Do Scholars Lives Affect Their Scholarship?

When it was discovered last year that the late Yale literary scholar Paul de Man had written anti-Semitic tracts during World War II, many critics charged that his Nazi sympathies tainted the whole discipline of deconstructionism, which he had founded in the U.S.

And in the March 6 edition of The Nation University of California historian Jon Wiener writes about evidence showing that the late Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons worked with American intelligence agents after World War II to bring Nazi collaborators to the U.S. as Soviet Studies experts.

In the same way that critics of de Man's scholarship found support for their skepticism in the deconstructionist's early writings, Wiener and other scholars say that the allegations about Parsons may fuel the fires of an academic--as well as a political--debate about Parsons' life and work.

At the height of the de Man controversy, Wiener wrote a similar piece in The Nation which argued that there was a relationship between the ahistorical nature of deconstructionism and de Man's Nazi sympathies.

Both cases have raised the question among academics about how much influence the lives of scholars should have on the evaluation of their scholarship.

While no one compares de Man's explicit Nazi involvement with Parsons' efforts to recruit Soviet experts during the early Cold War, scholars continue to ask what effect the Parsons allegations will have on the still-simmering debate over his theories.

Considered the most influential sociologist of the post-war era, Parsons was famous for developing the structural-functional theory, which examines the workings and evolution of stable systems and institutions.

His work was highly influential from the 1950s until the late 1960s, when it began to draw fire from Marxist and other leftist critics who said Parsons' scholarship about the stability of systems masked a conservative defense of the status quo.

Parsons' work has been revived in the '80s by European scholars like Jurgen Habermas and American sociologists such as Jeffrey C. Alexander '69 of the University of California at Los Angeles.

But Wiener writes in The Nation article that evidence about Parsons' post-war recruiting activities may quash the renaissance in Parsonian scholarship.

Some leftist critics such as C. Wright Mills explicitly link the lives of scholars with their scholarship, saying that theories should be viewed as outgrowths of the theorist's social and economic standing.

But other scholars argue that theories should be evaluated on their own merits.

Alexander cites the example of Karl Marx in arguing that a person's scholarly contributions should not be dismissed because of questions about that individual's personal life. Recent evidence has shown that Marx was Victorian in his lifestyle and was a sexist who refused to support an illegitimate child, Alexander says.

"Does that mean that Marx's theory wasn't a theory of liberation of oppressed groups?" asks Alexander, who says there are many other instances of social scientists whose lives have contradicted their scholarship.

In Parsons' case, scholars dispute Wiener's claim that the new evidence about Parsons' recruitment of collaborators will aid those who have attacked his work as reactionary.

"That kind of argument has been made for decades," says Robert N. Bellah '48-'50, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "I can't see that his recruiting some unpleasant people in Europe in 1949 is going to make much of a difference on that score."

"Theories, if they're good, start taking on a life of their own, and they appeal to people across ideological boundaries," Alexander says.