| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. By Uta Gerhardt. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv, 311 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-521-81022-1.)

"Spencer is dead," Talcott Parsons wrote in 1937 of Herbert Spencer, the sociologist favored by late nineteenth-century American conservatives; echoing the historian Crane Brinton, he asked, "Who reads Spencer now?" (The Structure of Social Action, 1968, p. 3). Today, many would say the same of Parsons, the preeminent American sociological theorist after World War II, whose influence declined sharply in later life under criticism by C. Wright Mills and other radical sociologists. Yet Uta Gerhardt insists on the vitality and relevance of Parsons's work. She portrays him as a writer much more engaged in contemporary political affairs, from New Deal reform to debates over atomic weapons and the Vietnam War, than his reputation as a remote, abstruse theorist allows. His "pro-democracy activism" (Gerhardt, p. 60), she writes, gave enduring purpose to his theory of dynamic change in modern society.

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