Cultural Theory1

Omar Lizardo2

Abstract
Contemporary cultural theory has acquired discipline-wide status as the only “subfield”
within which quintessentially “theoretical” issues are widely discussed, while at the same time
forming core parts of the research agenda. Cultural theory is also one of the few strands of
modern theorizing that boasts having a “straight line” of succession stemming from the
programmatic concerns that preoccupied the sociological classics. Cultural theory carries this
status in spite of the fact that its central concept is a 20th century anthropological
importation made prominent in Parsons’s functionalism. This an odd situation because
culture seems to be an inherently functionalist concept, and yet functionalism is the theory
that is accused of providing a misleading interpretation of the classics and, accordingly, the
theory that contemporary “cultural” approaches use to define themselves against. In this
chapter I argue that, in spite of the aforementioned pretensions, there is no straightforward
conceptual link between modern cultural analysis and the work of the classics, precisely
because the contention that the classics were budding cultural theorists is a convenient
invention of functionalism in the first place. I close by suggesting that the “problems” of
contemporary cultural theory, being problems inherited from functionalism, may only be
soluble by abandoning the culture concept. Ironically enough the 19th century classics,
especially Durkheim, and one 20th century “classic,” namely Bourdieu, provide a model of
how to do social theory without a culture concept.

Keywords: Culture - Social structure - Social action

1 Introduction
Long abandoned by anthropologists as a foundational concept (e.g. Abu-Lughod

1 Chapter prepared for Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn (Uncorrected final
draft).

2 Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556,

Email: olizardo@[Link], Tel: (574) 631-1855.
1991), the last two decades have seen a virtual explosion of interest in culture among
sociologists, not only as a “topic” of analysis (the “sociology of culture”) but most
importantly as a “resource” for general sociological explanation (“cultural sociology”). This
is exemplified by the fact that, while beginning as a relatively small and largely peripheral
intellectual movement in the mid 1980s, today the American Sociological Association’s
“Section on Culture” is decidedly central, boasting one of the largest rates of membership
especially graduate student members. Intellectually, cultural sociologists (or sociologists of
culture for that matter) can proclaim with confidence that their work stands “at the
crossroads of the discipline” (Jacobs and Spillman 2005), helping to inform the work of
social scientists working across essentially every substantive field of research. This includes
social science history (e.g. Bonnell and Hunt 1999), cognitive sociology (e.g. DiMaggio
1997), the sociology of religion (e.g. Smilde 2007), organizational studies (e.g. Weber and
Dacin 2011), social movement theory (e.g. Polletta 2008), economic sociology (e.g. Bandelj,
Spillman and Wherry 2015), culture and inequality studies (e.g. Small et al. 2010), and even
traditionally “positivist” subfields such as demography (Bachrach 2014). Articles and books
dealing with cultural analysis have become field-wide citation classics (e.g. Swidler 1986;
Bellah et al 1985, Lamont 1992; Sewell 1992, DiMaggio 1997; Lareau 2011), handbooks on
cultural sociology continue to be be published at a rapid pace (e.g. Bennett and Frow 2008;
Hall, Grindstaff and Ming-Cheng-Lo 2010; Alexander, Jacobs and Smith 2013), and
contemporary debates on foundational issues on the theory of action, the basic parameters
of social explanation, and the foundations of social order take place largely under the
umbrella of “cultural theory” and “cultural analysis” (e.g. Reed 2011; Vaisey 2009, Swidler
2001; Patterson 2014; Alexander 2003).
Given this, it is uncontroversial to propose that the “concept of culture” has joined
the couplet of “structure” and “agency” as one of contemporary sociology’s foundational
notions. Yet, just like those other foundational ideas, the concept is beset with ambiguity and
vagueness (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Stocking 1966), as well as lingering doubts as to
its analytical import and exact relation to other foundational notions in social theory such as
“social structure” and “agency” (Alexander 2003; Sewell 2005; Patterson 2014; Archer 1995).
As a result, while both “culture and structure” and “culture in action” debates continue to
rage, there does not seem to be any immediate resolution to these perennial problems in
sight (e.g. Vaisey 2009; Alexander 2003; Sewell 2005). This unsatisfactory détente acquires
more importance, when we consider the fact that the basic theoretical debates in the
discipline in the American scene---e.g. those inaugurated by Parsons’s (1937) problematic
interpretation of a selection of European thinkers---now take place largely under the
auspices of “cultural theory” and not “theory” in its unqualified form (Swidler 1995).
Whether the culture concept or cultural sociology as a general analytic approach is up
to this task remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is that continuing progress (or possible
resolutions) to contemporary theoretical impasses will depend on whether “culture” has the
potential to serve as such a unifying meta-concept. The basic argument in this chapter is that
the contemporary version of the culture concept in sociology is simply not the sort of
analytic resource that is up to this task and that “cultural theory” as currently configured will not
make headway on the relevant analytical issues. The reason for this is that the concept of
culture in contemporary sociology melds (in somewhat anachronistic ways) both basic
concerns inherited from the classics and post-classical issues inherited from the
incorporation of the modern (“analytical”) concept of culture developed in anthropology
into this classical tradition by Talcott Parsons. 3 As such, the status of cultural sociology as a
meta-field unifying other areas of substantive inquiry in the discipline will remain
problematic, even as “cultural theory” will continue to serve as a stand in for “theory” in the
general sense.
An important, if often unremarked issue, is that the “modern” culture concept had
no strict conceptual analogue among the sociological classics (here I restrict my definition of
“classics” to the standard canon of Marx, Weber, Durkheim). This means that many of the
issues that preoccupy contemporary cultural theorists only have superficial similarity to those
that preoccupied Marx, Weber, and Durkheim; this also means that the retroactive recasting

3 By the “analytical” concept of culture I mean what used to be called the “anthropological” concept (when
that discipline had full ownership of it) and like that concept it should be contrasted with the “classical” or “humanist”
(Arnoldian) culture concept along the usual dimensions of the denial of absolutism in favor of relativism, the denial of
“progressivism” in favor of homeostatic functionalism, the denial of a hierarchy among “cultures,” and the emphasis on
the determinism of inherited traditions over conscious reasoning in the shaping of conduct (see Stocking 1966: 868).
of the sociological classics as budding cultural theorists (e.g. Parsons 1951; Swidler 1995) is
an anachronism of consequential import. In this sense, contemporary cultural theory inherits
a post-classical problematic which has no strict analogue in the classics. Given this, my
argument is that it makes little exegetical or analytical sense to project a “concept of culture”
to such pre-cultural theorists Marx, Weber, and Durkheim (or even the early Parsons!).
Instead, we should go back to the drawing board and dissociate the classics from the
contemporary culture concept. All the same, they may also provide a model for how to do
social theory without relying on that concept as a central line of support.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. In the next section I outline the
conceptual armamentarium deployed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim to deal with
theoretical issues that have now been retroactively (and anachronistically) remapped as
central problems in cultural theory. The basic argument is that none of the classics had
anything close to what can be called a “concept of culture” because they did not need one to
deal with the analytical issues that preoccupied them. I will then argue that it is the figure
that marks the transition from “classical” to “contemporary” sociological theory namely,
Talcott Parsons, who recasts the classics as “cultural theorists” status nascendi thus
retroactively recruiting them to deal with basic problems that emerge from his own (failed)
attempt to link his own version of the anthropological concept of culture to theoretical
issues in action theory and normativist functionalism. We will see that Parsons’s primary
analytic concern in regards to cultural theory has to do mainly with the mechanisms of how
persons become “encultured,” which for Parsons is essentially a resolution to an unfinished
chapter in his own interpretation of Durkheim. Parsons coupled his solution (enculturation
as “internalization”) with a conception of the “cultural system” as a systematic ensemble of
ideal elements. Clifford Geertz for his part, takes up the remnants of Weber’s “meaning”
problematic, but does so from within the constraints of a Parsonian (via Kroeber and
Kluckhohn) conceptualization of culture as (external) “system” or “pattern.” This is the way
in which this particular problem continues to be formulated in contemporary cultural
analysis.
In the fourth section, I will review some of the basic issues in contemporary cultural
analysis. We will see that contemporary cultural theorists essentially divide themselves into
analytic camps depending on their stance vis a vis the Parsonian model of enculturation,
such that acceptance or rejection of a conception of culture as either “internal” to the actor
or as part of the external environment becomes correlative to acceptance or rejection of a
conception of the nature of culture as either systematic or fragmented (respectively). A third
group of contemporary cultural sociologists abandons the Parsonian problematic of
enculturation and internalization in favor of a return to the “problem of meaning” as a
defining issue for sociological explanation more generally. This group however, remains
wedded to a Parsonian conception of culture as systematic, although reinforced with a more
contemporary formulation of systematicity taken from structural linguistics. I close by
outlining the implications of this situation for the future of the “concept of culture” as a
central analytic resource in sociology.

