190 Facts About Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism.

Talcott Parsons viewed voluntaristic action through the lens of the cultural values and social structures that constrain choices and ultimately determine all social actions, as opposed to actions that are determined based on internal psychological processes.

Talcott Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion in American academia.

Talcott Parsons was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as its secretary from 1960 to 1965.

Talcott Parsons was born on December 13,1902, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Talcott Parsons's father had attended Yale Divinity School, was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, and served first as a minister for a pioneer community in Greeley, Colorado.

At the time of Talcott Parsons' birth, his father was a professor in English and vice-president at Colorado College.

Also, both he and Talcott Parsons would be familiar with the theology of Jonathan Edwards.

Talcott Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history.

Talcott Parsons's ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the 17th century.

Gently mocked as "Little Talcott, the gilded cherub," Parsons became one of the student leaders at Amherst.

Talcott Parsons took courses with Walton Hale Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Edwin Ayres, both known as "institutional economists".

Talcott Parsons took a course with George Brown in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and a course in modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, who was a great interpreter of Kant.

Talcott Parsons showed from early on, a great interest in the topic of philosophy, which most likely was an echo of his father's great interest in theology in which tradition he had been profoundly socialized, a position unlike with his professors'.

Two term papers that Parsons wrote as a student for Clarence E Ayres's class in Philosophy III at Amherst have survived.

The Amherst Papers reveal that Talcott Parsons did not agree with his professors since he wrote in his Amherst papers that technological development and moral progress are two structurally-independent empirical processes.

In June, Talcott Parsons went on to the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in sociology and economics in 1927.

Talcott Parsons was examined on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason by the philosopher Karl Jaspers.

At Heidelberg, Talcott Parsons was examined by Willy Andreas on the French Revolution.

Talcott Parsons decided to translate Weber's work into English and approached Marianne Weber, Weber's widow.

One scholar that Talcott Parsons met at Heidelberg who shared his enthusiasm for Weber was Alexander von Schelting.

Talcott Parsons later wrote a review article on von Schelting's book on Weber.

Generally, Talcott Parsons read extensively in religious literature, especially works focusing on the sociology of religion.

One scholar who became especially important for Parsons was Ernst D Troeltsch.

Talcott Parsons's reading included the work of Emile Doumerque, Eugene Choisy, and Henri Hauser.

Talcott Parsons became a close associate of Joseph Schumpeter and followed his course General Economics.

Talcott Parsons was at odds with some of the trends in Harvard's department which then went in a highly-technical and a mathematical direction.

Talcott Parsons looked for other options at Harvard and gave courses in "Social Ethics" and in the "Sociology of Religion".

Talcott Parsons became one of the new department's two instructors, along with Carl Joslyn.

Talcott Parsons established close ties with biochemist and sociologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson, who took a personal interest in Talcott Parsons' career at Harvard.

Talcott Parsons wrote an article on Pareto's theory and later explained that he had adopted the concept of "social system" from reading Pareto.

Sorokin's writings became increasingly anti-scientistic in his later years, widening the gulf between his work and Talcott Parsons' and turning the increasingly positivistic American sociology community against him.

Talcott Parsons established, at the students' request, a little, informal study group which met year after year in Adams' house.

In 1932, Talcott Parsons bought a farmhouse near the small town of Acworth, but Talcott Parsons often, in his writing, referred to it as "the farmhouse in Alstead".

Schumpeter contributed the essay "Rationality in Economics", and Talcott Parsons submitted the paper "The Role of Rationality in Social Action" for a general discussion.

Schumpeter suggested that he and Talcott Parsons should write or edit a book together on rationality, but the project never materialized.

Talcott Parsons was very critical about neoclassical theory, an attitude he maintained throughout his life and that is reflected in his critique of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.

Talcott Parsons was opposed to the utilitarian bias within the neoclassical approach and could not embrace them fully.

Talcott Parsons was thus unable to accept the institutionalist solution.

Talcott Parsons returned to Germany in the summer of 1930 and became an eyewitness to the feverish atmosphere in Weimar Germany during which the Nazi Party rose to power.

