Talcott Parsons

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Parsons was born on December 13, 1902, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Edward Smith Parsons and Mary Augusta Ingersoll. His father was a Congregationalist minister and a professor in English and vice-president at Colorado College. As an undergraduate at Amherst College, Parsons studied biology and philosophy, receiving his BA in 1924. He initially considered a career in medicine, inspired by his elder brother, and spent a summer working at the Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was drawn to social science by institutional economist Walton Hale Hamilton. At Amherst, he wrote two term papers for Clarence E. Ayres that have survived as the Amherst Papers: 'The Theory of Human Behavior in its Individual and Social Aspects' (December 19, 1922) and 'A Behavioristic Conception of the Nature of Morals' (March 27, 1923). After Amherst, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year, where he was exposed to the work of Bronisław Malinowski, R. H. Tawney, L. T. Hobhouse, and Harold Laski, and made friends with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth. At LSE he met Helen Bancroft Walker, and they married on April 30, 1927. He then went to Heidelberg University, where he received his PhD in sociology and economics in 1927. At Heidelberg, he worked with Alfred Weber, Edgar Salin, Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim, and was examined on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by Karl Jaspers. The most crucial encounter was with the work of Max Weber, whom he had never heard of before. Parsons decided to translate Weber's work into English and approached Marianne Weber, Weber's widow. He would eventually translate several of Weber's works. At Harvard University, Parsons became an instructor in the Economics Department in 1927. In 1930, he joined the new Sociology Department under Pitirim Sorokin as one of the department's two instructors, along with Carle Zimmerman. He established close ties with biochemist and sociologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson and became part of Henderson's famous Pareto study group. Parsons' social action theory was the first broad, systematic, and generalizable theory of social systems developed in the United States and Europe. He viewed voluntaristic action through the lens of the cultural values and social structures that constrain choices. Although generally considered a structural functionalist, in 1975 he published an article stating that 'functional' and 'structural functionalist' were inappropriate ways to describe the character of his theory.

Reader's Guide

Talcott Parsons' significance lies in his development of social action theory and structural functionalism, which provided a systematic framework for analyzing social systems. His translations of Max Weber's work and his analyses of works by Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto introduced key European sociological ideas to the English-speaking world. Their work heavily influenced Parsons' view and was the foundation for his social action theory. Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion in American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1965. From the 1970s on, a new generation of sociologists criticized his theories as socially conservative and his writings as unnecessarily complex. Sociology courses have placed less emphasis on his theories than at the peak of his popularity (from the 1940s to the 1970s). However, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in his ideas. His legacy includes shaping the direction of sociological theory for decades, despite later critiques.

Did You Know?

• Parsons was examined on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by the philosopher Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University.
• He spent a summer working at the Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, while considering a career in medicine.
• Parsons wrote two term papers for Clarence E. Ayres at Amherst that have survived and are known as the Amherst Papers.
• At the London School of Economics, he made friends with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth, who all participated in the Malinowski seminar.
• Parsons approached Marianne Weber, Max Weber's widow, for permission to translate Weber's work into English.