ABSTRACT
Richard McKeon and Talcott Parsons were two of the most powerful voices of the academic world in the twentieth century. Like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, McKeon and Parsons were contemporaries who took no documented notice of one another yet whose works were mutually relevant. The early careers of both men were marked by strife and ambiguities of status. The intellectual biographies of McKeon and Parsons also exhibit striking parallels. Inspired by the spirit of McKeon's approach to historical semantics, if not employing the terms of his schemas, the foregoing reflections challenge the hegemonic view of standard professional sociology as represented by Parsons. McKeon's philosophy seems to be excellent for clarifying the cognitive alternatives in our culture, and certainly consistent with the criticism of degraded versions of those alternatives, but provides no criteria for selecting one alternative or another.
