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Talcott Parsons was a Functionalist Sociologist who was born on December 13, 1902, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He died of a stroke on May 8, 1979, while giving a series of lectures in Munich, Germany. His father was a Congregationalist minister and then became president of Marietta College in Ohio. Parsons father pushed him to do well in academics because he was the first in his family to attend college. Talcott Parsons graduated from Amherst College in 1924, where he majored in biology, but decided to do graduate work in economics. From 1924-25 Parsons attended the School of Economics in London and then took his doctorate at Heidelberg University in Germany and received his Ph.D. Talcott Parsons became a teacher in the department of economics at Harvard University from 1927-1931. During that time he studied the works of Alfred Marshall a classical theorist and one the people who discovered the principle of marginal utility.
Talcott Parson was interested in the works of Max Weber, who was a German social scientist; Parsons later translated several of Max Weber’s works into English. In 1944 Parsons became a full professor of sociology at Harvard, and held his position until he retired in 1973.Some of the areas that Talcott Parson made contributions included the classification of the role of theory in research; the analysis of institutions; the outline of systematic theory in sociology and many more. He was an important American sociologist whose theories about the nature and structure of organizations played an important role in the development of 20th century sociology. In 1949 he was elected president of the American Sociological Association and served as a secretary from 1960-1965.
He was once attacked by the public and other Theorists as an Ethno Centrist; someone who believes that their society is above all others because he made a statement that the Western civilization of the United States was more developed than other societies
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