2 The Sociological Classics as Pre-Cultural Theorists

Given its current status as a central analytic construct, it might seem impossible to
imagine how one can get a conceptual bearing on the central analytic issues of social theory,
such as understanding the nature of action or explicating the nature and origins of social
change and reproduction without a culture concept. Yet, it is well known that the
contemporary analytic “concept of culture” did not exist until well into the twentieth century,
itself being an invention of American anthropologists (themselves reacting against what they
saw as an unduly austere British functionalism); most centrally Franz Boas (the innovator),
his student Alfred Kroeber (the systematizer), and later on Margaret Mead (the popularizer). 4
That means that none of the sociological classics operated with anything like the modern
culture concept yet they undoubtedly dealt with the “central problems in social theory”
(Giddens 1979). Accordingly, we may conclude that the culture concept is not necessary for
such a task, a claim supported by the fact that the discipline from which sociologists got the

4 See Stocking (1966) for the definitive historical treatment of the central role of Boas in crafting the modern
analytical culture concept; see Kuper (1999) for a wider ranging study linking the culture concept to interacting but
analytically autonomous traditions in England, France, and Germany; for a lexicographic analysis of the concept as used
in standard (non-academic) discourse see Goddard 2005; Sewell 1999 does a masterly job of disambiguating the folk and
analytic conceptions of culture.
concept in the first place (Anthropology) continues to plug along after having renounced it
as essentialist and reductive (Abu-Lughod 1991), and one of the major thinkers in 20th
century Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu, largely conducted his work without ever making analytic
use of the notion (although of course he took it up as “topic” of analysis). 5 How then were
the classics ever able to manage without a modern culture concept? The answer is that both
used cognate notions available from their native intellectual traditions (Levine 1995). What
were these?

2.1 The Germanic Tradition

In the case of Marx and Weber, the concept that performed the analytic task is that
of ideas (idee, vorstellung) inherited from the Kantian-Fichtean-Hegelian tradition of German
Idealism in Philosophy. Marx and Weber thus drew on a “German” (in Levine’s 1995 sense)
sociological tradition in which the “cognitive element” of action (Warner 1978) was largely
thought of in terms of “ideas.” The German tradition came in two brands; the first one came
from the Hegelian obsession with the “motor forces” of history and basically dealt with a
controversy in the so-called Philosophy of History as to which one of the two set of forces
was most important in accounting patterns of historical and social change usually
conceptualized in teleological “evolutionary” (in the pre-Darwinian “telos of history” sense)
terms.
The second flavor is (Neo)Kantian and has a more direct concern with the battle
between ideal and material forces within the individual in determining conduct and not as
macro-social “forces” or “factors” in historical societies. In the (neo)Kantian version of the
tradition, ideas are thought of as subjective conceptions of the world held by actors, which
may or may not accurately reflect its objective features. Accordingly, ideas are seen as the
creative, “active” elements determining action via relations of non-Newtonian, intentional
(final) causality, counterposed against external “deterministic” elements that push people
around via relations of physical (inclusive of the bodily instincts), efficient causation. Ideas
were thus thought of as a possible driver of action along with other forces, most importantly

5 For more details on Bourdieu as a “non-cultural” or at least “post-cultural” theorist see Lizardo (2011).
instinctual (biological) and environmental determinants (which we may refer to as “material”
for short). In this respect, this tradition linked “cultural analysis” (with this term being used
in an admittedly anachronistic way) with the problematic of “action theory” (another
anachronism as this term does not become prevalent until after Parsons).
The distinction between the “societal” and “individual” version of the German
“idealist” tradition is important because these two debates tend to be run together and
continue to be conflated in contemporary “cultural” analysis. Conceptually however, they are
thoroughly independent and rely on very different premises. The Hegelian debate deals with
(to use a modern term) “emergent” factors at the level of “societies” conceived in quasi-
organismic terms as coherent wholes. The Kantian debate deals with action at the level of
the individual. Most of the arguments regarding the Hegelian debate over ideas operated
with either no or very rudimentary references to a theory of action; the Kantian version, on
the other hand, operated from an a priori methodological presumption (somewhat muddily
articulated by Max Weber) that there were no emergent macro-social “forces” (either
“material” or “ideal”), that “society” as an organismic whole was a spurious analytic unit, and
that the the Hegelian “debate” in the Philosophy of History (of which Marx and Engels’s
historical materialism was viewed as an entry) was just a useless conceptual muddle. It was
only in the twentieth century recuperation of this debate by Parsons that problems of action
theory were again linked up to “macrosocial” issues, in so-called structural-functionalism.

2.2 Marx and Engels’s “Big” Idea

The problematic that was most poignant in the early 19th century and that was thus
the one inherited by Marx and dealt with primarily in the collaborative writings with Engels
from the mid 1840s to the late 1850s6 was the Hegelian “macrosocial” one (essentially the
middle “sociological” period between the philosophical anthropology of the early 1840s and
the “political economy” writings of the 1860s). The so-called “materialist conception of
history” of Marx and Engels essentially boils down, in between withering satire of the so-

6 These include, most importantly, the set of notes that came to be known as “The German Ideology”
(finished approx. 1846) but also the first part of the “Communist Manifesto” (1848) and the programmatic “Preface to a
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859).
called Young Hegelians, Proudhon, utopian socialists or whoever stood in their way, to
arguing that at the macrosocial level “ideal” factors as conceptualized by philosophers of history up
to that stage did not matter for explaining historical change as much as the “material” factors
of classical political economy (essentially land, labor, and capital, which “technology” being
the most important part of the latter). Note that what counts as “ideal factors” in this
tradition is essentially mostly the intellectual outputs of symbol producing elites, inclusive of
political theory, theology and popular religious doctrines, but also “philosophies of history”
or even the “philosophies” peddled by the “Young Hegelians.”7
However, Marx and Engels also counted “technical” ideas such as the ideas produced
by the classical political economists (e.g. Malthus, Smith and Ricardo) and even radical
movement actors (such as syndicalists like Proudhon and anarchists such as Bakunin) as
“ideas.” Note that from the point of view of modern “cultural theory” this conception of
“ideas” would be considered radically limited as it ignores the schemas, practices, beliefs and
normative commitments of the folk and essentially everything that is not ordered into some
expert “system” either “scientific” or “political.” Yet, this makes perfect sense for Marx and
Engels, as their primary goal had nothing to do with culture as some generic “dimension” of
society but with the role of certain “ideological” (meaning systematized and possibly
distorting) belief systems in directing social change. Their point was that rather than
directing change, transformations at the level of the “infrastructure” (unterbau) happen first,
and the “ideologues” emerge at the level of the superstructure (überbau) to justify those
changes by crafting ideas into ideology. The key issue is that Marx and Engels never talk
about anything that would be recognized as “culture” today at the level of individual action.

2.3 Max Weber’s Little Ideas

The theorist who would move the German debate over ideas to the level of the
individual level was Max Weber. Rivers of ink have been spilled on the issue of whether the

7 Sometimes this distinction is lost because Marx and Engels’s historical materialism is interpreted as making
statements about the balance between ideal and material “forces” at the level of group of individuals or even individual
themselves and not historical societies. Yet, there is little evidence that Marx or Engels cared about classes (or
individuals) in this sense or predicated theories taken standalone “classes” or “groups” as their referent. It was in fact
Max Weber (especially in the writings on religion) who moved the debate to this level. Most of the ideal versus material
interest debate in sociology is thus a purely Weberian and not a Marxian debate.
is a direct line of continuity between the theoretical tradition initiated by Marx and Engels
and that of Max Weber. The position taken here is that the preponderance of the evidence
suggests a radical incommensurability (in the Kuhnian sense) between Weber and the
Marx/Engels’s project. In essence, while the latter were radical “reverse-Hegelians”
concerned primarily with evolutionist issues that began in the philosophy of history and
which they attempted to move to the empirical terrain of “science,” (understood main as
classical political economy) the former is a neo-Kantian concerned with proto-
phenomenological issues of the existential determinants of human action as it pertains to the
generation of unique historical complexes at given conjunctures (Weber 1946a, 1946b).
While the solution of these neo-Kantian concerns had implications for our understandings of
the origins and trajectory of these unique historical complexes (such as “rational capitalism”)
These had no real ontological status (existing only as nominal “ideal types”), and Weber
never saw himself theorizing about them as such at a macrosocial level.
Attempts to recast Weber as a macrosocial theorist in the realist mode hinge on
extremely partial (and exegetically indefensible) readings of some of the least reliable of his
“writings” in English (such as the lectures known as General Economic History or excerpts from
Economy and Society) that downplay the bulk of the work that was actually published in
Weber’s lifetime and that he gave his living editorial approval to (essentially the writings
known as The Economic Ethics of the World Religions [EEWR]). They also ignore Weber’s
explicit pronouncements in the methodological writings that pure holistic analysis was a non-
starter both substantively and theoretically. As such, there is nothing wrong with Weberian
inspired macrosociology (e.g. Collins 1986) as long as it is understood to be a fundamental
deviation from Weber’s own line of thinking. This has implication for modern debates in
cultural theory. For instance, while it is perfectly legitimate to claim Weber as a pre-
Parsonian forerunner of “culture in action” debates (Swidler 1986), it is madness to think
that Weber prefigured (macro) debates about “culture and structure” at the “societal” level.
As first noted by Parsons, Weber’s fundamental concern was precisely with “the role
of ideas in social action” (Parsons 1938) and this approach is distilled in the two
“theoretical” essays in EEWR.8 In this respect, Weber targets the historical materialists only
secondarily. More directly located in his line of fire were all sort of instinctual psychologies
(such as Nietzsche's proto-Freudianism), environmentalism, generic motive theories of the
origins of historical complexes (such as Sombart’s “acquisitive motive” account), and other
assorted brain-dead biologisms prominent at the time. Because he was working at the level
of individual action, Weber is thus able to develop something pretty close to a modern
action-theoretic perspective on the role of “culture” in social action as long as we understand
that the Weberian notion of “ideas” is semantically much more restrictive than the modern
concept of culture. Weber does this by arguing that “ideas” as historically constructed conceptions
characteristic of given persons (or in the aggregate groups) have an independent effect on conduct,
and that this was noted precisely in those historical cases in which we see persons essentially
override, instincts, biology, generic motives and environmental pressures (all swept under the
rug of “material interests”) in order to fulfill an “ideal interest” (Weber 1946a).

