Appendix 2

This appendix gives the principal original sources for each chapter, using the cross-references listed in Appendix 1. Important commentaries, interpretations, and developments of Parsons’s work are provided as the basis for further reading.

Chapter 1

Parsons’s own biographical reflections can be found in P48 and in the oral history interviews in the Brown University audio archives (http://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:710401/). A good general account is Charles Camic’s ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Talcott Parsons. The Early Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Victor Lidz’s ‘Talcott Parsons’ in The Blackwell Comanion to Major Classical Social Theorists (ed., George Ritzer, Blackwell), while Renée Fox’s In the Field (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011) includes a personal memoir. Sociology at Harvard and Parsons’s relationship with Sorokin are discussed in Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, Chapters 2 and 5) and Barry V. Johnston’s Pitirim A. Sorokin: An Intellectual Biography (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995, Chapters 3, 4, and 5). Uta Gerhardt has written extensively on Parsons’s politics and his war-time work in Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual; Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).