ABSTRACT
A first draft of the introductory chapter was written by Parsons in 1974 and revised in the summer of 1975. This first draft already has the structure of the present chapter, with the two chosen examples (Nixon’s abuse of power and the conflicts in the system of higher education) and a less developed conceptual attempt to defend the possibility of a scholarly analysis of the society the analyst lives in. It was rewritten in the present form at the end of 1976 (Parsons 1976b), and revised marginally in 1978. Section 1.1 is a slightly revised version of Section III of a paper written by Parsons and Dean Gerstein comparing heroin addiction and Nixon’s addiction to power as two cases of social deviance (Parsons and Gerstein 1977).
