencies of politics itself--if only of the academic and organizational kind--with typically ironic and often embarrassing re- lationships to competing substantive definitions of the field. It is not surprising, therefore, especially in an era in which the intellectual tools of deconstruction and postmodernism have given privileged place to the devo- tees of skepticism, that some students of the history of sociology have called for both greater forbearance and a more discerning modesty among soci- ologists in their attempts to describe the scientific and political and ethical potentials of the field. One of these, Stephen Turner, has joined with Dirk K~isler in editing a volume of studies that documents sociology's failures to either understand or to engage in a politically effective way the rise of fascism during the interwar period, not to speak of the blatant moral ab- dication or overt collaborationism of many sociological theorists and researchers in the countries examined by the book's contributors. 1

469

�9 1994 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

470 Carney

The studies in Sociology Responds to Fascism cover six countries D Austria, Italy, Germany, Hungary, the United States and Great Britain, but Gerald Mozeti~'s final comment on the Austrian situation summarizes the essential impact of the collection as a whole, especially the contributions that deal with the first four countries:

The survey of the Austrian sociologists' relation to fascism given here does not warrant much optimism about the ability of sociology to resist dominant political and spiritual trends. The spectrum includes naivetd and self-deluded vanity, familiarity and opportunism, eager participation and attempts at ideological leadership. Those who were able to avoid this did so as a consequence of their political commitments and the challenges posed to them by fascism rather than their rigorously "scientific" sociological perspective (p.34).

The fundamental theme, then, of most of the contributors to Sociology Responds to Fascism is that there is nothing inherent in the range of ideas historically associated with sociology, the nature of the professional and scientific commitments of its practitioners or the fundamental assumptions that underlie its methods of investigation that would provide sociologists as a group with privileged interpretive powers or moral insight (not to speak of existential courage) to resist the blandishments and seductiveness of fas- cism or other political movements with similar potential for mass human destructiveness.

TALCOTT PARSONS: MELIORISM AND THE FASCIST THREAT

In light of its documentation, to be discussed further below, it is fitting that in the same year (1992) that the Turner and K~isler collection was published, there appeared a collection of previously published as well as unpublished papers of the sociologist who, not in the interwar period but during World War II, argued most forcefully the opposite case: Talcott Par- sons on National Socialism, edited by Uta Gerhardt. z All of the hallmarks of Parsons' lifework are grandly on show in these papers written from 1939 to 1946: his unabashed Calvinistic and American messianism, his devotion to the liberal institutions of American political and economic life (as he saw them), his affirmation of the continuing relevance of religious values to the stabilization of modern secular institutions, his ingenious theoretical amalgam of elitism, managerialism and therapeutic modes of social control as the quintessential form of modern rational politics, and his serene faith in the powers of deduction from a set of sociological first principles to illuminate and explain concrete, historical social realities. 3

Sociology in the Throes of Fascism 471

At the same time, Parsons' personal and intellectual confrontation with Nazism reveals plainly and consistently the fundamentally meliorist character of his sociology and professional commitments as a "scientist": the modern world and its institutions could be threatened--direly threat- ened as in the case of National Socia l i sm--but its socio-historical tendencies were progressive and emancipatory; the work of sociology was to build insight into these tendencies, to develop knowledge and modes of analyses that would enhance their positive features and allow enlightened elites to deal therapeutically with the inevitable "strains" among groups who were subject to the historical force of modernization or were victims of the uneven development of its various elements.

Fascism for Parsons was in a quite real sense a disease--of a particularly virulent type--of modernization. He, as the sociologist of modernization and as exemplar of the appropriate moral and political implications of member- ship in the modern liberal professions, threw himself without hesitation into a variety of organizational involvements and academic projects inside and outside the academy to alert the American public and its leadership class to the true historical meaning of Nazism and fascism: He was especially con- cerned to identify what had to be done (given their eventual military defeat) to dismantle the institutional complexes that had given rise to fascism and to restore the nations where it had fiourished--especially Germany and Ja- p a n - t o a salutary path toward modernization.

