Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology

By Karl Mannheim. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. 319 pp.

ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY. By Talcott Parsons. Revised Edition. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1954. 459 pp.

These two collections of essays will be helpful to readers who desire a general understanding of the recent development of sociological thinking. Those by Karl Mannheim were edited after the author's death in 1947. The essays by Talcott Parsons originate from a period between the publication of his Structure of Social Action (1937) and a number of his comprehensive works published in 1951 and 1953. Readers whose knowledge of sociology is derived from American studies will find a basically different approach in the papers collected here. Mannheim was a European scholar, and Parsons's scientific roots lie in the work of three great European sociologists, Vilfredo Pareto, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber.

Some discussion of the relationship between sociology and psychoanalysis is to be found in both volumes. Mannheim in his essay On War-Conditioned Changes in Our Psychic Economy endeavors 'to work out those methods of investigation on the basis of which psychologists and sociologists could work together' (p. 243). His suggestions emphasize that the goal is 'to ascertain the mutual relationships between individual mechanisms and the social mechanisms impinging upon them' (p. 249). Parsons discusses the relationship between psychoanalysis and sociology in Psychoanalysis and the Social Structure, a paper read at the 1950 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He points out that psychoanalysts and sociologists are both concerned with social action; but whereas the psychoanalyst is concerned with the individual personality as a system, the sociologist deals with the social system and its structure. That structure is defined as 'a system of pattern expectations of the behavior of individuals who occupy particular statuses in the social system'. This system is identical