Parsons's Early Voluntarism*

This paper is intended as a critique of the conventional understanding of Parsons's voluntarism. On the level of analytical theory. Parsons's scheme does not refer to the conscious choices of concrete individuals in concrete social situations, but is a system of abstract causal properties characterizing social action as a process of resolution of the inherent tension of normative and conditional aspects of reality through the mechanism of effort. The recent debate about Parsons's voluntarism misses this central dynamic.