It is surely no happenstance that in the first two contributions that Parsons made to the American debate on National Socialism--one pub- lished (in the Radcliffe News, Nov. 23, 1938) and the other unpublished--he identified the nature of the Nazi threat in terms of its assault on "science" and "liberal learning" (and secondarily on "religious universalism"). "There can be no doubt," he said, "that science and more broadly liberal learning are fundamental to our culture . . . . The ethical attitude toward National Socialism seems to me, for the person seriously imbued with the ideals of science and the academic profession, so obvious that it is scarcely necessary to discuss it" (pp. 81, 83).

For Parsons, science and liberal learning, especially as they were ac- tualized in the practices of the liberal professions, were the vanguard expressions of the historic process of "rationalization," which he had de- rived from Max Weber as the essence of the evolutionary process of modernization (p. 88). Insofar as it pertained to the development of sci- ence, rationalization meant that science was intrinsically characterized by "two main c o m p o n e n t s . . , observation and verification of fact, and rigor- ous logical reasoning about fact" (p. 88). Understanding the nature of the embodiment of modernizing rationalization in the sciences and its expres- sion in the liberal professions clearly pointed to the institutional context

472 Carney

that was necessary for science and the professions to exist and flourish. The context was essentially political, requiring the institutionalization in the general society of the ethos and practice of " l ibera l i ty . . . a state of free- dom from interference with the type of rational activity" (p. 88). The practice of science and the professions requires social arrangements that allow the professional to pursue his work with "disinterest," reliant on authority based on "technical competence" and bounded by the "functional specificity" of his expertise. To do such work, the professional cannot be indifferent to the political context that makes this work possible on an in- stitutionalized basis:

" . . . far from it being his duty to stand aloof from all conflicts of value, he has, under certain circumstances at least, an obligation to defend the liberal values which are essential to his own academic ethic, and to back up the forces in his society which maintain them (p. 95)."

Academics, as professionals, should not lightly assume political re- sponsibilities, but where the threat to liberal institutions was great, as in the case of National Socialism, the professional imperative to take action was clear: "The most reasonable view would appear to be that [such action] was justifiable only when the situation of academic work in the society was seriously threatened" (p.95).

The historical process of modernizing rationalization and the special insight into the moral and political implications of this process generated by professional and scientific training and practice, but especially by the systematic elaboration of sociological analysis, form the leitmotif of the en- tire range of Parsons' papers on National Socialism. The thrust of his analyses moves without inhibition to the plane of political engineering, as by early 1942, he is already earnestly involved in laying out programmatic guidelines as to what the occupation forces must do to liberalize the social institutions of the eventually to be defeated fascist powers, all based upon his conceptions of the institutional imperatives of rationalized modernity. 5

The articles in this collection clearly demonstrate the inappropriate- ness of many of the charges levelled at Parsons during the 1960s and 1970s by New Left academics and others that Parsons' theoretical program con- tained no concepts to deal with "social change." It could be argued that Parsons was interested in nothing but "social change," not (ironically from the standpoint of many critical views of his work) change "in the abstract," but the teleological change of the grand process of modernizing rationali- zation and the pathologies that, in his view, inevitably attended this process and threatened its emancipatory progress.

From this perspective, his work was not only an intricate exercise in secular theodicy--which it certainly was--but inherently a quest for melior- istic efficacy, to discover the rationalized forms of political intervention that

Sociology in the Throes of Fascism 473

rationalization itself would inevitably require, most urgently exemplified by the historically unprecedented threat of Nazism and fascism. 6 Rationaliza- tion, borne by the advances of industrialization, the market economy, bu- reaucratization, science, professionalization, a rational division of labor in society and secularization created inevitable "strains" and group-specific psy- chological insecurities in modernizing and modernized societies.

Parsons was careful to point out that this was so not only because the process of rationalization impinged on different sectors of the population of such societies in uneven ways, but because the process itself was inherently dislocating, even in the most advanced and consolidated of modern social orders. He outlined the conflicting pressures, demands, and expectations exerted especially on the lower middle classes, women and youth (alerted by his young colleague E.Y. Hartshore as to the supposed seed-bed audiences for Nazi appeals) that were generated by the successful operations of modern social institutions themselves, rather than being simply pathological excrescences on the surface of these institutions. He was especially forthright and cogent in arguing that the social stratification requirements of an efficient modern economy, in which rationalized productivity had to depend on the uneven distribution of economic and social rewards, as well as functional authority, meant that vast numbers of individuals must live with the psychological consequences of their failure to achieve what society taught them was best and most meritorious to achieve.