Talcott Parsons began, in the late 1930s, to warn the American public about the Nazi threat, but he had little success, as a poll showed that 91 percent of the country opposed the Second World War.

One of the first articles that Talcott Parsons wrote was "New Dark Age Seen If Nazis Should Win".

Talcott Parsons was one of the key initiators of the Harvard Defense Committee, aimed at rallying the American public against the Nazis.

Talcott Parsons' voice sounded again and again over Boston's local radio stations, and he spoke against Nazism during a dramatic meeting at Harvard, which was disturbed by antiwar activists.

Together with graduate student Charles O Porter, Talcott Parsons rallied graduate students at Harvard for the war effort.

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Talcott Parsons wrote in a letter to Arthur Upham Pope that the importance of studies of Japan certainly had intensified.

In 1942, Talcott Parsons worked on arranging a major study of occupied countries with Bartholomew Landheer of the Netherlands Information Office in New York.

Talcott Parsons had mobilized Georges Gurvitch, Conrad Arnsberg, Dr Safranek and Theodore Abel to participate, but it never materialized for lack of funding.

In early 1942, Talcott Parsons unsuccessfully approached Hartshorne, who had joined the Psychology Division of the Office of the Coordinator of Information in Washington to interest his agency in the research project.

In February 1943, Talcott Parsons became the deputy director of the Harvard School of Overseas Administration, which educated administrators to "run" the occupied territories in Germany and the Pacific Ocean.

On China, Talcott Parsons received fundamental information from Chinese scholar Ai-Li Sung Chin and her husband, Robert Chin.

Talcott Parsons met Alfred Schutz during the rationality seminar, which he conducted together with Schumpeter, at Harvard in the spring of 1940.

Talcott Parsons had asked Schutz to give a presentation at the rationality seminar, which he did on April 13,1940, and Talcott Parsons and Schutz had lunch together afterward.

For Talcott Parsons, the defining edge of human life was action as a catalyst for historical change, and it was essential for sociology, as a science, to pay strong attention to the subjective element of action, but it should never become completely absorbed in it since the purpose of a science was to explain causal relationships, by covering laws or by other types of explanatory devices.

Talcott Parsons agreed but stressed the pragmatic need to demarcate science and philosophy and insisted moreover that the grounding of a conceptual scheme for empirical theory construction cannot aim at absolute solutions but needs to take a sensible stock-taking of the epistemological balance at each point in time.

Talcott Parsons had probably met Voegelin in 1938 and 1939, when Voegelin held a temporary instructor appointment at Harvard.

Generally, Voegelin regarded Calvinism as essentially a dangerous totalitarian ideology; Talcott Parsons argued that its current features were temporary and that the functional implications of its long-term, emerging value-l system had revolutionary and not only "negative" impact on the general rise of the institutions of modernity.

Talcott Parsons found that Schutz, rather than attempting to build social science theory, tended to get consumed in philosophical detours.

Talcott Parsons discussed Dodd's theoretical outline in a review article the same year.

Talcott Parsons acknowledged Dodd's contribution to be an exceedingly formidable work but argued against its premises as a general paradigm for the social sciences.

Talcott Parsons argued that it would fail and suggested that Kubie was viewing the question of Germans' reorientation "too exclusively in psychiatric terms".

Talcott Parsons was against the extremely harsh Morgenthau Plan, published in September 1944.

Talcott Parsons participated as a part-time adviser to the Foreign Economic Administration Agency between March and October 1945 to discuss postwar reparations and deindustrialization.

Talcott Parsons was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1945.

Late in 1944, under the auspices of the Cambridge Community Council, Talcott Parsons directed a project together with Elizabeth Schlesinger.

Talcott Parsons' report was in form of a large memorandum, "Social Science: A Basic National Resource", which became publicly available in July 1948 and remains a powerful historical statement about how he saw the role of modern social sciences.

Talcott Parsons became a member of the Executive Committee of the new Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1948, which had Talcott Parsons' close friend and colleague, Clyde Kluckhohn, as its director.

Talcott Parsons went to Allied-occupied Germany in the summer of 1948, was a contact person for the RRC, and was interested in the Russian refugees who were stranded in Germany.

