Doing the Intellectual Biography of Talcott Parsons

Abstract

Writing the intellectual biography of Talcott Parsons, arguably the greatest American sociologist, is microlevel inasmuch as the subject is a single individual. But in the life and work of this giant of social thought, the history of twentieth century American society comes to the fore in a way that makes his stature paradigmatic, as it was for the state of the art of our discipline. This judgment on the value of Parsonian sociology, as a baseline, has spurred my knowledge interest in doing the intellectual biography of Parsons. My approach to the work of Parsons can be characterized through three background facts that have influenced my use of the Parsons papers accessible in the Harvard University Archives?a thesaurus indispensable for anyone writing on Parsons' oeuvre. For one, not only did Parsons' doctoral dissertation written in German and submitted to the Philosophische Fakult?t of Heidelberg University deal with capitalism as it had been analyzed by Max Weber. But Parsons remained a Weberian throughout his career, returning to the study and restudy of Weber whenever he ventured upon a new subject area until the 1960s and 1970s. Such lifelong reliance of Parsons on Weber's approach and findings in his own classic works, evidently, had to be substantiated through archival material. Second, rescuing sociology from the prongs of Spencerian social Darwinism was not only what drove German sociology around the turn of the century into accentuating methodology. But in Parsons' lifetime, National Socialism, whose racism derived from Darwinism, reigned supreme during more than a decade. The political initiatives and intentions of Parsons as he defended democracy against its enemies, even those who were sociologists themselves, needed proof that could only be found in memoranda, correspondence, and similar unpublished materials. The latter, stored as they are in the Harvard Archives, were the main source for my contention that Parsons' sociology was political in the sense that Max Weber had