Parsons, Talcott | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The leading anglophone social theorist between about 1940 and 1965, Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), who was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on December 13, was a tireless synthesizer of ideas from classical social and economic theory, functionalist anthropology, psychoanalysis (in which he was trained), and psychology. Though he did not create pathbreaking scientific concepts or procedures, nor contribute formally to ethical reasoning, he did succeed in grafting a robust affection for scientific method (as his generation understood and venerated it) onto the massive edifice of classical social theory in a way that no one else had managed.

Parsons was the youngest child of an early feminist mother (who could trace her ancestry to Jonathan Edwards [1703–1758], the American "divine") and a Congregational minister who became president of Marietta College. Parsons first studied biology at Amherst College, then shifted to political economy of the German-historical type. After a year at the London School of Economics (1924–1925), he moved to the University of Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate there with a dissertation on "'Capitalism' in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber." After teaching one year at Amherst he became an economics instructor at Harvard University, where he became a full professor in 1944 and where he remained until his retirement in 1974. He married Helen Bancroft Walker on April 30, 1927, and with her produced three children, Anne (an anthropologist of Italian culture), Charles (an economist), and Susan. Diabetic since the age of fifty-six, he died at seventy-six while on a trip to Heidelberg, on May 8, 1979, while celebrating his formative academic experience in that town fifty-three years earlier.

In 1946 Parsons helped form a new department, Social Relations, which brought together anthropology, political science, social psychology, and sociology. His keen attention to the claims of progressive, liberalizing science, coupled with an ever-present desire to understand the ethical meaning of social action (individually and collectively) were provoked by his parentage and upbringing, plus the special context of Harvard between 1927 and 1974, where he worked closely with a galaxy of gifted students and colleagues. His fascination with the proper role for "the professions," and how groupings of professionals could serve as a bulwark against the deadening routine of bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the self-serving market scramble of the capitalist on the other, was a theme adopted straight from Émile Durkheim's 1892 book, Division of Social Labor. It dovetailedperfectly with the strict Protestant morality, left-leaning in its politics, that he had absorbed while a boy. Parsons was also president of the American Sociological Association in 1949.

At Harvard, Parsons educated four self-aware generations of enterprising sociologists who carried his structural-functionalist scheme around the country and the world, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s (with a small renaissance in the early 1980s). His leadership of the theory wing of American sociology began to wane with C. Wright Mills's (1916–1962) famous attack on "grand theory" in The Sociological Imagination (1959) and was ended by Alvin Gouldner's (1920–1980) rhetorical masterpiece, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970).

Of Parsons' fourteen books, his first one, The Structure of Social Action (1937), remains of paramount interest. In this large study of Max Weber (1864–1920), Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), and the English economist Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), Parsons claimed to have discovered a "convergence" of ideas among four geniuses that culminated in Parsons's own ideas about the nature of normatively ordered social action. He was especially interested in how societies deal with the "Hobbesian problem of order," which is understandable given the history of the twentieth century to that point. But he was equally dedicated to updating the perennial question first systematically presented by Durkheim in 1892: What is the proper balance between the rights of individuals to express their uniqueness and the needs of the larger society to constrain these egocentric rights through normative controls? Fascinated with normative "consensus" and the avoidance of costly societal conflict, Parsons created his own sociological glossary, including such terms and concepts as voluntarism, pattern variables, the AGIL scheme of action (1963), and universalistic versus particularistic norms, as well as a large assortment of two-by-two tables that illustrated the personality/social structure dialectic in terms that seemed to validate his way of seeing the world.

Parsons's statements about science and technology now seem banal because he uncritically echoed the great enthusiasm for Big Science that so much infected the post–World War II period. A comment from his 1971 book, The System of Modern Societies, is typical:

Applied science did not begin to have a serious impact upon technology until the late nineteenth century. But technology has now become highly dependent upon research "payoffs," involving ever-wider ranges of the natural sciences, from nuclear physics to genetics, and also the social or "behavioral" sciences, perhaps most obviously economics and some branches of psychology. The social sciences share with the natural sciences the benefits of some striking innovations in the technology of research. (p. 96)

His most important work in this regard is a little-known empirical study he conducted with many collaborators between 1946 and 1948, "Social Science: A Basic National Resource." Here he argued that the new National Science Foundation ought to support the social sciences (contrary to the desires of President Franklin Roosevelt), because of its "scientifically based" contribution to the war effort. He wrote op-ed pieces for the New York Times making the same point, and led the fight for equal funding for social science because of its basic importance to national security, as well as its pivotal role in the general acquisition of knowledge.

Parsons was rediscovered briefly in the 1980s by a new generation of theorists, both in the United States and in Europe, but the "neofunctionalism" that briefly carried his banner has since become moribund. His future importance will probably turn around his first book, and he will be remembered as a great systematizer in an era that no longer cared for the presentation of knowledge in such "grand" synthetic gestures.

Durkheim, ÉMile.

Gouldner, Alvin W. (1970). The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.

Mills, C. Wright. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parsons, Talcott. (1937). The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Parsons, Talcott. (1986 [1948]). "Social Science: A Basic National Resource." In The Nationalization of the Social Sciences, ed. Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor M. Lidz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Parsons, Talcott. (1971). The System of Modern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

This is the complete article, containing 1,107 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).