Talcott Parsons discovered Max Weber by accident and carried him to America
Talcott Parsons arrived at Heidelberg in 1927 never having heard of Max Weber. He left determined to translate him, and his translations and analyses of Weber, Durkheim and Pareto underpinned the first broad theory of social systems built in the United States, making him one of the century's most influential sociologists.
Born in Colorado Springs on 13 December 1902, Parsons was the son of a Congregationalist minister turned English professor. At Amherst College he first planned on medicine, studied biology and spent a summer at Woods Hole, but teachers from the institutional school of economics pulled him toward social science. Classmates teased him as the gilded cherub. Two surviving student essays show him already arguing that technical progress and moral progress are separate processes.
A year at the London School of Economics brought him into Bronisław Malinowski's circle and introduced him to his wife, Helen Walker. At Heidelberg he earned a doctorate on how recent German writers understood capitalism, was examined on Kant by Karl Jaspers, and attended Marianne Weber's sociological teas in the library of her late husband's flat. Weber answered a puzzle that had nagged him since childhood in a religious household: what part do culture and religion play in history?
He joined Harvard in 1927 as an economics instructor, uneasy with the department's turn toward mathematics, and in 1930 became one of two instructors in the new sociology department. A study group on Pareto gave him the idea of the social system. Students included Robert K. Merton, and late in his career the German theorist Niklas Luhmann sat in on his lectures. Much of his major writing was done in a humble New Hampshire farmhouse with barely any modern utilities.
His theory held that shared values and social structures shape the choices people make, rather than private psychology alone. He led the American Sociological Association in 1949. From the 1970s younger scholars attacked his work as conservative and needlessly convoluted, and courses gave it less space, but interest has lately revived. He died on 8 May 1979.
Source: Talcott Parsons