2.4 Emile Durkheim’s Représentations

One of the most disastrous bits of classical exegeses enacted by Parsons (1937)
concerns his classification of Durkheim as an (inconsistent) member of a tradition of
(German?) “idealism.”9 We know now, especially after the efflorescence of Durkheimian
studies in the 1990s, that this characterization---still repeated as late as Alexander (1982)---is
patently non-sensical as there is an even deeper Kuhnian incommensurability gulf separating
Durkheim from any representative of the German idealist tradition (properly called because
it derives its preoccupations from German Idealism). We also know thanks to the pioneering
(and painstaking) work of such scholars as Stephen Turner, W. F. Pickering, Warren
Schmaus, Sue Stedman-Jones, Ann Rawls, Robert Alun-Jones and others, that Durkheim
actually belonged to a non-German-idealist tradition of French Neo-Kantianism, which

8 These are the “Social Social Psychology of the World Religions” (1946a, serving as the “introduction” or
Eilentung) to the collection and the interlude or “intermediate reflections” (zwischenbrachtungen) known in English as
“Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions” (1946b).
9 Durkheim was an inconsistent member of the idealist category because, according to the now thoroughly
discredited “two Durkheims” argument in Structure, he begins his career as an idealist (in Division) but ends it by going
“clean over” into “idealism” in Elementary Forms. These claims can only be made sense of by accepting Parsons’s
idiopathic (and exegetically obsolete) understanding of the term “idealism” to encompass any human being who
considers the mental component important for explaining action.
combined a set of problematics that while derived from the French reception of Kant in the early
to mid 19th century, featured a set of solutions actually derived from Aristotelian, Thomist,
and personalist conceptions autochthonous to the French tradition (Schmaus 2004). These
conceptual approaches have little if nothing to do (in a substantive sense if not in allusive
sense) with german neo-Kantianism.
The French Neo-Kantian tradition, systematized by such thinkers as Renouvier,
Maine De Biran, and Victor Cousin rejected the Kantian problematic of ideas, derided
Kant’s departure from the Humean skeptical argument as to the problematic origin of
general categories as a non-starter, and even questioned the whole notion that “ideas” could
be different from or “independent” from a “non-ideal” objective reality. Instead, these
thinkers, beginning with Renouvier, developed an ontology of representations (représentations)
in which the dualistic tendencies typical of the German tradition (in which ideas and material
forces fight it out to determine action or history) is renounced in favor of a “naturalistic”
conception in which représentations exist in the same natural plane as objects in the world
(thus Parsons, in his mangled interpretation of Durkheim, confused good old fashioned
Aristotelian naturalism with the German bugaboo of “materialism”). 10 Contra the German
tradition, French thinkers did not see the causality pertaining to représentations as different
from material or efficient causality (Turner 1982), thought that persons became epistemically
acquainted with concrete (e.g. “perceptual”) représentations in the same way that they became
acquainted with “abstract” (e.g. “categorical) ones (Schmaus 2004), and asserted that
représentations in this sense could fail (unless under pathological conditions) to match reality,
since représentations (like persons and their consciousness) were natural objects and thus an
integral part of that very same reality (Stedman-Jones 2001; see the essay collected in
Pickering 2000).
This representationalist ontology is adopted wholesale by Durkheim who sees in this
concept the key to the founding of a new “special” science (actually a “special psychology’)
of a particular kind of object. Because représentations were a natural object (as opposed to

10 In what follows, I use the conventional tactic in modern Durkheimian studies of using the untranslated
term représentations to refer to the original French notion, as the term is not semantically equivalent to the English word
“representation” which is beset by Germanic (e.g. Kantian) hangups not applicable to the French notion.
“ideas” which Kantians held to be non-naturalistic), they could form the foundation of a
plain-old science (in the same sense as Physics and Biology) and there was no need to go
through all of the tortured hand-wringing (productive of mostly unreadable texts) that
German neo-Kantians participating in the methodenstreit had to go through in questioning
whether scientific methods were proper or not for such non-naturalistic entities as ideas.
Instead, having travelled to the laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt as a young representative of
the best that the French intelligentsia had to offer after the national humiliation suffered
during the Franco-Prussian war, Durkheim had seen concrete institutional proof that
représentations could be studied scientifically, naturalistically, and objectively.
From the point of view of the nascent science of sociology, the issue had nothing to
do with scientific method (as with the German neo-Kantian constipation) and everything to
do with scientific object. Durkheim noted that what sociologists were lacking was not a special
method but a special “thing” to study. Durkheim “solved” the problem as follows: While
Wundt and the nascent science of German scientific psychology (and even German “social
psychology”) would be concerned with “individual representations” (représentations
individuelles) as their natural object, the “new” French science of Sociology was going to re-
direct the same scientific bravado to a set of natural objects that had yet to be dealt with in
the same vein: collective representations (représentations collectives). The only thing left to do
(e.g. Durkheim 1892) was to write an anti-philosophical manifesto proclaiming the existence
and causal preponderance (in relation to représentations individuelles) of this novel scientific
object, and their analytic resistance to armchair (read classical philosophical) introspective
methods. Collective representations are “things” (and thus a “natural kind” in modern
parlance) just like chairs, pains, atoms, and chickens, and can be studied with the same
methods and using the same old concepts of causation.
It is hard to overstate, in light of recent discoveries in Durkheim scholarship, how
incredibly alien is Durkheim’s original conceptual apparatus (Rawls 2004), methodological
approach (Schmaus 1994), and set of epistemic and ontological commitments (Stedman-
Jones 2001) from contemporary “germanic” cultural sociology in the United States. Most
importantly, how alien is the naturalistic conception of représentations (Pickering 2000) from the
(germanic!) Boasian-Parsonian “concept of culture” that continues (to paraphrase a germanic
theorist) to weigh heavily upon the brains of living American sociologists.
For instance, it is clear that neither the standard “culture versus structure” nor
“culture in action” debate fit the Durkheimian problematic because the notion of
représentations is not commensurable (once again in the Kuhnian sense) with any modern
conception of the culture concept. To wit, (the “early”) Durkheim was a “monist” organicist
for whom the issue was not, as it was for the dualist organicism of the middle-period Marx
or modern “culture and structure” theorists (e.g. Archer 1995), whether there was one
“factor” (e.g. the material or “social”) that was preponderant upon another factor (the ideal).
Interpreting Durkheim in a “germanic” mode (as do Parsons and Alexander) leads to bizarre
notions such as “Durkheimian materialism” or the even crazier idea of the “paradigm shift”
from the “materialism” of Division to the “idealism” of Elementary Forms (Schmaus 1994).
For Durkheim, the primary analytic issue was whether the whole “social” organism
composed primarily of social facts (inclusive of person to person bonds, institutional facts,
traditions, and mores) conceived as représentations collectives, held together as a unity or not.
This is the sort of formulation that Weber would have rejected as non-sensical mysticism. At
this level, the issue was whether different sets of collective representations fit together or
not. At the level of the individual Durkheim does not face the action-theoretical problematic
of whether “ideal” factors were most important than “material” factors in determining
conduct. For Durkheim all action had to be driven by représentations, (the notion of action
without representations is patently non-sensical from the point of view of the Aristotelian
neo-Kantianism under which Durkheim was reared). The key issue is thus, which kind of
representation is preponderant in determining action; représentations individuelles or
représentations collectives. According to Durkheim’s “dualist” conception of the individual, when
the social organism is whole and healthy action is driven (unproblematically) by the
appropriate (for that social type) set of collective representations although these must be of
sufficient strength and carry enough authority to subjugate the dissipative force of individual
(and thus eogistic, evanescent) representations.
3 Enter “Culture”: Talcott Parsons
As alluded to above, the biggest theoretical disaster in modern social theory consists
of Parsons’s shoehorning of Durkheim into a German “ideal/materialist” frame. All modern
Durkheim scholars now reject this formulation along with associated non-problems such a
the (non-materialist) meaning of “thing” in Durkheim’s definition of social facts, along with
the related non-shift from “materialism” to “idealism” (Schmaus 2004). In the 1970s there
was an entire anti-functionalist movement designed to free Max Weber from the cage of
normativist functionalism (e.g “de-Parsonizing Weber”). Yet a movement to “de-Parsonize
Durkheim” (e.g. Stedman-Jones 2001) has only been enacted recently among a small cadre
of specialty Durkheim scholars having little impact on social and cultural theory writ large.
But this matters, because it is my contention that modern cultural theory is the unholy
offspring of Parsons’s conceptual mixture of German neo-Kantian and post-Hegelian
hangups concerning “the role of ideas in social action” and the “balance” between “cultural”
and “material” forces at the social level with Durkheim’s (as we saw above absolutely
incommensurable) conceptual apparatus. The result is a “Germanized Durkheim”; an
analytically incoherent conceptual “monster” (in Douglas’s 1966 sense) that continues to
play havoc on the theoretical imagination of modern cultural theorists.
Parsons’s conceptual monster emerges in two steps. From the point of view of
modern cultural theory the key conceptual moves occur in two distinct periods; the “action-
theoretic” period of “the early essays” and Structure (1935-1938) where Parsons still operates
with a pre-cultural vocabulary steeped in the 19th century germanic neo-Kantian tradition
(e.g. voluntarism, ideas, materialism, positivism). At this stage, the “anthropological”
(analytic) concept of culture is absent; what we have instead are the twin germanic concepts
of “ideas” (Parsons 1938) and “values” (1935; including ultimate values). The second period
is the so-called “middle period” of normativist functionalism proper culminating in the
publication of The Social System (1951), and most importantly for cultural theorists the book
co-authored with Parsons and Shils (Towards a General Theory of Action [1951]) and the
collection of essays, mostly written from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, known as Social
Structure and Personality (1964). This period is key because it is here that Parsons becomes
acquainted with various fledgling versions of the “analytical” culture concept floating around
in American anthropology since at least 1911 (Stocking 1966; Bidney 1967) and uses them to
develop his own, and ultimately decisive for us, version of the culture concept (Parsons
1972; Kroeber and Parsons 1958).