Rationalization, moreover, undermined and challenged all traditional "non-logical" values and sentiments, depriving individuals and groups of secure symbolic anchorage in the social order in the face of incessant social change. And rather than the clear divisions of class and social status that others had looked to in order to explain structured conflict in modern so- cieties, Parsons looked toward a--for himmmuch more fundamental basis of social cleavage and conflict: the division between those who had been most radically transformed by rationalization, benefited most fully from it, and whose personal and social identities were grounded in its celebration, as opposed to those to whom the values and inroads of rationalization rep- resented the crucible of their personal insecurities, their isolation from others, their failures to achieve social recognition and their denigration by the "system" and its workings.

Speaking from within his own professional and academic milieu, Par- sons exposed the tendencies of secular, rationalistic elites to attack all that was not rationalistic in society, to demean and pillory "tradition" and all traditional attachments, to "debunk" religious and other "non-logicar' val- ues and symbols, to create "pseudo-rational" structures that generate psychological and social rewards for those who participate in them simply

474 Carney

on the basis of the denigration of the less-enlightened. 7 In reaction to this the injured and outraged of rationalization's have-nots find a focus for their resentments and insecurities. They express themselves in idea and action against the most visible purveyors of rationalism--capitalists, intellectuals, the "successful," Communists and, of course, "the Jews." Parsons called such reactions "fundamentalism."

At a more diffuse level the "frustration-aggression" tendencies en- gendered among specific groups by the wrenchings of rationalization as well as the cultural contempt of its most symbolic carriers led to the potential "seape-goating" of any "minority," or "outsiders," as defined by those who were themselves outside the primary benefit structure of the historical proc- ess of rationalization. From these essentially "structural" premises, Parsons positioned himself theoretically to add to his model historical contingencies and peculiar aspects of national cultural development, such as the effects of the Versailles settlement and the cultural ramifications of the hegemony of the Prussian Junkers class in Germany, that fed into the specific devel- opment of National Socialism. But it is clear that the selection of key historical variables in his analysis--however informed by the empirical re- search available to him, as well as his own experience as a student in Germany---was primed essentially by the structural model of rationaliza- tion, as well as its psychological addenda.

Parsons' controversial essay on "The Sociology of Modem Anti-Semi- tism" is instructive as to the intricacies and flexibility of the model. From a historical overview (derived from Weber) of the development of Judaism as a national religion in Biblical times, Parsons leaps to an analysis of the place of Jews in modem society. Attempting to walk the tightrope of "ex- plaining" anti-Semitism and not falling into an analysis that "blames the victim" (not a successful walk, according to some critics), he uses his his- torical analysis to illuminate the status of Jews as outsiders in modem societies. He argues on structural grounds (rather extraordinarily) that members of "outgroups" in such societies, because of social exclusion, "be- come as a rule, socially as well as psychologically maladjusted" (p. 138) and specifies this consequence (sociologically and historically) as mani- fested among the Jews in tendencies to "oversensitiveness to criticism on the one hand and self-assertion, on the other" (p. 145). He sees these ten- dencies as feeding into and re-enforcing other structurally and historically induced reasons that Gentiles are hostile toward Jews--all this happening, of course, "without either party being at least aware of what the actual reasons for these actions are" (p. 145). To those who may be taken aback by such an analysis, it is important to keep in mind (not for exculpatory reasons) that this is an essay directed toward melioristic intervention, the

Sociology in the Throes of Fascism 475

analysis sets the frame for appropriate political therapeutics, which must be based on a "scientific" understanding of a deplorable situation:

The situation may be compared to that of a psychiatrist in treating a patient. The psychiatrist resorts to neither admonition to be "reasonable" nor coercive measures, for he knows this will do no good. What he does is to study the case from every angle; what he endeavors is to discover the sources of the trouble. It is only then that he may find an effective cure for his patient. Without painstaking study of the case all attempts at cure are liable to prove not only ineffective but even harmful. Similarly, anti-Semitism can be dealt with effectively only by apprehending all the problems involved in it. In other words, it is by means of serious study, by means of an objective analysis, and not through emotional thinking that a successful tackling of the problem may be attempted (pp. 150-151).

