Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,614

This is the grave of Talcott Parsons.

Born in 1902 in Colorado Springs, Parsons grew up in an intellectually elite family out in that still young state. His father was a Yale Divinity-educated Congregationalist minister who at the time was also the VP of Colorado College, still one of the West’s only elite liberal arts colleges. Later he became president of Marietta College in Ohio, where Parsons spent quite a bit of time growing up. Parsons went to Amherst College, which was the norm in that family. He was a biology and philosophy major who wanted to go into medicine. But ideas about the world also interested him greatly and he started thinking through some of the big questions of the world. That led him on a new path.

After graduation in 1924, he attended the London School of Economics and then the University of Heidelberg in Germany, where he got a PhD in 1927 in sociology and economics. His dissertation was titled The Concept of Capitalism in the Recent German Literature. He worked there with Max Weber’s brother Alfred, no slouch himself, who introduced the young American to Max’s groundbreaking work. What interested Parsons was the question of how to combine culture and religion with an understanding of world history, which is one of the things Weber explored of course.

Weber completely blew Parsons’ mind and changed his life. Parsons decided he needed to translate Weber into English and he did so, working with Weber’s widow. He got a job briefly back at Amherst, but Harvard hired him in Economics in 1927. Trying to imagine Talcott Parsons in a contemporary Economics department and that makes me laugh. He had no interest in the field by this time anyway and when Harvard created a Sociology department in 1930, he headed over there.

Because Parsons knew Germany so well and visited it frequently, he turned much of his attention in the second half of the 1930s to the threat of the Nazis. This wasn’t just your regular opposition. He was in the media all the time–warning readers of various magazines about the real threat of Nazis, doing radio shows about it, and working on war preparedness activities at Harvard. It’s worth noting just how unpopular this was in the 30s and even until midway or so into 1941. Between a lot of Americans just being outright pro-Nazi, or at least fascist curious, and the general revulsion to war that dominated the two decades after World War I, being this public about the Nazis did nothing to increase Parsons’ popularity. By 1940, he turned his attention to Japan as well and worked with fellow professors both to increase public concern about the rising threat from that country and to increase the study of Japan in American academia. He maintained his interest in working on the war effort through the conflict and much of that became training administrators to help run these nations after the U.S. kicked out the fascists. He also worked for OSS and was going to be part of the occupation of Germany himself, but he got promoted to department chair with a big raise instead. I think I’d rather risk a stray Nazi bullet than become department chair.

After the war, he became a major anti-communist academic. He felt communism and fascism is two sides of the same coin. This was more theoretical than his anti-fascist actual work. But Parsons did have one belief that really can’t be defended, which is that all of this was driven by his belief in American exceptionalism. Americans loved this stuff for two centuries and the right still does today. In fact, you can argue–Michael Kazin has done this, though not quite on the terms I’m talking about here–that the left giving up on these ideas of America being THE BEST has actively hurt left-of-center politics and emboldened the right to take patriotism and American imagery as their own. Maybe that’s true.

Also, despite being a clear anti-communist, someone sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, accusing Parsons of leading a communist circle at Harvard. This was obviously bullshit, but basically Parsons couldn’t travel during the first half of the 1950s as he fought these charges. What an era.

Of course, Parsons is more significant as a sociologist than as a political actor, though the former is probably more interesting to most of us (or it is to me anyway). His 1937 book The Structure of Social Action did much to make his reputation as a sociologist. It’s a fairly abstract work that focused a lot on value systems in shaping human behavior and tried to create big knowledge paradigms to understand things like this. Very mid-century. He was the kind of guy who thought you could put human behavior on an axis to understand it. As a historian, I automatically raise an eyebrow, but whatever, there are many ways of learning. He expanded on these ideas in a couple of big new works, both published in 1951, The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action. These were again big theoretical type works. He was super interested in Freudian psychology as well, which mercifully is almost completely gone from mainstream thought today. So he published works in psychology as well. In 1956, he published  Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, which basically applying psychoanalysis to sociology.

By the early 60s, Parsons was starting to go out of fashion. There were a few reasons for this. His anticommunism did not age well in an era of decolonization and personal liberation. New generations of sociologists, especially by the 70s, saw him as way too conservative and ideas too disconnected to the issues of the day. Also, his writing was hard to read, even for other sociologists, and his use of theory and the complexity of the ideas seemed more pretentious than brilliant. People such as Theda Skocpol criticized his work’s inability to address apartheid in South Africa as a sign of its bankruptcy. Jurgen Habermas was another harsh critic. Now, Parsons wasn’t some kind of reactionary. He supported the New Deal and the Great Society. He was a big Adlai Stevenson guy in the 50s (this phenomena of liberals falling in love with the guy still baffles me) But his work didn’t seem to apply to the issues of the day by the 1960s, he was often quite critical of leftists and that form of sociology, whether Frankfurt School guys or David Riesman.

Parsons retired from Harvard in 1973, but continued to work all the way until the very end. In fact, he died in 1979 in Munich, where he had just given a lecture to an audience that included Habermas. He was 76 when he died and the sudden death makes me assume it was a heart attack. There is more to say about him and his ideas, but this post is plenty long and let’s take it to comments.

Talcott Parsons is buried in Old Burying Ground, Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire.

Parsons was president of the American Sociological Association in 1949. If you would like this series to visit other presidents of the ASA, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Kimball Young, president in 1947, is in Salt Lake City, Utah and Robert Angell, president in 1951, is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.