Talcott Parsons happened to interview in Germany a few members of the Vlasov Army, a Russian Liberation Army that had collaborated with the Germans during the war.

In Germany in the summer of 1948 Talcott Parsons wrote several letters to Kluckhohn to report on his investigations.

Talcott Parsons' fight against communism was a natural extension of his fight against fascism in the 1930s and the 1940s.

In contrast, Talcott Parsons highlighted that American values generally were based on the principle of "instrumental activism", which he believed was the outcome of Puritanism as a historical process.

Talcott Parsons maintained it reached its most radical form in England in the 17th century and in effect gave birth to the special cultural mode that has characterized the American value system and history ever since.

Talcott Parsons maintained that the revolution was steadily unfolding, as part of an interpenetration of Puritan values in the world at large.

Talcott Parsons defended American exceptionalism and argued that, because of a variety of historical circumstances, the impact of the Reformation had reached a certain intensity in British history.

Talcott Parsons maintained that this has continued to place it in the leading position in the world, but as a historical process and not in "the nature of things".

Talcott Parsons viewed the "highly special feature of the modern Western social world" as "dependent on the peculiar circumstances of its history, and not the necessary universal result of social development as a whole".

In contrast to some "radicals", Talcott Parsons was a defender of modernity.

Talcott Parsons believed that modern civilization, with its technology and its constantly evolving institutions, was ultimately strong, vibrant, and essentially progressive.

Talcott Parsons acknowledged that the future had no inherent guarantees, but as sociologists Robert Holton and Bryan Turner said that Parsons was not nostalgic and that he did not believe in the past as a lost "golden age" but that he maintained that modernity generally had improved conditions, admittedly often in troublesome and painful ways but usually positively.

Talcott Parsons had faith in humanity's potential but not naively.

Talcott Parsons was wrong in thinking it was the end.

At Harvard, Talcott Parsons was instrumental in forming the Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary venture among sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

Talcott Parsons became strongly interested in systems theory and cybernetics and began to adopt their basic ideas and concepts to the realm of social science, giving special attention to the work of Norbert Wiener.

In 1951, Talcott Parsons published two major theoretical works, The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action.

Talcott Parsons discusses the basic methodological and metatheoretical principles for such a theory.

The details of Talcott Parsons' thought about the outline of the social system went through a rapid series of changes in the following years, but the basics remained.

Talcott Parsons carried the idea into the major work that he co-authored with a student, Neil Smelser, which was published in 1956 as Economy and Society.

The paper can be regarded as the main statement of his own interpretation of Freud, but as a statement of how Talcott Parsons tried to use Freud's pattern of symbolization to structure the theory of social system and eventually to codify the cybernetic hierarchy of the AGIL system within the parameter of a system of symbolic differentiation.

Talcott Parsons had early been fascinated by the writings of Walter B Cannon and his concept of homeostasis as well as the writings of French physiologist Claude Bernard.

Talcott Parsons called the concept of "system" for an indispensable master concept in the work of building theoretical paradigms for social sciences.

From 1952 to 1957, Parsons participated in an ongoing Conference on System Theory under the chairmanship of Roy R Grinker, Sr.

Talcott Parsons came into contact with several prominent intellectuals of the time and was particularly impressed by the ideas of social insect biologist Alfred Emerson.

Talcott Parsons was especially compelled by Emerson's idea that, in the sociocultural world, the functional equivalent of the gene was that of the "symbol".

Talcott Parsons participated in two of the meetings of the famous Macy Conferences on systems theory and on issues that are now classified as cognitive science, which took place in New York from 1946 to 1953 and included scientists like John von Neumann.

Talcott Parsons read widely on systems theory at the time, especially works of Norbert Wiener and William Ross Ashby, who were among the core participants in the conferences.

Around the same time, Talcott Parsons benefited from conversations with political scientist Karl Deutsch on systems theory.

In one conference, the Fourth Conference of the problems of consciousness in March 1953 at Princeton and sponsored by the Macy Foundation, Talcott Parsons would give a presentation on "Conscious and Symbolic Processes" and embark on an intensive group discussion which included exchange with child psychologist Jean Piaget.

Talcott Parsons would defend the thesis that consciousness is essentially a social action phenomenon, not primarily a "biological" one.