Parsons treats the topics of "nationalism," "romanticism" and other components of the National Socialist movement adroitly within the frame- work of what we might call the "contradictions" (he would call them "strains") of modernizing rationalization, focusing alternately on the special case of Germany, the exemplary case of the United States and the general process as manifested in all modernizing and modern societies. Although I will not detail these treatments here, the essential point to underscore is that most make eminent sense within the framework of the model, and the more refined and extensive the elaboration of the model, the larger its "empirical" sweep: no phenomenon associated with the historical rise of Nazism is potentially beyond its explanatory range.

Although it is certainly true, as his defenders have pointed out, that the development of Parsons' thought did not culminate with the writing of The Social System, his sociological project throughout exhibited this capacity to encompass programmatically any problem that came its way (including, eventually, an understanding---"conceptually," of course--of "death" and "the human condition"), s Nowhere is this capacity better on view than in these analytical accounts of National Socialism, the political overtures that Parsons made to deal with its causes and to expunge it and other forms of fascism from the future societies of the defeated fascist powers, and the programs he suggested to neutralize cognate tendencies in the United States. What also seems clear on the basis of the National Socialism essays is that the absorbative capacities of Parsons' "system" were not essentially or even primarily due to the super-elasticity of his concepts, but rather to the fact that the foundations of his sociological theorizing were to be found in an overarching substantive construct of what he considered to be the structural and cultural tendencies of all societies in the modem world. This construct was, to be sure, abstracted from a consideration of the work of other sociologists and "behavioral scientists." But it was also, and not in- cidently, congruent with the developing position of the United States in "the world of nations" during his lifetime and a secularized Calvinistic in-

476 Carney

terpretat ion of that nation's mission, the possible uses of its power, and the openings that, in his view, American society provided for enlightened methods of political intervention and rational forms of social control. These me thods were to be in formed by a sociological unders tand ing of the "strains" as well as the emancipatory promises of historic modernizing ra- t i ona l i za t ion - fo r him, "the only game in town."

A grasp of Parsons' "medical sociology" and his "sociology of the pro- fessions" becomes key to understanding his melioristic approach to the role of sociology and the social sciences in general. In many ways the most re- markable essay (previously publ ished and anthologized) found in the G e r h a r d t col lec t ion is tha t t i t led " P r o p a g a n d a and Social Con t ro l , " (pp. 243-274), which appeared in 1942. Here Parsons delves into the pos- sibilities for p ropaganda work and the deve lopment of a professional propaganda organization within the American government. His model is the propaganda of "reinforcement," which essentially means, in this con- text, informational strategies aimed at specific publics to deal with social "pathologies." "Reinforcement" means "strengthening at tachment to the basic institutional patterns and cultural traditions of the society and delib- e ra t e ly and sys temat ica l ly coun te r ac t i ng the very i m p o r t a n t deviant tendencies" (p. 268). For any sociological figure other than Parsons, one might be surprised that the bulk of a long article devoted to this topic would be taken up with the analysis of the physician-client relationship in modern medicine and another excursus on the institutionalized values and assumptions that inform the conduct of the modern professions. But such is the case, for reasons that are clearly articulated at the end of the article:

It is the principle thesis of this paper that the structure of Western society in its relation to the functions of social control provides an extraordinary opening for the deliberate propaganda of reinforcement as an agency of social control . . . . On the social level, the propaganda of reinforcement would be simply an extension of many of the automatic but latent functions of existing institutional patterns . . . . Indeed, as a result of the above analysis it can safely be said that consideration of the role of the propaganda agency as analogous to that of the psychotherapist is more than mere analogy . . . . With proper precautions for taking account of the difference of level, to treat propaganda policy as a kind of"social psychotherapy" is to act directly in accordance with the essential nature of this social system . . . . IT]he first maxim is that, quite apart from what it deliberately does in dealing with particular tendencies to deviance which arise, the agency or agencies should assume a role as closely analogous to that of physician as is possible in the circumstances (p. 269).

