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History & Background of Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was an influential American sociologist who taught at Harvard University. He developed structural functionalism, which examines how parts of society function to maintain social order and stability. Parsons argued that social order results from shared societal values rather than economic structures. He introduced the works of Max Weber and Vilfredo Pareto to American sociology and developed a theory of social action that integrated sociology with clinical psychology and social anthropology. Parsons' work examined social systems and the problems of order, integration, and equilibrium on a large scale.

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122 views1 page

History & Background of Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was an influential American sociologist who taught at Harvard University. He developed structural functionalism, which examines how parts of society function to maintain social order and stability. Parsons argued that social order results from shared societal values rather than economic structures. He introduced the works of Max Weber and Vilfredo Pareto to American sociology and developed a theory of social action that integrated sociology with clinical psychology and social anthropology. Parsons' work examined social systems and the problems of order, integration, and equilibrium on a large scale.

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History & Background of Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (born Dec. 13, 1902, Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.—died May 8, 1979, Munich, West
Germany), was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to
1973. Parsons was one of the most influential structural functionalists of the 1950s. As a functionalist, he
was concerned with how elements of society were functional for a society. He was also concerned with
social order, but argued that order and stability in a society are the result of the influence of certain
values in society, rather than in structure such as the economic system. His theory of social action
influenced the intellectual bases of several disciplines of modern sociology. His work is concerned with a
general theoretical system for the analysis of society rather than with narrower empirical studies. He is
credited with having introduced the work of Max Weber and Vilfredo Pareto to American sociology.

Parsons united clinical psychology and social anthropology with sociology, a fusion still operating in the
social sciences. His work is generally thought to constitute an entire school of social thought. In his first
major book, The Structure of Social Action (1937), Parsons drew on elements from the works of several
European scholars (Weber, Pareto, Alfred Marshall, and Émile Durkheim) to develop a common
systematic theory of social action based on a voluntaristic principle—i.e., the choices between
alternative values and actions must be at least partially free. Parsons defined the locus of sociological
theory as residing not in the internal field of personality, as postulated by Sigmund Freud and Weber, but
in the external field of the institutional structures developed by society. In The Social System (1951), he
turned his analysis to large-scale systems and the problems of social order, integration, and equilibrium.
He advocated a structural-functional analysis, a study of the ways in which the interrelated and
interacting units that form the structures of a social system contribute to the development and
maintenance of that system. Other works by Parsons include Essays in Sociological Theory (1949; rev. ed.
1954), Economy and Society (1956; with Neil J. Smelser), Structure and Process in Modern Societies
(1960), Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966), Sociological Theory and Modern
Society (1967), Politics and Social Structure (1969), and The American University (1973; with Gerald M.
Platt and Neil J. Smelser).

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