"Talcott Parson: Problems of Theory Construction." Sociological Inquiry 51.3 (1981): 173–196.

According to Professor Habermas, Parsons’s later system paradigm is in conflict, to some extent, with his earlier action paradigm, as Menzies contended; but Parsons concealed the conflicts from himself, Habermas thinks, and retained his “cultural determinism” and “secret idealism.” According to Habermas, Parsons lacked any adequate equivalent of the concept of a “life world” built up on the basis of intersubjective communication. Parsons’s unrealistic assumption of harmony between actors’ orientations on the one hand and functional requirements of systems on the other prevented him, according to Habermas, from seeing what Marx for example saw, namely that in modern society the symbolic life worlds of actors suffer distortion because of their subordination to the rationalizing tendencies of money and power.

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