It was Parsons' work, his analytical cum prescriptive understanding of the nature of the scientific and other modern professions, which he re- garded as on the lead edge of the process of rationalization in the modern world, that provided him with constantly renewable resources to expand the range of his sociological project from the center of the most power- ful---and to him the most "modern ized"- -na t ion known to history. Guided

Sociology in the Throes of Fascism 477

properly, America could not lose, rationalization could not fail, but the guidance, the intervention, the active political exercise had to be there. Ra- tionalization took on capacities for active self-correction in the person, ideals and practices of the modem professional and scientific practitioner. For him it was clear what the sociologist had to do and say in the face of the threat of fascism.

In an admiring essay on Parsons' political orientation, Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen tells us that at the end of World War H, William Langer, Director of the Research and Analysis Section of the OSS offered Parsons a job:

The proposal was that Parsons should follow the American Army in its march into Germany and function as a political advisor on the question of how to administer occupied Germany. Parsons was very interested in the assignment; but he eventually declined Langer's offer because of his increased responsibilities for the development of Social Science at Harvard. 9

Up or down on Langer's offer, it is very unlikely that Parsons saw himself faced with the prospect of a change of career.

FASCISM AND SOCIOLOGY BEFORE THE WAR: NO TIME FOR HEROES

It is perhaps significant that the only sociologist that receives extended treatment in the Turner and K~ler anthology as having "done it right" in a way that moved against the stream in his response to fascism is Talc, oR Par- sons. Moreover, not only does Robert Bannister see Parsons as personally valiant in his confrontation with fascism, but he characterizes his analytical treatment of the fascist movements as moving "American sociology to a new level of analysis" (p. 201), and thereby, "fascism [shaped] . . . . if only indi- rectly a fundamental reorientation of the discipline in the postwar years (p. 206). "1~ Almost all other professional sociologists, sociologists-by-imputation and the discipline as such are weighed in the balance by the contributors and found sorely wanting. Among the most interesting accounts is that by Carsten Klingemann, arguing that sociology as a research discipline actually flourished under Nazi rule and that there were ample sociologists to be found (or to be trained) who were eager to pursue their work under Nazi auspices, many not drawing the line at open collaboration with the SS and the production of tech- nical plans to implement the Third Reich's infamous "settlement" schemes. To add sobering insult to injury, Klingemann documents the strong continuities at the level of personnel of the war-time sociological establishment and the organization of sociological work in the postwar Federal Republic.

Co-editor Dirk Kasler and Thomas Steiner deal extensively with the efforts of German academic sociological thinkers to comprehend Italian

478 carney

fascism, as well as those of essentially politically affiliated intellectuals to analyze Nazism before 1933. They see the political results of these efforts as largely inconclusive or ineffectual in two directions. The academicians, who often generated positive images of fascism in their work, were so ab- stract and self-consciously "scholarly" in their publications that it is difficult to gauge how much they may have contributed to the general climate of ideas concerning pre-Nazi fascism in Germany. I~sler and Steiner see their research on fascism as being "part of a much broader concerted effort by social scientists to gain recognition as 'real scholars' by adhering to the ideal of 'objectivity' (p. 105)--in order, for many of them at least, "to find niches in the highly institutionalized academic system of German universi- ties (p. 105)." On the other hand, the sociological discussion of Nazism itself was dominated by scholars affiliated with social democratic political organizations. Whatever the relative merits of their analyses and the po- litical conclusions they drew from them, Kgsler and Steiner see the organizations they attempted to influence as essentially unmoved by their analyses and proposals.

Malta Losito and Sandro Segre trace the development of sociology in Italy to the beginning of the fascist period and document its failure to become institutionalized within the academy as a social science. After 1923, some institutionalization of the discipline did take place. But as this oc- curred under fascist auspices or at least in response to the limited educational permissiveness of the regime, it could not, as a field of study and research, break the bounds of the corporatist philosophy imposed on the universities, the restrictions on the exercise of political freedom, and the lack of any "consensus" traditions as to what the field was supposed to be about. The field also suffered the sustained opposition of idealist epigones such as Benadetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. Independent, co- gent analyses of fascism did emerge in Italy; but they did not arise from a common pool of sociological concepts, substantive theories or value com- mitments. Indeed, it is Losito and Segre's contention that the work of Gramsci, Mosca, Pareto and Michels, either in analyzing fascism them- selves, or providing seminal concepts for others to do so, illustrate the ironies of sociological work under conditions such as those in fascist Italy:

[Their contributions] to a sociological account of the rise and consolidation of fascism met either complete indifference or a very qualified acceptance, or finally a selective interpretation which concerned their analytical categories rather than their theoretical propositions. (p. 74).

