ABSTRACT
In an autobiographical interview given in 1973, Talcott Parsons recalled the academic year 1924-5, which he spent at the London School of Economics studying with Malinowski and Morris Ginsberg immediately after receiving his undergraduate degree. Having noted that he did not hear Weber’s name mentioned even once during that year, he went on to add that by contrast:
. . . I did hear about [Emile] Durkheim but what I heard from both Ginsberg and Malinowski was mostly wrong. For example, in his introduction to a volume of essays by Hobhouse which was published after his death, Ginsberg says that Durkheim was the proponent of ‘a mystical view of society as a new entity qualitatively distinct from the members composing it, which was always operating in a powerful and distinctive manner, but whose mode of operation remains wrapped in total obscurity.’ That was Ginsberg’s view of Durkheim. I had to un-learn that.