3.1 Parsons Invents “Culture”

We have seen that the classics, in particular Weber and Durkheim, did not have a
concept that maps onto the “modern” (anthropological) concept of culture; as such, it is an
analytical and exegetical mistake (as well as an embarrassing anachronism) to treat the
classics as budding “cultural theorists.” However, this is done regularly by both cultural
analysts (e.g. Swidler 1995) and by everybody who has been tasked with writing a “classics”
question for a qualifying exam on “culture” in a contemporary graduate program in
sociology (myself) in the United States. How did we get to this sad point? The answer is that
the classics became “cultural theorists” because Talcott Parsons re-read them as such. The
story of how this happened is messy, because everybody focuses on the “rewriting” of the
classics that Parsons enacted in Structure of Social Action (1937) when Parsons still did not have
access to the modern culture concept. Everybody forgets, however, that Parsons kept
rewriting and re-interpreting the classics throughout his entire career. 11 This was especially
true during the highly active (both theoretically and in terms of institution building) middle
period that saw the publication of The Social System (1951) and various mid-career theoretical
essays (1964), when Parsons was fully equipped with a modern (analytic) culture concept
(Kuper 1999).12
Where did Parsons get an analytic version of the culture concept? The short answer, is
that he got it from the anthropologists in particular via the influence of Clyde Kluckhohn
(the leading, because he was the only, cultural anthropologist at Harvard) and the
professional link to one of Franz Boas’s most influential student: Alfred Kroeber. The

11 As we have seen, it is important to note that Parsons kept trying to demonstrate the existence of various
“convergence theses” after 1937, including the even more fantastic (and ridiculous) “Freud/Durkheim” convergence
thesis around the issue of “cultural internalization.”
12 Of most immediate direct influence was Clyde Kluckhohn the leading anthropologist at Harvard, and via
Kluckhohn, Berkeley’s Alfred Kroeber who received the first PhD in anthropology awarded at Columbia by Franz Boas.
influence of Clyde Kluckhohn’s notion of culture as “pattern” and Alfred Kroeber’s neo-
Spencerian conceptualization of culture as “superorganic” on Parsons’s thinking on this
score, the equally important influence that Talcott Parsons had on anthropological
definitions of the culture concept, as well as the famous disciplinary turf-splitting “deal”
enacted by the two doyens of American social science---such that Anthropology got to keep
the “cultural system” and sociology got “the social system” (e.g. Parsons and Kroeber
1958)---is an unwritten chapter in the history of sociology (but see Kuper 1999 coming to
bat for anthropology).
For instance, it is clear that Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) were spurred to clarify
systematize, and update the Tylor-Boas analytic culture concept right after Parsons began to
make use of his own (ultimately decisive) twist on this very notion (e.g. Parsons 1951) as one
of the central concepts of the middle-period functionalist scheme (with the other two being
the “social” and “personality” systems). As Kuper has noted, this is hugely important
because the culture concept did not emerge from anthropology as a result of an internal
conceptual development within the discipline. Instead, “it was Parsons who created the need
for a modern, social scientific conception of culture, and who persuaded the leading
anthropologists of the United States that their discipline could flourish only if they took
culture in his sense as their particular specialty” (1999: 68).
It is also clear that at that time the disciplinary identity and intellectual coherence of
the sociological and anthropological projects hung of the balance of this definitional contest,
which was precisely what lay behind the famous Kroeber/Parsons “truce” (Kroeber and
Parsons 1958), one that was no truce at all but essentially the capitulation on the part of
Kroeber to give “society” the sociologists (something that would have been, and was,
unthinkable for a Malinowski or a Radcliffe-Brown in the British context of “social
anthropology”) and keep the desiccated Parsonian version of “culture” as an idealist symbol
system made up of “patterns” for the anthropologists. The culture concept is thus as
American as apple pie and an inherent (not accidental) outgrowth of normativist
functionalism.
The career of the analytic concept of culture within anthropology has been written on
extensively both during the heyday of functionalism (e.g. Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952;
Bidney 1967) during the immediate post-functionalist period (e.g. Stocking 1966) and more
recently (e.g. Kuper 1999) and as such it is relatively not very obscure, although it is clear
that most cultural sociologists are blissfully ignorant about it. However, there is no doubt
that there had been an “analytic” concept of culture available to anthropologists since at least
the 1870s, when Tylor defined the concept in a sufficiently “value-free” way as to serve the
relevant scientific purposes. Yet, Tylor’s formulation remained inherently tied to
ethnocentric views of cultural evolution that saw something like Victorian era England as the
pinnacle of civilization (with “Australians” at the bottom and the “Chinese” in between). As
such Tylor’s famous “complex whole” rendering of the culture concept, in spite of the
largely inaccurate hagiography enacted by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) remained indelibly
tied to 19th century (racist) version of the concept. It was in fact Kroeber’s teacher Franz
Boas, himself drawing on his upbringing in a (liberal, not racist) version of the germanic
tradition, who developed something like the modern (fully relativist) culture concept and
who used it to vanquish the last remnants of ethnocentric evolutionism and racialism still
extant in the American field. This begat the American version of (what later came to be
known as) cultural anthropology and then known as “ethnology” (Stocking 1966). In Boas,
culture becomes equivalent to the “social heritage”; essentially everything from beliefs,
values, morals, and technology that is not given by the human biological constitution is
learned by novices and is preserved and transmitted from generation to generation.
But the funny thing is that even though Boas developed this concept in early writings
before 1920, most anthropologists did not take notice. Instead, a variety of definitions,
counter-definitions, and redefinitions of culture began to accrete during the 40 years
separating Boas’s early writings from Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s emergency intervention as a
reaction to the Parsonian incursion (so much so that the latter were able to collect about 164
of these in 1952). It is obvious that no anthropologist during this period thought that
anything big for the professional status of anthropology actually rode on coming up with a
“crisp” consensual definition of the culture concept. This was an entirely correct perception.
For once Boas vanquished the bugaboo of racialist biologism, his particular version of the
culture concept seem to have done its knowledge-political job and people felt free to ignore
and develop their own twists on the idea (or more frequently, ignore it altogether).
Accordingly, other anthropological writers, following their own creative projects, began to
propose other ideas about what culture might or might not be, with some (like Sapir and the
early Kroeber) even harking back to “normative” or “humanistic” notions of culture.
Lines of division (and here I rely on Bidney 1967) began to coalesce around those
who remained loyal to Boas’s more naturalistic “social heritage” notion (which includes
artifacts, buildings, habits, techniques, mores, and essentially everything that is learned and
“man-made”) separating them from those who thought of culture in more restrictive terms
as referring exclusively to non-material, non-naturalistic ideal or conceptual elements. Most
importantly, there were those who though of culture not as a set of contents (either material
or ideal) but as a pattern (later on referred to as cybernetic “program” by both Parsons and
Geertz) abstracted from the social behavior of persons (importantly Kluckhohn was of this
persuasion, but both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead provide popular versions of this
story). This “pattern” was akin to a set of general recipes or abstract guidelines for how to
behave but did not reduce to particular bits of behavior or even the symbols via which they
are expressed. Patterns could be typed and classified, and therefore the job of the cultural
anthropologist was to uncover these and possibly come up with exhaustive list of variants
across the world’s “cultures.” One thing that most anthropologists did attempt to do, was to
tie their definitions of culture to the Kroeberian (1917) notion of the “superorganic” (even if
they were critical of the details Kroeber’s particular formulation they all liked the autonomist
implications) in which “culture” was thought to constitute its own emergent level analytically
and ontological separate from the biological individual and acting back on persons to
constrain their behavior.
It is from these idea bits that Parsons built up his own version of the concept of
culture in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to the anthropologists, Parsons understood full
well the knowledge-political implications of nailing down a culture concept, for he was
engaged in his own bit of empire making at Harvard at the time. These were the years (1946
to be exact) when Parsons leveraged an outside offer to finally take down rug down from
under Sorokin in Sociology. This would be done by agreeing to lead the formation of the
“Social Relations” department that would include a group of like-minded psychologists and
sociologists along with Clyde Kluckhohn in anthropology. Because the department was to be
a combination of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, each of the branches (in good
Durkheimian fashion) was to have its own “object.” To sociology would go “the social
system” to psychology “the personality system” and to anthropology “the cultural system”
(Parsons 1951).
Working analytical definitions of society and personality were already there, but
Parsons noted that no such neat definition existed for “culture” and that meant that he
needed to provide one. To construct his definition, Parsons combined the notion that the
elements of “culture” were ideal (cultural) objects linked to one another to form a system
(Parsons 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951); this system contained both the content via which
persons expressed their values and constructed their beliefs and the (following Kluckhohn)
more generalized “patterns” via which they organized their actions. The cultural system was
thus a Kroeberian superorganic addendum to both persons and their social relations,
hovering above them while at the same time serving as the storehouse of the system of
ultimate values that gave persons their motivations and provided the necessary order to
systems of social interaction.13
In this way, what was for the anthropologists a substantive proposal used for the
pragmatic purpose of arguing against racialist and “primitive mentality” theories (e.g. Boas
1911) became for Parsons a full-fledged analytic abstraction used---for the first time---as a
macro-level repository for all of the Germanic elements that had received separate treatment
previously (ideas, values, beliefs). It is at this point that Parsons first develops the essentializing
assumption (Biernacki 2000) with respect to culture as an analytic category installing it as a
fundamental component of the full functionalist systems ontology. In Parsons’s hands,
culture thus goes from a relatively non-committal concept used to to refer to certain habitual