Gramsci, imprisoned by the fascists until his death in 1937, was silenced. Mosca, vocal political opponent to the regime, belied the fascist interpretations that potentially could be made of some of his ideas. Michels, ideologue for the regime, undermined the possible relevance that some of his theoretical

Sociology in the Throes or Fascism 479

contributions could have made to the work of liberal oppositionists to Mus- solini. Pareto was selectively put to use to re-enforce certain biological notions congenial to rfascist thinking in ways that were alien to his own intentions. "Even Weber's rigorously defined term of authority was reinterpreted by Micheis to become a suitable tool to legitimate Mussolini's despotic rule" (p. 78). Sociologists' ideas in the fascist political arena became not their own or not what they were originally intended to be, or were selectively abandoned or repressed, sometimes by their own originators. Perhaps, one might add, this is not their potential fate only under fascism.

The situation of interwar Hungary, analyzed by D6nes N6medi raises another issue relevant to the connections between politics and sociology. In N6medi's view--in a nation in which fascist ideas and political practices were influential, but not ascendent--it was in fact the character of the po- litical commitments, rather than their absence, held by the main schools of sociological thought (the "official" conservative sociology, the "populist" intellectuals, and the [mainly Jewish] "liberals") that abetted their failure to sociologically "confront" fascism:

For different reasons, each of the three groups of 'sociologists' were unable to give a specifically sociological answer to the fascist challenge. This can be explained partially by the relative backwardness of sociology in the interwar period in Hungary. But this is only part of the explanation. We have seen that the special place which was occupied by politics in the thought of the different groups determined their approach. The "metapolitical" attitude of the populists was as much a hindrance to the understanding of the fascist phenomenon as the "pure" political (or ethical-political) conception of the Szdzadunk [conservative] group (and in a different way of Bib6 [connected to the populist group]. Fascism (or any other totalitarian political system) cannot be understood unless one is able to synthesize the social and political point of view. This cannot be done unless circumstances permit, as they did not in the Hungarian situation (pp. 166-167).

Robert Bannister in his analysis of American sociologists' response to fascism concentrates on what he calls the "big shots" of the profession--ex- emplified in the extreme by William F. Ogburn and George Lundberg--and the dissonant voices of such mavericks as Charles A. Ellwood, Jerome Davis, Maurice Parmelee and Luther L. Bernard. The latter group, in Bannister's view, are to be credited for the stance they took in opposition to fascism, but he argues that the ambiguities of their analytical approaches and the vulnerability of their political commitments undermined their capacity to prevail against the objectivist and positivist orientations of the sociological establishment, or to influence effectively public opinion:

Politically, their leftist views, coupled in varying degrees with enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, made them automatically suspect. However energizing their animus against American 'big business', their insistence on this theme to the exclusion of a genuinely sociological analysis revealed more about the American past than the German or Italian present (p. 189).

.Carney

But what would have been a "genuinely sociological analysis." As noted above, this seems to be exemplified by Parsons, and Parsons alone, during the period under consideration, although the desideratum seems to have been approached in the work of Clifford Fitzpatrick and Theodore Abel. Apparently, in Bannister's view, what Parsons had succeeded in ac- complishing was an effective resolution of what he calls "the dilemma of advocacy and objectivity" (p. 196).

As for the insiders of the establishment, before Parsons' "entry" into the sociological debate on fascism, the record is bleak:

�9 . . Ogburn's studied silence [on fascism], if notable in its frankness, was not unique among the profession's leaders. During Mussolini's rise to power surprisingly few sociological big shots mentioned Italian fascism, while even fewer criticized it. From the triumph of National Socialism in 1933 through the Nazi-Soviet pact six years later, an amalgam of value-free objectivism, political isolationism and veiled anti-Semitism kept public discussion to a minimum (p. 175).

