Introduction

This book is my attempt to give a reading to Parsons. The test of an adequate interpretation or reading is that when the reader has finished it, he can take any book or article of Parsons and fit it into the suggested structure of Parsonian thought. In order to do this, I must trace how his ideas developed and how problems that are unresolved at one stage reappear at another. It is also necessary to focus on the structure of his basic argument, not the substantive analyses he gives, for it is in terms of the former that an interpretation of the latter can be provided.