Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons arrived at Harvard in 1927 with a PhD in economics and stayed for forty-six years, joining the new sociology department in 1930 and later founding the Department of Social Relations. He translated Max Weber into English and synthesized Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto into something new: social action theory, which argued that cultural values and social structures - not internal psychological drives - constrain and determine human behavior. His structural functionalism dominated English-language sociology from the 1940s through the 1970s, dense and systematic and generalizable across societies. By the end, critics called his work conservative and impenetrable; he himself published a 1975 article rejecting the "structural functionalist" label. He served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1949, spent fifteen years in its leadership, and died in 1979 with his reputation in eclipse - though interest in his ideas has quietly returned.