ABSTRACT
The conceptual decisions that major social theorists make early in their careers typically orient them across their later works. Talcott Parsons, for instance, drew a sharp line early between rational action and nonrational action and then spent his career exploring the analytical components of the nonrational realm as well as their implications for empirical research. To this end, he endeavored in the 1930s to identify within the nonrational realm a distinct arena of action, namely, “voluntaristic action.” Throughout his career, Parsons felt that he could ground the cumulative findings of the social sciences by identifying the interrelationship between voluntaristic action and social order. On this ground he could translate into a common language the findings that social scientists discover at different levels of analysis, couched in the terminologies of different theories, disciplines, and methodologies. Everything that Parsons subsequently wrote from the 1950s through the 1970s about law and community, professions and universities, can be read as an ongoing effort on his part to identify how voluntaristic action is institutionalized and, with this, to account for the possibility of social order. Rarely do major social theorists reconsider or rework their earliest conceptual decisions. 1
