ABSTRACT
Parsons’s epistemological confrontation with the German historicist school and, more especially with the neo-Kantian epistemology of Max Weber, strengthened his belief in the possibility of formulating a general and analytical action theory which would include the subjective and particular aspects of actor’s orientation. This was the intellectual luggage that Parsons brought with him when he returned from Germany in the 1920s. However, back home in the United States he was immediately confronted with an entirely different scientific climate, that of behaviourism. Instead of concern for the individual and the subjective, now ‘anyone who believed in the scientific validity of the interpretation of subjective states of mind was often held to be fatuously naive’. 1
