Volume 13, Number 8 · November 6, 1969
Out of This World
By Tom Bottomore
The Structure of Social Action
with a new Introduction Talcott Parsons
Free Press, 775, 2 vols. pp., $2.95 each volume (paper)
Politics and Social Structure
by Talcott Parsons
Free Press, 600 pp., $13.50
Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives
by Talcott Parsons
Prentice-Hall, 128 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Sociological Theory and Modern Society
by Talcott Parsons
Free Press, 564 pp., $12.50
In 1937, during the decade of the Depression and the New Deal, of the revival of intellectual radicalism and left-wing social movements, of the Spanish Civil War and the approaching conflict with the Fascist states, Talcott Parsons published a study in social theory, The Structure of Social Action, which turned resolutely aside from any concern with the contemporary economic and political crisis in order to expound the ideas of some earlier European thinkers, and to distill from them a very general and abstract scheme of sociological thought. [1] The main theme of the book, as Parsons notes in his Introduction to the paperback edition, was that the works of Alfred Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Max Weber represented, against the background of two preceding styles of social thought—utilitarian positivism and German idealism—a 'major movement in the structure of theoretical thinking' and 'an altogether new phase in the development of European thought about the problems of man and society.'
Review, 5637 words
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