At the national level, Great Britain seems to be the only country that comes out as somewhat a winner in its sociological response to fascism, ironically it seems, in the treatment of Peter Lassman, because the task did not fall to academic sociologists---sociology had scant institutional firm- ness at the time----but to intellectuals of the active and organizational Left. British socialists drew upon their Marxist heritage to differentiate their own brand of socialism not only from National "Socialism" but state socialism as it was emerging in the Soviet Union . As key actors in the internal poli- tics of their own country, they were driven to clarify the nature of fascism and Nazism as well as Stalinism as an effort of self-clarification and political positioning in a fundamentally liberal, rather than authoritarian, political environment. The concept of "totalitarianism," borrowed from fascism it- self, became the key to their understanding of the political regimes in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, and they elaborated the implications of this concept through the war and afterward. Their intellectual confron- tation with fascism was therefore, transformatory, in that the theories of fascism and, more broadly, totalitarianism, they improvised and elaborated were related to their need to envision and construct socialism in a nation where, for them, democratic values and political practices were firmly in- stitutionalized.

SOCIOLOGY, POLITICS, AND MORALITY

The historiographic accounts of "sociology'"s encounter with fascism during the interwar (and to some extent, during the war itself) period raise a number of problems of "method," some of the more important of which

Sociolol~ in the Throes of Fascism 481

are acknowledged by co-editor Turner in his introductory essay and by the other contributors. If by "sociology" in these analyses, one is to identify a fully established and recognized academic discipline, only one case, the United States, provides a relatively clear-cut example. Germany is the next most proximate candidate. But because of the decimation of that country's intellectual ranks from the early 1930s onward and the fact that the soci- ology "establishment" that seemed to flourish under National Socialism was not in any vital sense continuous with the historical, comparative, and criti- cal traditions that played such an important role in the development of German sociology before the 1930s, the German case underscores the am- biguities of what we mean by "sociology" for the purposes of historical and critical analysis. Turner slights the role of the Frankfort School, not only because, he asserts, its members did not directly confront fascism in their work (while still in Germany) but also because their impact on public opin- ion in the countries they emigrated to (where they did analyze the fascist phenomena) was limited before the beginning of the war. Given the fact that the contributors to the anthology, by the very nature of the historical situations they surveyed, were driven to find sociology wherever it appears to have peeped its head, this dismissal of the Frankfort School and the emigr6 sociology it contributed to seems gratuitous. It is perhaps mainly explainable by the prominence that Turner believes the School played in the construction of the myth that European sociology did in fact confront fascism and was viewed as a threat to be destroyed by fascist regimes.

The fact that members of the "University in Exile" of the New School for Social Research and other exile figures, such as Mannheim and Lukacs, receive no extensive treatment in this collection, is doubly curious, and raises issues of selectivity that are not adequately addressed by the editors and other contributors. 11 Particularly surprising is that Sociology Responds to Fascism contains no critical treatment of Hans Speier, whose work on the rise of Naziism was completed (but not published, certainly through no fault of his own!) before he emigrated from Germany. 12 An analysis of Speier's work would seem especially apposite in a collection of this kind because the methods of his research and the intricacies of his analysis hardly seem to conform to the dismissive evaluations of intellectuals of the German left that are expressed in varying degrees in Turner's introductory essay, K~isler and Steiner's chapter on pre-1933 Germany and Bannister's account of fascism and American sociology.

Despite these and other caveats that could be advanced, Sociology Responds to Fascism does provide an important historical vantage point from which to address the question: Is sociology because of the ideas it works with and the subject matter it addresses inherently heroic, morally privileged and politically efficacious when it comes to addressing the

482 Carney

great historical crises and threats to human survival and freedom, such as fascism?

