Talcott Parsons: Despair and Modernity

This is not a conventional biography but an attempt to explore the motives and intentions that underpin Talcott Parsons’ published work by exploring the reasoning Parsons shares with his readers in the pages of his many published works and the possible links between Parsons’ academic outputs and the social, economic and political situations in which Parsons found himself during the course of his life. Shaun Best brings together biography and the sociology of knowledge to demonstrate that th...