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Article: Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America.
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- February 13, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Talcott Parsons, the grand theorist of American sociology from the thirties through the fifties, described maintaining order as a central problem of any social system. Since human beings achieve their goals by working together, there must be forces that hold them together and direct their efforts toward common purposes. Order can be oppressive as well as functional, though, and social thinkers for the past twenty to thirty years have tended to be more concerned with issues of personal liberation and distributive justice than with questions of cooperation and collective efficiency. Recent publications, such as Dennis Wrong's masterly The Problem of Order (Basic Books, 1994), ...