The answer to this question would seen to be "no" on all counts. This is so not only because sociologists are men and women like other men and women, with no special immunities to the temptations of greed, opportunism, self-deception, careerism or the frailties of short-sightedness--and certainly, on average, they possess no special endowments of physical courage and moral heroism. It is also the case because sociology as an institutionalized academic discipline and as an organized "profession" cannot escape the ma- terial, cultural, political and moral compromises that it constantly transacts with the societies that give rise to it, sustain it, and demand their own tolls for the toleration of, indifference to, or support of its existence. 13

As the grand paradox, the life work of Talcott Parsons is a testimony to this entrapment: by being on the side of the gods and being in the right place, in the fight country, at the fight time, his view of the world and his compelling commitments to secularized Calvinistic global redemptionism could powerfully inform his sociological project. The goals of his sociologi- cal meliorism were rendered plausible and seemingly reachable, and his role as rational helper of the gods was available as a true vocation that enhanced his moral powers. Thus armed, he could embrace with optimism and serenity the ideal of political and moral responsibility that he derived from Max Weber's discussion of verantwortungsethik, an active stance that

refused to judge any act, any means, any situation, as absolutely good or bad, which was as clear-headed as possible as to the complex ramifications of action, and which, above all, was not afraid to assume responsibility with its inevitable accompaniment of guilt, responsibility for being instrumental in bringing about things which, for their own sake, must always without hesitation be judged to be evil (Talcott Parsons on National Socialism, p. 183).

REFERENCE NOTES

1. Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Kisler, eds., Sociology Responds to Fascism (London and New York. Routledge, 1992). Among Turner's other works, see especially, Stephen Turner, "The Strange Life and Hard Times of the Concept of General Theory in Sociology: A Short History of Hope," in Stephen Seidman and David G. Wagner, eds, Postmodernism and Social Theory: The Debate over General Theory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 101-133.

2. Talcott Parsons, Talcott Parsons on National Socialism, edited and with an Introduction by Uta Gerhardt (New York: Aldine de Grnyter, 1992).

3. For Parsons' Calvinism and Americanism, see William Buxton, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State: Political Sociology as Strategic Vocation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); Roland Robertson and Bryan S. Turner, eds., Talcott Parsons: Theorist of Modernity (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1991); Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner, Talcott Parsons on Economy and Society (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); and Arthur J. Vidich, "State, Society and Calvinism: Parsons and

Sociology in the Throes of Fascism 483

Merton as Seen from Abroad," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall, 1988), pp. 109-125.

4. For Parsons' academic and governmental involvements on behalf of the war effort, see Gerhardt's introductory essay to Parsons, op cit.

5. See Parsons, "National Socialism and the German People,"/b/d., pp. 219-224. 6. On "theodicy" in American sociology, see Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford Lyman,

American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985). For the seminal American philosophical renditions of meliorism, from the opposed perspectives of Idealism and Pragmatism, see Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series: Nature, Man, and the Moral Order (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901); and William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897) and A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912).

7. This was the crux of Parsons' analysis of the dangers to modernization that were represented by the ideologies (as opposed to the organized political action) of the "left."

8. See Talcott Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition (New York: The Free Press, 1978).

9. Jens Kaaihange Nielson, "The Political Orientation of Talcott Parsons: The Second World War and Its Aftermath," in Robertson and Turner, op. cit., pp. 217-233; p. 220.

10. Bannister acknowledges, however, that the theoretical ground on which Parsons grazed was ample, if not always acknowledged: "Viewed in the light of European theories of fascism, most of this was hardly new. Parson's anomic mass man, consumed by 'free-floating aggression' stood in the tradition of Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd . . . . Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses . . . . and most recently, Emil Lederer's The State of the Masses . . . . even though Parsons cited only Durkheim. His notion of the differential impact of modernization likewise echoed Karl Mannheim's analysis of the 'sphere of knowledge' of different social groups in Ideology and Utopia . . . . although Parsons did not mention any source other than Weber." Robert Bannister, "Principle, Politics, Profession: American Sociologists and Fascism, 1930-1950," in Turner and Kasler, op. cir., pp. 172-213; pp. 200-201.

11. See Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Peter Rutkoff and William B. Scott, "Democracy and Fascism: From Europe to America," State, Culture and Society [International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society], Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall, 1984), pp. 26-60; and Zoltan Tar and Judith Marcus, "Two Theories of Fascism and Society: Lederer and Lukacs," State Culture and Society, ibid., pp. 61-75.

12. Hans Speier, German White Collar Workers and the Rise of Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

13. Cf. Arthur J. Vidich, "Values and Morality of Scientists: Some Unresolved Problems," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1988), pp. 471-486.