Parsons, Talcott

Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. New York Free Press. 

Weber, M. (1971 (1904-5)). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Parsons, Talcott, Trans.). London Merton, R. (1987). Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. New York Webster, C. iycfii). The Great Instauration. Science, Medicine and Keform 1626-1660. London. 

Weber, M. (1971 (1904-5)). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Parsons, Talcott, Trans.). London. 

The English anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown puts it this way. In any technical activity an adequate statement of the purpose of any particular act or series of acts constitutes by itself a sufficient explanation. But ritual acts differ from technical acts in having in all instances some expressive or symbolic element in them.. . . My own view is that the negative and positive rites of savages exist and persist because they are part of the mechanism by which an orderly society maintains itself in existence, serving as they do to establish certain fundamental social values. (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, On Taboo, in Talcott Parsons, et al. [Eds.], Theories of Society, Vol. II, pp. 951-959 pp. 954, 958.) For a discussion of the distinction between ritual and technical action in psychoanalysis, see Thomas S. Szasz, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, especially pp. 9 7-... 

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