In February 1954, a colleague, Stouffer, wrote to Talcott Parsons in England to inform him that Stouffer had been denied access to classified documents and that part of the stated reason was that Stouffer knew communists, including Talcott Parsons, "who was a member of the Communist Party".

Since the late 1930s, Talcott Parsons had continued to show great interest in psychology and in psychoanalysis.

In 1956, he published a major work, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, which explored the way in which psychology and psychoanalysis bounce into the theories of motivation and socialization, as well into the question of kinship, which for Talcott Parsons established the fundamental axis for that subsystem he later would call "the social community".

Talcott Parsons spent 1957 to 1958 at the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, where he met for the first time Kenneth Burke; Burke's flamboyant, explosive temperament made a great impression on Talcott Parsons, and the two men became close friends.

Talcott Parsons had the greatest admiration for Kroeber and called him "my favorite elder statesman".

Talcott Parsons' essay is particularly notable because it and another essay, "Pattern Variables Revisited", both represented the most full-scale accounts of the basic elements of his theoretical strategy and the general principles behind his approach to theory-building when they were published in 1960.

Alvin Gouldner even claimed that Talcott Parsons had been an opponent of the New Deal.

Talcott Parsons' theory was further regarded as unable to reflect social change, human suffering, poverty, deprivation, and conflict.

Theda Skocpol thought that the apartheid system in South Africa was the ultimate proof that Talcott Parsons's theory was "wrong".

Parsons supported John F Kennedy on November 8,1960; from 1923, with one exception, Parsons voted for Democrats all his life.

Talcott Parsons discussed the Kennedy election widely in his correspondence at the time.

Talcott Parsons was especially interested in the symbolic implications involved in the fact of Kennedy's Catholic background for the implications for the United States as an integral community.

Talcott Parsons had supported Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 and was greatly disappointed that Stevenson lost heavily both times.

Talcott Parsons's influence was very extensive but at the same time, the concrete adoption of his theory was often quite selective, half-hearted, superficial, and eventually confused.

Miller remained one of Talcott Parsons' most favoured historians throughout his life.

Talcott Parsons was very enthusiastic about the Second Vatican Council and became known for the National Sisters Survey, which aimed at improving women's position in the Catholic Church.

The prime model for the generalized symbolic media was money and Talcott Parsons was reflecting on the question whether the functional characteristics of money represented an exclusive uniqueness of the economic system or whether it was possible to identify other generalized symbolic media in other subsystems as well.

In 1964, Talcott Parsons flew to Heidelberg to celebrate the 100th birthday of Weber and discuss Weber's work with Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, and others.

Talcott Parsons delivered his paper "Evaluation and Objectivity in Social Science: An Interpretation of Max Weber's Contribution".

Talcott Parsons conducted a persistent correspondence with noted scholar Benjamin Nelson, and they shared a common interest in the rise and the destiny of civilizations until Nelson's death in 1977.

Talcott Parsons was opposed to the Vietnam War but was disturbed by what he considered the anti-intellectual tendency in the student rebellion: that serious debate was often substituted by handy slogans from communists Karl Marx, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro.

Talcott Parsons was highly appreciative of Schneider's work, which became in many ways a crucial turning point in his own attempt to understand the fundamental elements of the American kinship system, a key to understanding the factor of ethnicity and especially building the theoretical foundation of his concept of the societal community, which, by the beginning of the early 1970s, had become a strong priority in the number of theoretical projects of his own intellectual life.

Talcott Parsons borrowed the term "diffuse enduring solidarity" from Schneider, as a major concept for his own considerations on the theoretical construction of the concept of the societal community.

Talcott Parsons, who was a close friend of Geertz, was puzzled over Geertz's article.

Talcott Parsons accepted and wrote one of his most powerful essays, "The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Ideas", in 1969 or 1970.

Talcott Parsons had several conversations with Daniel Bell on a "post-industrial society", some of which were conducted over lunch at William James Hall.

Talcott Parsons thus played an important role in shaping the early interest of social network analysis in homophily and the use of egocentric network data to assess group- and community-level social network structures.

Talcott Parsons became increasingly interested in clarifying the relationship between biological and social theory.

