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( Talcott Parsons)
Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902 - May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist, who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927–1973. He produced a general theoretical system for the analysis of society, that came to be called structural functionalism. This was created by Parsons to reflect his vision of an integrated social science. For many years Parsons was the best-known sociologist in the United States, and indeed one of the best-known in the world. His work was very influential through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, particularly in the United States, but fell gradually out of favour afterward. The most prominent attempt to revive Parsonian thinking, under the rubric neofunctionalism, has been made by the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, now at Yale University. Talcott Parsons was born December 12, 1902 in Colorado Springs. His father was a Congregationalist minister and later president of Marietta College in Ohio. As an undergraduate, Parsons studied biology and philosophy at Amherst College and received his B.A. in 1924. After Amherst, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year, where he was exposed to the work of Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse. He then moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he received his Ph.D. in sociology and economics. It was at Heidelberg that he became familiar with the works of Max Weber, then relatively unknown to American social theorists; he later translated several of Weber's works into English. After a year teaching at Amherst (1926–27), he obtained a position at Harvard, first in economics and then in sociology. He first achieved significant recognition with the publication of The Structure of Social Action (1937), his first grand synthesis, combining the ideas of Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto, among others.
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