Actions of large bodies and events of communications: The political significance of some sociological categories

Abstract

The object of this paper is to compare the philosophical foundations of the three most influential sociological concepts of the past century — Max Weber, Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Although the influence of Weber on Parsons and Parsons on Luhmann is undeniable, the differences between them are fundamental. Each of the concepts is based on a special philosophical intuition, all of them also have a political character. To explain this, we introduce the philosophically vague, but intuitively understandable term “large body”, that is, one that is distinguishable without special instruments. For Weber, such large bodies turn out to be people acting, as he calls them. The famous concept of “social action” means the action of a large body, because such an actor is located in the space of a political union, within which the hierarchy of goods is built, that is, the area of possible goals. Thus Weber’s theory of action presupposes a theory of the state. Parsons’ theory of action systems is at first constructed quite differently. In accepting Weber’s schemes, Parsons refuses to study a single action as a concrete event in space and time. Instead, drawing on the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, he proposes to study action in its temporal aspect. Since before the action, the goals are only imagined, not existing in reality, here open up the prospects of a completely original concept of action, in which not only there will be no space of large bodies, but also the usual time of physical events. But Parsons does not hold on to this height, and in later writings returns again to acting as an organism that political power can reach and use force against. Only Luhmann, with his intuition of world society and the incorporeal events of communication, breaks away from the traditions of European political thinking. He manages to build a logically more coherent concept. But it turns out to be vulnerable when you have to think again about territories and regions, that is, about the spaces of large bodies.