Talcott Parsons was the initiator of the first Daedalus conference on "Some Relations between Biological and Social Theory", sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Talcott Parsons wrote a memorandum dated September 16,1971, in which he spelled out the intellectual framework for the conference.

The seminar and conversations with Fuller stimulated Talcott Parsons to write one of his most influential articles, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild".

In September 1972, Talcott Parsons participated in a conference in Salzburg on "The Social Consequences of Modernization in Socialist Countries".

In 1972, Talcott Parsons wrote two review articles to discuss the work of Bendix, which provide a clear statement on Talcott Parsons' approach to the study of Weber.

However, Talcott Parsons criticized how Bendix had proceeded, who he felt especially had misrepresented the work of Freud and Durkheim.

Talcott Parsons found that the misrepresentation was how Bendix tended to conceive the question of systematic theorizing, under the concept of "reductionism".

Talcott Parsons further found that Bendix's approach suffered from a "conspicuous hostility" to the idea of evolution.

Talcott Parsons was especially concerned with a statement by Bendix that claimed Weber believed Marx's notion that ideas were "the epiphenomena of the organization of production".

In 1973, Parsons published The American University, which he had authored with Gerald M Platt.

The idea had originally emerged when Martin Meyerson and Stephen Graubard of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1969, asked Talcott Parsons to undertake a monographic study of the American university system.

Talcott Parsons officially retired from Harvard in 1973 but continued his writing, teaching, and other activities in the same rapid pace as before.

Talcott Parsons continued his extensive correspondence with a wide group of colleagues and intellectuals.

Talcott Parsons taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Martel arranged a series of seminars at Brown University in 1973 to 1974, and Talcott Parsons spoke about his life and work and answered questions from students and faculty.

In February to May 1974, Talcott Parsons gave the Culver Lectures at Brown and spoke on "The Evolution of Society".

Late in life, Talcott Parsons began to work out a new level of the AGIL model, which he called "A Paradigm of the Human Condition".

Talcott Parsons worked out the ideas of the new paradigm with a variety of people but especially Lidz, Fox and Harold Bershady.

The new metaparadigm featured the environment of the general action system, which included the physical system, the biological system, and what Talcott Parsons called the telic system.

Talcott Parsons worked toward a more comprehensive understanding of the code-structure of social systems and on the logic of the cybernetic pattern of control facilitating the AGIL model.

Talcott Parsons wrote a bulk of notes: two being "Thoughts on the Linking of Systems" and "Money and Time".

Talcott Parsons had extensive discussions with Larry Brownstein and Adrian Hayes on the possibility of a mathematical formalization of Parsons' theory.

Talcott Parsons had worked intensively with questions of medical sociology, the medical profession, psychiatry, psychosomatic problems, and the questions of health and illness.

The last field of social research was an issue that Talcott Parsons constantly developed through elaboration and self-criticism.

Talcott Parsons participated at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in August 1974 at which he presented a paper, "The Sick Role Revisited: A Response to Critics and an Updating in Terms of the Theory of Action", which was published under a slightly different title, "The Sick Role and the Role of the Physician Reconsidered", in 1975.

Talcott Parsons later used much of his influential article, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild", to discuss Bellah's position.

Talcott Parsons thought that Bellah trivialized the tensions of individual interests and society's interests by reducing them to "capitalism"; Bellah, in his characterization of the negative aspects of American society, was compelled by a charismatic-based optimalism moral absolutism.

In 1975, Parsons responded to an article by Jonathan H Turner, "Parsons as a Symbolic Interactionist: A Comparison of Action and Interaction Theory".

Talcott Parsons acknowledged that action theory and symbolic interactionism should not be regarded as two separate, antagonistic positions but have overlapping structures of conceptualization.

Talcott Parsons regarded symbolic interactionism and the theory of George Herbert Mead as valuable contributions to action theory that specify certain aspects of the theory of the personality of the individual.

Talcott Parsons criticized the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer since Blumer's theory had no end to the openness of action.

Talcott Parsons regarded Blumer as the mirror image of Claude Levi-Strauss, who tended to stress the quasi-determined nature of macro-structural systems.

