Why Parsons and Weber distorted restraints

Abandonment of reason

Like the social theorists whose works he helped elevate to the status of classics, Parsons assumed that when social scientists (or actors) describe a social action as “reasoned,” rather than as rational and either instrumental or strategic, this is at best normative and at worst ideological (see also Stinchcombe 1986, even as he endeavors to distinguish reason from rationality). For Parsons and the classics alike, the concept of rational action is generalizable. It can credibly claim grounding against actors' subjective interests and normative relativism, as well as against the relativism of researchers' own value commitments. By contrast, the concept of reasoned social action cannot. As a result, there is no “Archimedean point” available to the social sciences other than the narrow norm of rational action.

By labeling the concept of reasoned social action normative, however, social theorists leave social scientists with an enormous problem. Every researcher's description of social events ultimately contains, among other things, the researcher's attribution of subjective interests to actors and the researcher's own value commitments. As a result, the obstacles to recognizing shifts in the direction of social change other than those either toward or away from rationalization are seemingly insuperable. This is why Parsons thought that the “directionality” that social scientists might possibly recognize in common are shifts (a) toward or away from the narrow norm of rational action, or (b) toward or away from realizing social scientists' own shared value-commitments.