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The 1940s and 1950s were paradoxically the years of greatest dominance and the

beginnings of the decline of structural functionalism. In those years, Parsons produced

his major statements that clearly reflected his shift from action theory to structural

functionalism. Parsons’s students had fanned out across the country and occupied

dominant positions in many of the major sociology departments (for example,

Columbia and Cornell). These students were producing works of their own that were

widely recognized contributions to structural-functional theory.

However, just as it was gaining theoretical hegemony, structural functionalism

came under attack, and the attacks mounted until they reached a climax in the 1960s

and 1970s. There was an attack by C. Wright Mills on Parsons in 1959, and other

major criticisms were mounted by David Lockwood (1956), Alvin Gouldner (1959/

1967, 1970; Chriss, 2005a), and Irving Horowitz (1962/1967). In the 1950s, these

attacks were seen as little more than “guerrilla raids,” but as sociology moved into

the 1960s, the dominance of structural functionalism was clearly in jeopardy.

George Huaco (1986) linked the rise and decline of structural functionalism to

the position of American society in the world order. As America rose to world dom-

inance after 1945, structural functionalism achieved hegemony within sociology.

Structural functionalism supported America’s dominant position in the world in two

ways. First, the structural-functional view that “every pattern has consequences which

contribute to the preservation and survival of the larger system” was “nothing less

than a celebration of the United States and its world hegemony” (Huaco, 1986:52).

Second, the structural-functional emphasis on equilibrium (the best social change is

no change) meshed well with the interests of the United States, then “the wealthiest

and most powerful empire in the world.” The decline of U.S. world dominance in the

1970s coincided with structural functionalism’s loss of its preeminent position in

sociological theory.