The education of young Talcott Parsons
The most extended account of Parsons’ intellectual development is in his Daedalus article “On building social system theory: a personal history” (Fall 1970)
Parsons found his way into theoretical sociology as a result of personal and intellectual contacts that he made in his college studies in the US, England and Germany. His early academic career is a remarkable record of change and confusion, with some remarkably lucky breaks.
Peter Hamilton has an excellent biographical overview on line. "Parsons was born in 1902 into a religious family in which ascetic Protestantism was the moral base of life: his father was a Congregational minister in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and active in the social reform movement known as the Social Gospel movement. The elder Parsons was also a college teacher of English, who eventually became President of a small college in Ohio. Parsons thus spent the early part of his life in an atmosphere of American midwest provincialism and, as Guy Rocher suggests, experienced the austerity and limited social horizons typical of small American colleges in the first quarter of the century".
Clearly he was a bright and motivated student from early days. He went to Amherst College in the west of Massachusetts, intending to concentrate on biology with the possibility of a medical career, following in the footsteps of his older brother.
Amherst is described as a “liberal arts college founded in 1821 as a nonsectarian institution for the education of indigent young men of piety and talents”. The Parsons family was not indigent, but nor was it affluent. The ethos of the college was clearly progressive social ameliorism, and this impacted directly on Parsons from two of his most important teachers, Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayers. Incidentally Veblen and Tawney were visitors to the college.
“In 1923, my junior year, I was converted to social science [from biology and medicine] under the influence especially of the unorthodox ‘institutional economist’ Walton Hamilton. Then all my concentration plans were disorganised by the dismissal, at the end of my junior year, of Alexander Meiklejohn as president of the college. None of the teachers whose courses I had elected was on hand the next fall. I made do with more courses in biology, some in philosophy, includingd one on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and some in English literature”.
When the time came for graduate work he was not attracted by the American courses on offer and he was pleased to accept the offer of an uncle to finance a year of studies overseas. Knowing of Hobhouse, Tawney and Laski he elected to go to the London School of Economics where he discovered Bronislaw Malinowski who became his most important London influence. Good things happen in London! He met the woman who he married and on top of all that he was offered an exchange fellowship to Germany and he was assigned to Heidleberg which was the stronghold of Max Weber's thought. Weber turned out to be Parsons’ most important single influence and he wrote “It is significant that I do not remember having heard his name either at Amherst or in London”.
Weber’s work made an immediate and powerful impact, especially "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which Parsons later translated into English. Parsons was not a degree candidate in London and he did not intend to take a degree in Heidleberg until he found that this could be done in a year, including a dissertation (which he completed at Amherst) on “The Concept of Capitalism in Recent German Literature” with special reference to Werner Sombart and Max Weber. During his year of teaching and writing at Amherst he resolved to go thoroughly into the relations between economic and sociological theory, helped by extended discussions with Richard Meriam, the chairman of the Department of Economics.
When he returned to Amherst he was persuaded by Richard Miriam to go on to Harvard to strengthen his understanding of economics and Miriam arranged an instructorial appointment there in the fall of 1927. At Harvard F W Taussig and Joseph Schumpeter helped Parsons with his study of Alfred Marshall and L J Henderson introduced him to Pareto. As he began to outline his voluntarist theory of action, which involved the convergence of Marshall, Pareto and Weber, he found that more attention had to be paid to Durkheim but he had no teachers in this venture which involved unlearning much that he had picked up from Ginsberg and Malinowski.
And so we leave the education of young Talcott, on the brink of his first and most useful work, the reinvention of the Austrian wheel of situational analysis and methodological individualism which he presented in "The Structure of Social Action" (1937).
Parsons found his way into theoretical sociology as a result of personal and intellectual contacts that he made in his college studies in the US, England and Germany. His early academic career is a remarkable record of change and confusion, with some remarkably lucky breaks.
Peter Hamilton has an excellent biographical overview on line. "Parsons was born in 1902 into a religious family in which ascetic Protestantism was the moral base of life: his father was a Congregational minister in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and active in the social reform movement known as the Social Gospel movement. The elder Parsons was also a college teacher of English, who eventually became President of a small college in Ohio. Parsons thus spent the early part of his life in an atmosphere of American midwest provincialism and, as Guy Rocher suggests, experienced the austerity and limited social horizons typical of small American colleges in the first quarter of the century".
Clearly he was a bright and motivated student from early days. He went to Amherst College in the west of Massachusetts, intending to concentrate on biology with the possibility of a medical career, following in the footsteps of his older brother.
Amherst is described as a “liberal arts college founded in 1821 as a nonsectarian institution for the education of indigent young men of piety and talents”. The Parsons family was not indigent, but nor was it affluent. The ethos of the college was clearly progressive social ameliorism, and this impacted directly on Parsons from two of his most important teachers, Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayers. Incidentally Veblen and Tawney were visitors to the college.
“In 1923, my junior year, I was converted to social science [from biology and medicine] under the influence especially of the unorthodox ‘institutional economist’ Walton Hamilton. Then all my concentration plans were disorganised by the dismissal, at the end of my junior year, of Alexander Meiklejohn as president of the college. None of the teachers whose courses I had elected was on hand the next fall. I made do with more courses in biology, some in philosophy, includingd one on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and some in English literature”.
When the time came for graduate work he was not attracted by the American courses on offer and he was pleased to accept the offer of an uncle to finance a year of studies overseas. Knowing of Hobhouse, Tawney and Laski he elected to go to the London School of Economics where he discovered Bronislaw Malinowski who became his most important London influence. Good things happen in London! He met the woman who he married and on top of all that he was offered an exchange fellowship to Germany and he was assigned to Heidleberg which was the stronghold of Max Weber's thought. Weber turned out to be Parsons’ most important single influence and he wrote “It is significant that I do not remember having heard his name either at Amherst or in London”.
Weber’s work made an immediate and powerful impact, especially "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which Parsons later translated into English. Parsons was not a degree candidate in London and he did not intend to take a degree in Heidleberg until he found that this could be done in a year, including a dissertation (which he completed at Amherst) on “The Concept of Capitalism in Recent German Literature” with special reference to Werner Sombart and Max Weber. During his year of teaching and writing at Amherst he resolved to go thoroughly into the relations between economic and sociological theory, helped by extended discussions with Richard Meriam, the chairman of the Department of Economics.
When he returned to Amherst he was persuaded by Richard Miriam to go on to Harvard to strengthen his understanding of economics and Miriam arranged an instructorial appointment there in the fall of 1927. At Harvard F W Taussig and Joseph Schumpeter helped Parsons with his study of Alfred Marshall and L J Henderson introduced him to Pareto. As he began to outline his voluntarist theory of action, which involved the convergence of Marshall, Pareto and Weber, he found that more attention had to be paid to Durkheim but he had no teachers in this venture which involved unlearning much that he had picked up from Ginsberg and Malinowski.
And so we leave the education of young Talcott, on the brink of his first and most useful work, the reinvention of the Austrian wheel of situational analysis and methodological individualism which he presented in "The Structure of Social Action" (1937).
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