13 The full definition, first previewed in The Social System and then fully brought out to the world in the famous
“truce” paper with Kroeber is “transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas and other symbolic-
meaningful systems.” Culture in this sense serves as a “factor” in the “shaping of human behavior and the artifacts
produced through behavior” (Kroeber and Parsons 1958: 583).
modes of acting, feeling, and believing along with the requisite set of material objects and
know how used by persons to get by in the world (as in the Boasian/Malinowskian tradition)
to a set of “substantialized ideal objects” (cultural objects) existing in their own ideal world
(in a cultural realm?), expressed in cultural symbols, communicated via symbolic media, and
towards which persons may be “oriented” in the same way that they orient themselves in
relation to tables, cats, and other people. Culture (while still “expressive” of underlying
sentiments and value patterns) is now part of the “furniture” of the world.

3.2 Culturalizing the Classics

Parsons basic conceit was that while this particular concept “culture” could of course
not be found in any of the classics, they somehow had intuited something pretty close to it
except that they did not have the right words for it. In Parsons’s (fantastic) proposal,
“Comte and Spencer, and Weber and Durkheim spoke of society as meaning essentially the
same thing Tylor meant by culture” (Kroeber and Parsons 1958: 583). This is a statement
radically ludicrous in its brazen anachronism and completely inaccurate in every word. We
know now for a fact that what Tylor meant by culture had little to do with what Boas meant
by culture, which had even less to do with what Parsons meant by culture. Regardless, for
Parsons, given that the classics had a concept of culture (except that it was “society” and
except that they really did not) then it was perfectly fine to simply project, his own invented
notion of culture as behaviorally relevant symbolic patterns transmitted from generation to
generation to Durkheim and Weber without remainder. By culturalizing the classics, Parsons
is able to “demonstrate” that Durkheim and Weber “converge” once again (but the 1950s
convergence argument is not quite the same as the 1930s one) because it turns out that they
were talking about two sides of the same coin: objective culture (existing as “patterns” in a
superorganic system) and subjective culture (existing as internalized norms, values, and ideas
about the world inside the person).
The key move in this “middle” period is therefore the integration of Parsons twist on
the anthropological concept of culture into the early action-theoretical problematic
(essentially swapping the 19th century germanic notion of “ideas” for the his notion of
culture), the incorporation of Kroeber’s (1917) notion of “superorganic” culture pattern into
the functionalist macro-sociology, and the proposal that the (Weberian) action-theoretical
level could be joined to the (Durkheimian) macro-social level via the theory of
“internalization,” a pseudo-Freudian concept that Parsons not only devised whole cloth but
which he later went on to claim Durkheim had also come up with independently from “Freud.”
Parsons goes on to propose the implausible notion that because Durkheim and Freud had
“converged” on the same (bizarre) notion that therefore the convergence spoke (in a perfect
circle) to the scientific validity of the notion. The foundational Parsonian moves (essentially
defining the basic set of problems of modern cultural theory) have had disastrous conceptual
consequences.
In essence, middle-period Parsons replaces Weber’s 19th century focus on “ideas”
(even if he earlier endorsed it; see Parsons 1938) and Durkheim’s focus on “representations”
in favor of a hyper-inflated and hypostatized version of the culture concept. But we have
also seen that Parsons’s concept was not the anthropologists concept; it was an idealist
abstraction that separated culture from “society” (or social structure) as a sui generis entity.
Not even Kluckhohn was ready to go that far for it implied that anthropology was no longer
in the business of studying society (although clearly Kroeber was willing to play).
Finally we have also seen that while basic elements from which Parsons cobbled
together his version of the concept seems deceptively harmless and all were available in
Parsons’s milieu; but together they generate a powerful conceptual monster. In the Parsonian
recasting of the modern anthropological concept, culture becomes a “superorganic” system of
ideal elements (but most importantly beliefs, norms, and values) expressed in significant
symbols and communicated via symbolic media (e.g. language) that act to constrain (following
Parsons favorite recourse to cybernetic metaphors) via a top-down “pattern maintaining”
process both action (for agents) and patterns of interaction (for social systems) (Parsons
1951).14 Under the middle-period scheme, Durkheim’s concern with “collective
representations” now comes to be recast as a concern with (institutionalized) elements of the
“cultural system,” thus taking care of culture’s public, external side. Weber’s concern with

14 On the quite nonsensical--in Wittgenstein’s sense---status of the very idea that something like “culture” as
conceived in the analytic sense can “constrain” see Martin (2015, chapter 2).
subjective “ideas” then gets recast into a concern with the subjective (internalized) elements
of the same pseudo-Durkheimian cultural system.
Durkheim fixes Weber by providing him with a theory explaining why cultural
worldviews come to acquire validity and authority, and Weber fixes Durkheim by providing
him with a theory explaining how external culture comes to acquire subjectively binding
forms for the actor and comes to be directly implicated in driving and motivating action. 15
Properly anthropologized, the classics now provide justification for a “culturalist
functionalism” that is “cultural” through and through, in which “culture” had an external
order (in terms of the patterning of symbolic elements in the cultural system) and an internal
order (in terms of the patterning of internalized norms and value orientations in the
personality). The Parsonian problem of external patterning is taken up by Geertz and yields
the modern problematic of “interpretation” around the (fuzzy) notion of “cultural system”
(Geertz 1973). The problem of internal patterning was taken up by Parsons’s more directly
(in the middle period work) and resulted in the unwieldy edifice of “socialization theory” in
normativist functionalism. Let us take a closer look at this mess, as it is important for the
overall story.

