I am Talcott Edgar Frederick Parsons, born December 13, 1902 in Colorado Springs. My father was a Congregationalist minister and later president of Marietta College in Ohio.
As an undergraduate, I studied biology and philosophy at Amherst College and received my B.A. in 1924. After Amherst, I studied at the London School of Economics for a year, where I was exposed to the work of Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney, Bronis,,aw Malinowski, and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse. I then moved to the University of Heidelberg, where I received my Ph.D. in sociology and economics. It was at Heidelberg that I became familiar with the works of Max Weber, then relatively unknown to American social theorists; I later translated several of Weber's works into English.
After a year teaching at Amherst (1923–24), I obtained a position at Harvard, first in economics and then in sociology.
I first achieved significant recognition with the publication of The Structure of Social Action (1937), my first grand synthesis, combining the ideas of Durkheim, Weber and Pareto, among others.
At Harvard, I was instrumental in forming the Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary venture among sociology, anthropology, and psychology.
Nationally, I was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion within American academia. I was elected president of the American Sociological Association in 1949 and served as secretary from 1960–1965. I retired from Harvard in 1973, but continued teaching (at a number of other universities as a visiting professor) and writing until my death in 1979, while on a trip to Germany.