Action theory, Talcott Parsons maintained, represented a middle ground between both extremes.

In 1976, Talcott Parsons was asked to contribute to a volume to celebrate the 80th birthday of Jean Piaget.

Talcott Parsons contributed with an essay, "A Few Considerations on the Place of Rationality in Modern Culture and Society".

Talcott Parsons characterized Piaget as the most eminent contributor to cognitive theory in the 20th century.

In 1978, when James Grier Miller published his famous work Living Systems, Talcott Parsons was approached by Contemporary Sociology to write a review article on Miller's work.

Talcott Parsons complained about Miller's lack of any clear distinction between cultural and non-cultural systems.

Talcott Parsons had visited Japan for the first time in 1972 and he gave a lecture on November 25 to the Japanese Sociological Association, "Some Reflections on Post-Industrial Society" that was published in The Japanese Sociological Review.

In early spring, Talcott Parsons accepted the invitation, and on October 20,1978, Talcott Parsons arrived at the Osaka Airport, accompanied by his wife, and was greeted royally by a large entourage.

Talcott Parsons gave his first public lecture to a huge mass of undergraduates, "The Development of Contemporary Sociology".

Talcott Parsons lectured on organization theory to the faculty and the graduate students from the Departments of Economics, Management and Sociology.

The Talcott Parsons flew back to the US in mid-December 1978.

Talcott Parsons had especially been captivated by certain aspects of Zen Buddhism.

Talcott Parsons told his friends that after his experience in Japan, he was going to reconsider certain aspects of his interpretation of the origins of modern civilizations.

Talcott Parsons died May 8,1979, in Munich on a trip to Germany, where he was celebrating the 50th anniversary of his degree at Heidelberg.

Talcott Parsons believed that objective reality can be related to only by a particular encounter of such reality and that general intellectual understanding is feasible through conceptual schemes and theories.

Generally, Talcott Parsons maintained that his inspiration regarding analytical realism had been Lawrence Joseph Henderson and Alfred North Whitehead although he might have gotten the idea much earlier.

Talcott Parsons developed his ideas during a period when systems theory and cybernetics were very much on the front burner of social and behavioral science.

Talcott Parsons compares the constitutive level of society with Noam Chomsky's concept of "deep structure".

Talcott Parsons' theory reflects a vision of a unified concept of social science and indeed of living systems in general.

Talcott Parsons sometimes wrote about general theory as aspects of theoretical concerns of social sciences whose focus is on the most "constitutive" elements of cognitive concern for the basic theoretical systematization of a given field.

Talcott Parsons would include the basic conceptual scheme for the given field, including its highest order of theoretical relations and naturally the necessary specification of this system's axiomatic, epistemological, and methodological foundations from the point of view of logical implications.

Talcott Parsons highlighted that is almost logically impossible that there can be any "perfect fit" or perfect consensus in the basic normative structure of complex modern societies because the basic value pattern of modern societies is generally differentiated in such a way that some of the basic normative categories exist in inherent or at least potential conflict with each other.

However, as Talcott Parsons emphasizes, no simple answer on the priority of freedom or equality or any simple solution on how they possibly can be mediated, if at all.

Talcott Parsons always maintained that the integration of the normative pattern in society is generally problematic and that the level of integration that is reached in principle is always far from harmonious and perfect.

The heuristic scheme that Talcott Parsons used to analyze systems and subsystems is called the AGIL paradigm or the AGIL scheme.

Talcott Parsons elaborated upon the idea that each of these systems developed some specialized symbolic mechanisms of interaction analogous to money in the economy, like influence in the social community.

Furthermore, Talcott Parsons explored the sub-processes within three stages of evolution:.

Talcott Parsons viewed Western civilization as the pinnacle of modern societies and the United States as the one that is most dynamically developed.

Talcott Parsons asserted that there are not two dimensions to societies but that there are qualitative differences between kinds of social interaction.

Talcott Parsons observed that people can have personalized and formally detached relationships, based on the roles that they play.

Talcott Parsons had a seminal influence and early mentorship of many American and international scholars, such as Ralf Dahrendorf, Alain Touraine, Niklas Luhmann, and Habermas.