3.1 Classical Socialization Theory

Textbook introductions to normativist functionalism usually propose that Parsons
thought that social order was accomplished via “socialization” whereby this process reduces
to the “internalization of values.” This account. while correct in spirit is actually summarily
incorrect in the most consequential details. The problem is that by focusing on “values” as
the central element that is allegedly internalized, it ignores a fundamental shift in Parsons’s
thinking, one that is crucially involved in his incorporation of the anthropological theory of
culture into the normativist-functionalist scheme.
As we saw above, the Parsons of the 1930s (up an including the so-called “early
essays” (esp. 1935, 1938) and the uber-classic Structure of Social Action, is still operating with a

15 As Parsons acknowledges in his last published statement in this regard, “Durkheim did not work out a
Weberian analysis of the various steps between religious commitment and obligations in the field of social action,
especially in what he called the profane sphere, but the congruence with Weber s analysis is quite clear” (Parsons 1972:
259)
“pre-cultural” vocabulary one that still tethers him more or less directly to two 19th century
germanic sources, one the germanic cultural vocabulary of “ideas” (e.g. 1938) and the
Americanized neo-Kantian vocabulary of “values” (e.g. 1935). Both of these terms appear in
Structure, and provide the first attempt to “update” the 19th century classics for Parsons’s
20th century theoretical concerns. Because the Germanic language of ideas and values was
already closer to Weber (and Parsons for biographical and intellectual reasons was at this
point just an American broker for the transatlantic importation of the Germanic tradition
into sociology) Weber does not come off too badly in Structure. As we have already seen, the
theorist that gets absolutely mangled is Durkheim, because Parsons has to retrofit the
awkward vocabulary of “ideas” to a theorist for whom this was a meaningless concept.
However, the more important point is that there is a fundamental shift in Parsons’s
vocabulary post-structure, so that the classical theory of internalization does not reduce to a
“value internalization” account. Instead, the little-discussed Freud/Durkheim convergence
(that it was even more exegetically preposterous than the Weber/Durkheim convergence
thesis at the center of Structure is not important) comes to play a key role. In this respect, few
contemporary theorists actually comprehend the radicality of Parsons’s proposal at this
“middle period” stage, because they still confuse the Parsonian model of enculturation with
the value internalization account and dismiss it as a “special” and not a “general” proposal.
The key is to realize that Parsons came to realize that both “values” and the broader
“conceptual schemes” through which social actors come to know and classify the entire world
of objects, agents, and situations (essentially what we moderns use the term “culture” to
refer to) have to be internalized. Thus, any theory that presupposes that persons internalize
the basic categories with which they make sense of the world from the external environment
is still essentially consonant with the a “Parsonian” model.
Parsons only tweak on Freud consists in his chiding him for not having a
(“Durkheimian”) theory of cognitive socialization. According to Parsons Freud’s mistake
was precisely to think that only normative standards externally (e.g. culturally) specified and
thus internalized within the personality as the “Superego” but that the organism does need
to internalize a cognitive apparatus with which to make sense of the object-environment,
relying instead on a pre-social, naturally given (and thus always veridical) system of
perception and cognition. For Parsons, (as for most sociologists of culture) this is mistake.
In Parsonese, Freud, “failed to take explicitly into account the fact that “the frame of
reference in terms of which objects are cognized, and therefore adapted to, is cultural and
thus cannot be taken for granted as given, but must be internalized” (Parsons 1964: 23).
One ironic consequence of not recognizing that Parsons’s theory changes
dramatically once the early language of “ideas” and “values” is junked and the theory goes
“full cultural” is that even though contemporary cultural sociologists are quick to reject the
Parsonian value-internalization account, they continue to abide by the Parsonian model of
cognitive socialization. In essence, most sociologists continue to believe that people share
cultural contents (e.g. worldviews and beliefs) because they internalize those contents from
the larger culture. Any theory that presupposes that persons introject the basic categories
with which they make sense of the world from the external environment is still essentially a
“Parsonian” theory of enculturation even if the adjective Parsonian has come to (wrongly)
be limited to the “value internalization” account.
Accordingly, the Parsonian theory of culture and cognition is (discouragingly) hard to
distinguish from contemporary approaches, especially in presuming the wholesale
internalization of entire conceptual schemes by socialized actors. For instance, Jeffrey
Alexander chides post-functionalist conflict theory for failing to emphasize “…the power of
the symbolic to shape interactions from within, as normative precepts or narratives that
carry internalized moral force” (Alexander 2003: 16; italics added; see also Pp. 152-153 of the
same book on the internalization of cultural codes). Eviatar Zerubavel for his part notes,
that when it comes to the “logic of classification,” by the age of three a child has already
“internalized conventional outlines of the category ‘birthday present’ enough to know that, if
someone suggests that she bring lima beans as a present he must be kidding” (1999: 77, our
italics).
These so-called “contemporary” accounts are simply not conceptually distinguishable
in any way from the culturalized Parsonianism of the middle period (which goes to tell you
that just because somebody writes something today it does not make contemporary). Thus,
rather than being some sort of ancient holdover from functionalism, a model pretty close to
Parsons’s Durkheimian Freudianism continues to be used by contemporary theorists,
whenever those theorists wish to make a case for enculturation as a form of mental
modification via experience. There do exist a family of contemporary proposals that is truly
“post-functionalist” in the sense of recasting the question of culture in action away from
issues of “internalization,” this leads us to a consideration of “contemporary” cultural
theory.

4 Contemporary Cultural Theory: Fighting the Parsonian Ghost in the

Machine
From this account, it is easy to see that the culturalized functionalism of the middle-
period Parsons provides a skeleton key to understand contemporary cultural theory. The
classic text is Swidler (1986) who essentially uses sound pragmatist sensibilities to develop a
“negative” (in the old fashioned photographic sense) theoretical system in which the two
basic premises of culturalized functionalism are denied. In Swidler there is no “internal”
cultural order (because actors don’t “deeply internalize” any culture) nor is there any
“external” cultural order because culture does not exist outside of people’s heads in the form
of tightly structured systems. Instead, actors are only lightly touched by culture (learning
what they need ignoring the rest) and draw on disorganized external cultural elements in
expedient ways. We may refer to this “negative” of culturalized functionalism as the “cultural
fragmentation” model. This account is essentially hegemonic in contemporary cultural
analysis and heterodox positions today (e.g. Vaisey 2009; Alexander 2003) can only be
understood within the context of this hegemony. A good entry into this debate thus is the
quasi-functionalist problematic of “cultural depth” opened up by Swidler (1986) and
repeatedly revisited by subsequent cultural theorists (e.g. Sewell 1992, Patterson 2014).

