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Criticism of Bendix

In 1972, Parsons wrote two review articles to discuss the work of Bendix, which provide a clear statement on Parsons' approach to the study of Weber. Bendix had become well known for his interpretations of Weber. In the first review article, Parsons analyzed the immigrant Bendix's Embattled Reason, and he praised its attempt to defend the basic values of cognitive rationality, which he unconditionally shared, and he agreed with Bendix that the question of cognitive rationality was primarily a cultural issue, not a category that could be reduced from biological, economic, and social factors. However, Parsons criticized how Bendix had proceeded, who he felt especially had misrepresented the work of Freud and Durkheim. Parsons found that the misrepresentation was how Bendix tended to conceive the question of systematic theorizing, under the concept of "reductionism". Parsons further found that Bendix's approach suffered from a "conspicuous hostility" to the idea of evolution. Although Parsons assessed that Weber rejected the linear evolutionary approaches of Marx and Herbert Spencer, Weber might not have rejected the question of evolution as a generalized question.

In a second article, a review of Bendix and Guenther Roth 's Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber, Parsons continued his line of criticism. Parsons was especially concerned with a statement by Bendix that claimed Weber believed Marx's notion that ideas were "the epiphenomena of the organization of production". Parsons strongly rejected that interpretation: "I should contend that certainly the intellectual 'mature' Weber never was an 'hypothetical' Marxist." Somewhere behind the attitudes of Bendix, Parsons detected a discomfort for the former to move out of an "idiographic" mode of theorizing.