The Parsons/Merton strategy that we have identified as the medicaliza- tion/clinicalization of the classical problem of social order is remark- able not so much for its abstractive and generalizing power as for its rhetorical effect of a quasi-natural description of society as a bio- system. To the extent that the structural-functionalist discourse of con- temporary sociological theory resonates with bio-cybernetic discourse, it assumes the force of the hegemonic language of science in general and of medicine in particular. It thereby tends to by-pass the traditional conflicts and confusions of philosophical, political, and legal discourse concerned with articulating the nature of social order, justice, and the good life. However, what might be welcomed in this cybernetic formu- lation as progress in the scientific knowledge of society must also be considered from the standpoint of the political and moral life of a soci- ety and its citizens. This is so because the communicative competence of citizens with questions of political legitimation and individual moti- vation may be alienated or expropriated in favour of the diagnostic and prescriptive expertise of social physicians employing bio-cybernetic discourse. Thus Habermas (1984) has commented upon the ability of the social welfare state to absorb class conflict by redefining the politi- cal life of the citizen as a client relation. This analysis has intended to show how a key concept of sociological discourse—the social control function—can be seen to make the practice of professional sociology itself indispensable, i.e., a quasi-medical function, in the therapeutic society which it discovers, analyses, and aspires to administer. The therapeutic state in turn employs the discourse of the social sciences according to a medicolegal model whose function is to pacify clients, or to produce docile citizens.
Arthur Kroker (1984) has commented upon the curious affinity between Parsons’ ‘disembodied discourse on power’ and Foucault’s concrete studies of those discursive strategies for the embodiment of power in the instututions of health, education, work, and penology. What Parsons and Foucault share is the shift from the nineteenth- century episteme of physics to the twentieth-century episteme of biol- ogy which in turn makes the concept of power constitutive of the life
struggle and thereby assigns primacy to the life sciences. Power and control are no longer external effects of politics and economics upon the individual who struggles to minimize them. Rather, power, truth, and life are, so to speak, internalized messages encoded in the species to normalize its health, knowledge, and labour (O’Neill 1985). Of course, unlike Foucault, Parsons retains the rhetoric of nineteenth- century bourgeois individualism on the level of action while constrain- ing its commitments toward the dominant control functions on the level of the social system. The personality and social system levels are mediated, as has been argued here, through the discourse of the profes- sional social scientist whose higher individualism is exercised in ser- vice of a social system which reproduces the will to reason and value that characterizes its normal members.
The Parsonian social system, despite its apparent abstract structural- ism, is in fact a thoroughly moral system. Like Durkheim and Freud, however, Parsons conceived the morality of the social system to derive from its sociological rather than its ethical nature. Kroker’s insight is essential here because he makes it clear that the social sciences could only ‘take-off by abandoning the model of physics for the discourse of biology, medicine, and psychoanalysis. They thereby succeeded in transplanting themselves as previously external organs of power into the internalized organs of bio-power. Properly understood, the social system is a moral system and all the social sciences are life-sciences whose control functions, explored in Foucault’s studies of the discur- sive reproduction of health, sexuality, education, and labour, exceed anything previously dreamed of on the physicalist model of power. The biological sciences themselves have, of course, expanded consider- ably as strategies for the reproduction of the social system conceived in terms of the strategies of bio-power. Parsonian bio-sociology is a step away from Spencer, having absorbed current developments in cybernet- ics and communications systems thinking. The critical wisdom gener- ally dismisses these developments as evidence of Parsons’ hardened conservatism. But this misses the point. The two discursive strategies contained in the clinicalization of the socio-psychic spaces in the Amer- ican social order and the medicalization of the concept and techniques of social control are not ideological facades concealing bourgeois power relations. Rather, they open up a new field of power relations which we have called the therapeutic state and in which the life- sciences are the hegemonic modes of power/knowledge.
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