4.1 The Problem of “cultural depth”

As we have seen, Between the 1930s and 1950s, it was the synthetic work of Parsons
(Parsons 1937; Parsons 1951; Parsons and Shils 1951) that provided the first fully developed
account of how some cultural elements acquire the capacity to become significant in their
capacity to direct action. Parsons’s centerpiece proposal was that some cultural elements
come to play a more significant role in action because they are subject to an internalization
process whereby they come to form an integral part of the cognitive and motivational
makeup of the actor. This internalization mechanism, as a particularly powerful variant of
the learning process, arranges cultural elements according to a gradient of “cultural depth.”
Cultural elements that are deeply internalized are more crucial in determining an actor’s
subjective stances towards a wide range of objects across an equally wide range of settings
and situations than elements towards which the actor only owes “shallow” allegiance.
We have also seen that contemporary cultural theory can be read as a repeated
attempt to relax the stipulation that cultural power derives from “deep internalization”
(Swidler 1986; Sewell 1992). The guiding observation is that individuals do not seem to
possess the highly coherent, overly complex and elaborately structured codes, ideologies or
value systems that the classical theory expects they should possess (Martin 2010). Instead of
regular demonstrations of the possession of coherent cultural systems on the part of
“socialized” agents what these newer “toolkit” theories suggest (and what the empirical
evidence appears to support) is that persons do not (and cognitively cannot) internalize
highly structured symbolic systems in the ways that classical socialization accounts portray.
These cultural systems are simply too “cognitively complex” to be deeply internalized;
people simply wouldn’t be able to remember or keep straight all of the relevant (logical or
socio-logical) linkages (Martin 2010).
Instead, as Swidler (2001) has pointed out, much coherence is actually offloaded
outside of the social agent and into the external world of established institutional
arrangements, objectified cultural codes and current relational commitments. That is,
“cultural meanings are organized and brought to bear at the collective and social, not the
individual level” (Swidler 2008: 279), and gain whatever minimal coherence they can obtain
“out of our minds” through concrete contextual mechanisms-instead of “inside” them.
However, this is not a return to functionalism because external culture is also unstructured,
acquiring whatever “coherence” it has via extra-cultural (political, economic, institutional)
means (Sewell 2005).
This view of internal and external culture as “fragmented,” “contradictory,” “weakly
bounded” and “contested” has become the de facto standard in contemporary discussions in
cultural sociology (e.g. Sewell 2005: 169-172), cognitive sociology (e.g. DiMaggio 1997) and
“post-cultural” anthropology (e.g. Hannerz 1996), the latter of whom have thoroughly
rejected the “myth of cultural integration” (Archer 1985) inherited from culturalist
functionalism. Contemporary cultural theory thus relies primarily on an unquestioned
conception of cultural fragmentation. What is distinctive about the cultural fragmentation
model in relation to its Parsonian counterpart is (a) its primary empirical motivation (the
failure of persons to display highly structured ideologies), (b) its rejection of any form of a
positive account of subjective modification of the actor via cultural transmission, and (c) its
theorization of the “power” of culture as located “outside of the head” of the actor.
As Swidler noted in her classic paper, “[p]eople do not build lines of action from
scratch, choosing actions one at a time as efficient means to given ends. Instead, they
construct chains of action beginning with at least some pre-fabricated links” (1986: 276,
italics added). This implies a critique of socialization models that operate via the
“psychological modification” of actors: “[c]ulture does not influence how groups organize
action via enduring psychological proclivities implanted in individuals by their socialization.
Instead, publicly available meanings facilitate certain patterns of action, making them readily
available, while discouraging others” (Swidler 1986: 283). What is appealing about the
fragmentation formulation is that we get to keep the phenomenon of interest (e.g. systematic
patterns of human social behavior) without relying on the suddenly doubtful assumption
than an entire model of the social world or a whole system of values or logically organized
conceptual scheme has to be internalized by social agent (Martin 2010).
Contemporary cultural theorists are thus nearly unanimous in proposing a common
mechanism that accounts for how “coherence is possible” when the norm is that culture
tends toward incoherence; cultural coherence is possible through external structuration. The
specific form in which external structuration mechanisms are theorized is less important
than the agreement on this basic point. For instance, Sewell (2005: 172-174) points to
mechanisms of power and constraint as the source of external structuration. Through the
systematic “organization of difference” by powerful institutional actors (and counter-
movements) cultures can become (quasi)coherent. DiMaggio (1997: 274), drawing on
research from the cognitive sciences (broadly defined), argues that the “sources of stability in
our beliefs and representations” should not be sought in the structure of our minds but
rather in “cues embedded in the physical and social environment” (see also Shepherd 2011).
The point to keep in mind is that coherence does not exist “inside of people’s heads”
but instead is offloaded towards “the efforts of central institutions and the acts of organized
resistance to such institutions” (Sewell 2005: 174). From this perspective, persons do not
need to internalize highly coherent sets of classificatory structures and “value systems” in
order for their action to be “systematic” since a lot of the “systematicity” and regularity in
human action actually lies outside, in the world of objectified institutions and situational
contexts (Swidler 2001). In the contemporary conception, culture is not possessed in a
“deep” way, but rather in a “shallow,” disorganized fashion that requires structuring and
support from the external social environment to produce coherent judgments.

4.2 Reactions to the (Over)reaction

If the cultural fragmentation reaction against culturalist functionalism is the
contemporary orthodoxy, then it is easy to predict the shape that the heterodoxy has to take
(Patterson 2014). Either one tries to bring back some semblance of theorizing the “internal”
order of culture as embodied in actors (Vaisey 2009) or one tries to bring back a conception
of the strong external patterning of culture. This first route has been followed by
contemporary cultural theorists who draw on post (or non) functionalist theoretical
traditions (e.g. practice theory) to develop a conception of internalization that is not subject
to Swidlerian objections.
The rising appeal of Vaisey’s (2009) appropriation of the discursive/practical
consciousness distinction (Giddens 1979), and his importation of “dual process” models
from moral psychology, in order to suggest that culture can be internalized in both weakly
and strongly patterned ways can be traced to this. In the same way, revivals of “strong
external patterning” of the “superorganic” element of culture such as Alexander (2003) or
Reed (2011) attempt to conceptualize this patterning without relying on the problematic
(quasi-organicist) conception of culture as a “system.” Instead, these analysts have attempted
to revive neo-Saussurean conceptions of patterning as systems of binary codes, which license
strong theoretical proclamations as to the coherence of culture, and justify an
“interpretative” (textualist) approach to cultural explanation. This is of course a
methodological approach that was advocated by Geertz (1973) but which was not quite
compatible with the Parsonian notion of the “cultural system” that he was conceptually
stuck with (at least in the core essays written in the 1960s). Today these heterodox
conceptions of both the internal and external order of culture compete against still
hegemonic fragmentation ideas for explanatory prevalence.

4.3 Whatever Happened to the Cultural System?

A rather unremarked aspect of contemporary cultural theory in American sociology is
that while some version of the fragmentation model is usually the first thing cultural
sociologists trot out of their toolkit when trying to explain something there has been a
simultaneous movement to see strong patterning in cultural systems at a “deep level” and to
see cultural fragmentation as a surface mirage. These “strong program” sociologists, tend
point to culture as the fundamental dimension of social reality and link a methodological
interpretivism to a substantive conception of culture as a “system of signs.” This approach,
seemingly antithetical to the fragmentation idea, is actually a close cousin of it and emerges
from the same set of problematics inherited from Parsons.
Recall that Parsons’s main contribution was to develop a culture concept that made
robust assumptions about the makeup, nature, of culture as a macro-level ontological
category. These were ideas that a lot of anthropologists had played around with (inclusive of
the more brilliant Boas students such as Sapir and Kroeber) but which none had
systematically laid out (Kuper 1999). It is Parsons that comes clean and offers the notion of
the “cultural system” as a scientific object of study. However, it was an upstart student in the
department of social relations, Clifford Geertz, who runs away with the culture notion of
“cultural system” and actually cashes in on the analytic potential of Parsons revolutionary
notion. In a series of essays written primarily in the 1960s (collected in 1973 in the classic
Interpretation of Cultures), Geertz is able to formulate both an evolutionary/naturalistic
foundation for the culture concept and a non-naturalistic, “interpretative” methodological
manifesto that Geertz seduced everybody into thinking that it followed from that foundation.
Geertz’s approach was masterful in the knowledge political sense; for Geertz sees Parsons
“gift” of culture to anthropology and ups the ante by taking this gift and using it to argue
into irrelevance the other two denizens of the Parsonian systems ontology (personality and
society).
Geertz thus squares the Germanic circle by separating ontology from methodology or
more accurately by using ontology to justify methodology. Not surprisingly, this
“methodology” is nothing but good old fashioned “interpretation” (verstehen) updated with
nods to (for Geertz) contemporary anti-naturalistic arguments in the philosophy of action
(Gilbert Ryle) and hermeneutics (Ricoeur). In this way, Geertz becomes the conduit via
which a host of Parsonian problematics (and associated issues from the Kantian/Hegelian
Germanic legacy that Parsons only provide pseudo-solutions to) have been passed along to
modern cultural theorists in essentially pristine forms. How did he do it?
Geertz basically used a loophole in the Parsonian charter. For while Parsons was
content to define a new object of study for anthropology and even give clues as to its
ontological constitution, he said little about how to study it. The hint, left hanging by Parsons
for Geertz to take, was that while an ontology of systems emphasizing the cold scientific
language of homeostasis, pre-requisites, cybernetic control, and so on was appropriate for
the more “physical,” or “material” (or biological) of the three systems (society and
personality) given the symbolic nature of culture its “systemness” was not to be conceived in
the same physicalist terms. Instead, the cultural system was held together by meaningful links
and its mysteries could only be cracked by mixing a scientistic language that conceived of the
cultural system as a sort of “program” or “code” (similar to the genetic code; Parsons 1973)
with a humanistic language that cracked that code by relying on the deep interpretation of
meaningful action.
The classic text here is the early essay on the “The Impact of the Concept of Culture
on the Concept of Man” (Geertz 1973: 33-54; originally published in 1965). Here Geertz
takes on Parsons indirectly by attacking Kluckhohn’s attempt to pursue a sort of Parsonian
“psychological anthropology” aimed at uncovering and typologizing universal cultural
patterns across societies. Geertz’s point is simple: culture does not exist in dessicated cross-
cultural generalities tied to the empty generalizations of psychological science, but in the
irreducibly unique configuration that produce the uniqueness of each cultural display in
explicit symbolism. These configurations (which may include the shaping of a person’s most
intimate desires and worldviews) can only be described not catalogued and it is in the sum total
of these time and place specific configurations of cultural elements that “generality” will be
found in the anthropological project. While it is true that in theory the nature of culture can
be described as a Parsonian/Kluckhohnian “pattern,” “program,” or “code,” culture does
not present itself to the analyst in this form; its concrete reality can only be ascertained in the
specific symbolic manifestations by which it shapes even the most exotic patterns of
behavior and action.
This attempt to bring together the most abstract of naturalistic generalities (e.g. the
notion that culture is a program, like a computer program or a code like the genetic code)
with the most specific of humanistic particularities is the key to Geertz’s counter-charter;
and in this sense the nod to culture as a naturalistic phenomenon that emerges in evolution
as an external control system (in the form of programs or models) for human behavior is
only a sideshow (as in the much overhyped essay “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution
of Mind”; see e.g. Sewell 1997). For what Geertz was after was the foundations for an
analytic approach to cultural analysis that justified a purely non-naturalistic understanding of
the sources of human action. The naturalistic fact that persons are born incomplete and
depend on cultural programming to become “fully formed,” leads to an anti-naturalistic
conclusion: that these foundational meanings can only be grasped via hermeneutic methods
not psychological needs, biological underpinnings, or appeals to the functional prerequisites
of social systems (Kuper 2009).
For Geertz, the most important thing is that people necessarily become entangled in
and external “web of meanings” to give pattern and meaning to their actions; both the social
and personality system are just the formless clay upon which the form giving powers of the
cultural system work to produce the phenomena available for analytic inspection (see Reed
2011 for an update on this argument). While cultural theorists tend to read the Geertzian
“web of meanings” aphorism as a nod to Weber, it is important to understand that this is
actually a nod to Parsons’s “culturalized” Weber and that Geertz understood both the
ontological existence of this cultural web and people’s entanglement in it in a quite
substantive (rather than a heuristic) sense. In this last respect, if Geertz’s is supposed to have
provided an early preview of the “strong program” in cultural analysis (Alexander 2008),
then it is clear that contemporary versions of this approach are a direct outgrowth of the
Parsonian notion of culture. It is thus no wonder that it is precisely perennially recovering
functionalists (e.g. Alexander 2003) who have gone farthest in reviving a neo-Parsonian
notion of culture as both an autonomous (substantive) “realm” with an internal structure
modelled after language (replacing talk about “programs” with neo-Saussurean talk of
“semiotic codes” but keeping the underlying Parsonian definition essentially the same)
designed to give “order and meaning” to individual and collective action.
All of this is of much more than purely historical interest; for the Parsonian ghost
continues to haunt the sociological appropriation of the cultural concept via the massive
influence that the Geertzian inflection has had on practitioners of this approach especially in
sociological “cultural studies” (Alexander 2003; Reed 2011) and “cultural history” (Sewell
1997). As Biernacki (2000) notes, two foundational assumptions of Parsons idiosyncratic
rendering of the culture concept (which he blames Geertz for) continue to haunt us to this
very day. The first assumption (“the essentializing premise”) is the ontological rendering of
the cultural system as an addendum to the social and material world manifested as an
assemblage of signs and signifying objects and actions. The second assumption (“the
formalizing premise”) is the endowment of this hypostatized cultural system with an
endogenous capacity to generate “meaning” and signification via the internal interplay of
signs only in isolation from action, cognition, and social structure. Both of these Biernacki
traces to Geertz but as we have seen, Geertz only clarified features of the culture concept
that were already explicit in Parsons’s radical rendering. 16 Accordingly, when “[c]ultural
historians and sociologists followed Geertz in reifying the concept of a sign system as a
naturally given dimension of...reality” (Biernacki 2000: 294) they were actually following
Parsons without realizing it.

