ABSTRACT
Talcott Parsons had one of the longest and most productive academic careers of any modern sociologist. Although Parsons began his career very much writing against the mainstream of American behaviouristic social science, his structural-functionalist perspective became the dominant theoretical paradigm of American sociology in the 1950s and 1960s. There are various ways by which one could organise and review criticisms of Parsons' sociology. Any attempt to develop a systematic approach to Parsonian sociology on the basis of a list of critics is not promising as a theoretical strategy, since the results of such an inquiry would be necessarily eclectic and unstable. These second-order interpretations of Parsons rarely attempt to resolve the alleged contradictions between the implied contingency of human action and the implied determinacy of the social system. Although Parsons was frequently charged with abstrusity and abstract formalism, his theoretical inquiries led decisively to an engagement with social issues; the essays on Germany, social stratification and medicine.
