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Comment on Itskhokin's "The Dual System"

Reading this piece from the Soviet Union is a little like watching the opening of a time capsule. The international transmission of ideas is full of lags and flows in unexpected new directions. It is known that in Moscow in the early 1970s there was considerable interest in the work of Talcott Parsons. The Parsons seminar had a rather brief period of official approval (or tolerance), and its members soon disappeared from sight. Now we find a full-blown theory from Aleksandr Itskhokin, who seems to have assimilated Parsons's ideas and gone on to build a countersystem. Itskhokin's conceptual apparatus moves within the orbit of theoretical ideas prominent around 1950, the time of Parsons's major systematic work, The Social System. Along with functionalism, role theory, and value orientations, the milieu drew heavily on psychoanalytic works, especially in their application to various national cultures and to questions like the authoritarian personality. In Parsons's major work, neo-Freudian socialization theory became the linchpin of the system, showing the mechanism by which the value patterns of society become the internalized needs and dispositions of individuals. Itskhokin parts company from Parsons on precisely this point. Not that he rejects Parsons's model as wrong. He thinks in fact that the Parsonian model of the internalization of role obligation is an adequate description of the main form of social control in modern societies. But Itskhokin wants to construct an ideal system of society as it should be. The system of role obligations is dehumanizing, egotistical, opposed to the real needs of people as recipients of social action. So he proposes an alternative form of control, in which behavior is motivated by the intrinsic rewards of immediate personal contact-in short, by a primal altruism. In contrast to the Parsonian role system, he calls this the "service system." But Itskhokin wishes to be realistic as well as idealistic. He wishes to show that the "service system" actually can exist, that there are both historical and contemporary examples of it. He is willing to compromise with the inevitable: both the role system and the service system can exist in the same society; each has its own functional imperatives which it must meet, and both fit into a larger functional division of labor. He sketches an evolutionary model, in which crucial turning points in the religious culture are noted and the trends of contemporary society are extrapolated into the future.