5 Conclusion
Contemporary cultural theory is, in it essential aspects, an offshoot of culturalist
functionalism. Because of this lineage, it is also ineluctably tethered conceptually,
thematically, and ideologically to Parsons’s (long known to be misleading) appropriation of
the classics and his idiosyncratic but ultimately agenda setting rendering of the
anthropological culture concept. The fragmentation model that has become standard in
contemporary cultural theory is for all intents and purposes a “negative image” of the mid-
twentieth century Parsonian concoction and more recent reactions to the (over)reaction boil
down to trying to “bring back” some of the Parsonian goodies unfairly dismissed by the
hegemonic model (e.g. values, internalized culture, strong external structuration) (Patterson
2014).
In addition, contemporary attempts to bring culture as a robust dimension of reality
and as key in the explanation of social action are unwitting prey of Geertz’s radicalization of
the Parsonian rendering and his (successful) knowledge-political attempt to undercut the
Parsons-Kroeber compromise by making what would been only one element of the culture-
personality-society triad the overarching factor that swallowed up the other two. Analysts
peddling hermeneutic approaches to cultural analysis are unwitting scions of Geertz’s radical
move to remove naturalism from cultural theory by acknowledging the naturalist essence of
culture but disallowing access to cultural explanation via naturalist methods in the same
breath (Geertz 1973). In all, every single one of the problems of contemporary cultural
theory, from those related to enculturation, to the relationship of culture and action, to those
of analytical method and the ontological nature of “culture” as a dimension of social reality

16 Parsons himself (1972) was quite open to conceptualization the structure of the cultural system using
methods from linguistics.
are iatrogenic problems generated by the mid-twentieth century Parsonian intervention.
Insofar as middle-period functionalism became the model for what “theory” and
“theoretical discourse” looks like for sociologists, and insofar as it is Parsons who first
formulates and subsequently defines the “hard” problems in social theory, it is no wonder
that “cultural theory” has essentially become the stand-in for theory in general in the
discipline, at least among young sociologists who do empirical research. But what if the
“theoretical” problems that cultural theorists are grappling with are “iatrogenic,” self-
generated by the (anachronistic) Parsonian “culturalization” of the classics in the first place?
We have seen that there is little exegetical warrant to consider the classics as “cultural
theorists” as neither Marx, Weber, nor Durkheim trafficked in notions that have a one to
one match with the modern “culture concept.” Surprisingly (to some), this implies that it is
possible to do social theory and attend to its various conundra without a culture concept as we
conceive of it. In fact, it can be argued that the reason why we seem to go around and
around the same Parsonian issues is that, in spite of their self-perceptions, most cultural
theorists have not actually moved that far away from culturalist functionalism (as we saw
above in the case of cognitive internalization). In fact, it is even more surprising (given the
intellectual history) that the culture concept itself is seldom tagged by sociologists as an
inherently functionalist concept (even though the intellectual history in anthropology says it is;
see Kuper 1999). Regardless, there is no question that the culture concept is as closely tied to
functionalism as such now “dead” notions such as “latent pattern maintenance,” “need
dispositions,” and “functional prerequisites.” It is also very likely that the culture concept,
due to its indelible link to functionalism, currently functions as a theoretical trojan horse
smuggling other Parsonian (pseudo) issues into the contemporary scene. These “problems”
then become the core dividing lines of theoretical argumentation and position-takings
among cultural theorists.
Ironically, the classics provide models of how one may be able to have a post-cultural
social theory. For instance, Warner (1970), in a now largely forgotten paper, convincingly
argued that the whole of Weberian sociology can be made sense of using (a properly
refurbished version of) the germanic notion of “ideas” and the new fangled notion of
“models” (a notion that ironically has been revived in current “post-cultural” cognitive
anthropology [c.f. Shore 1996]). Recent calls to treat “ideas” seriously are consistent with a
post-cultural revival of the notion (e.g. Campbell 1998).
But it is clear that the most neglected classic in this regard Durkheim (because he was
the one most mangled by the Parsonian germanization). I am not talking about the
“culturalized” Durkheim of those who want to recruit him for a project of (germanic, and
now obsolete) “cultural studies” (e.g. Alexander 1990). I am talking about the real Durkheim
that has been unearthed and saved from intellectual oblivion in the recent exegetical and
historical intellectual work alluded to above. This Durkheim sees what people now call
cultural phenomena from a naturalistic perspective and avoids the germanic imbroglio of
conceptualizing culture in non-naturalistic terms (thus leading the “method battles”). In fact,
this Durkheim points to a coherent post-cultural landscape in which most of the so-called
“cultural” phenomena that are thought to be only accessible via non-naturalistic methods
(e.g. textual analysis, hermeneutics, phenomenology, etc.) may yield to naturalistic
approaches.
Furthermore, this “new” old Durkheim, as some perspicacious analysts have noted
(e.g. Schmaus 2004; Turner 2007), is closer to the naturalistic spirit of what has been called
“cognitive science” while avoiding the sort of tail-chasing neo-Kantian problematics that
come from banishing the cultural and the mental to an incoherent nether-region outside of
the natural world (Sperber 1995). It is no wonder that it is the most recent sociological heir
of the French strand of naturalistic rationalism (Pierre Bourdieu) who has provided us with
the only other coherent theoretical program in sociology that does not make use of the
“culture” concept for analytic purposes (Lizardo 2011).
In spite of what the future may hold, it is becoming increasingly clear that “cultural
theory” is the only intellectual site in which this future will be resolved if only for the simple
reason that it is the only subfield in contemporary sociology within which the “big
questions” get asked by empirically oriented scholars. These analysts however, must begin to
seriously grapple with the spotty intellectual genealogy of their favorite conceptual tools,
since it may be time for us, as Weick (1996) once noted in a different context, to drop those
tools and try to run to the safest space.
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