The Emerald Guide to Talcott Parsons

Once the best-known sociologist in the world, the American sociologist Talcott Parsons is now almost forgotten. His ideas on general theory and structural functionalism once dominated world sociology, being widely regarded as the only viable approach to the subject. Relatively few sociologists today have heard of him or think his ideas worth consideration. Those who remember his name tend to see him as old-fashioned, even misguided. His vision of general theory seems strange, kept alive only by a handful of committed adherents. Even during his lifetime, he was criticised for presenting complex and abstract ideas in unwieldy and incomprehensible texts, and these views are today often taken as grounds for disregarding his work. 

I have written this book in the conviction that Parsons has been wrongly criticised and unduly ignored. It is time to reassess his ideas, which properly understood offer a fruitful way of undertaking empirical work and moving towards robust explanations. This explains a recent upsurge of interest in Parsons’s sociology, most marked in Germany and the United States. New critical studies of his works have appeared, and the archives have been trawled to find previously unknown draft manuscripts that could be brought to a new audience. These publications make it possible to reconsider the significance and contemporary relevance of Parsons’s sociology. My presentation of Parsons’s views – the first, I believe, to accurately and clearly explain the development of his work without misleading simplification – is intended as a contribution to that reassessment and to introducing his theoretical project to a new generation.