The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu
Critical Essays
Edited by
Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner

Unsurprisingly, the Second World War had separate and distinctive
consequences for different national traditions of sociology. After the War, the
dominant and arguably most successful of the Western democracies emerged in
North America, and its sociological traditions assumed a celebratory and often
triumphalist perspective on modernisation. The defeat of the fascist nations –
notably Germany, Italy, and Japan – seemed to demonstrate the superiority
of Western liberal democratic systems, and North American sociologists took
the lead in developing theories of development and modernisation that were
optimistic and forward-looking. The examples are numerous, but we might
mention Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) or S. M. Lipset’s
The First New Nation (1963). At the centre of this post-war tradition stood The
Social System of Talcott Parsons (1951), which involved the notion that systems
could continuously and successfully adapt to environmental challenges through
the master processes of differentiation and adaptive upgrading. In many of his
short essays, he analysed the problems of German and Japanese modernisation
and saw the United States of America as a social system that had successfully
adapted to the rise of industrial modernisation. In its assessment of modern
society, Parsons’s sociology avoided the pessimistic vision of early critical
theory – epitomised in Adorno’s analysis of mass society – because he looked
forward to America as a ‘lead society’ in large-scale social development
(see Holton and Turner, 1986).