A world from brave to new: Talcott Parsons and the war effort at Harvard University

This article argues that for Parsons and some of his colleagues at Harvard, the Second World War and the post-war period provided a context in which their work contributed to the transformation from totalitarianism to democracy in Central Europe (especially Germany) and Japan. The various agendas of Parsons' work are shown, supplemented by that of three of his colleagues with whom he collaborated (Gordon W. Allport, Carl J. Friedrich, Clyde Kluckhohn). The immediate effect of this work, for Parsons, however, meant frustration rather than fame, and his eventual reputation, I maintain, came unexpectedly with the third of his three attempts in the immediate post-war period to sum up what he believed were crucial insights that the Second World War had yielded concerning the ways in which sociology could contribute to the analytical understanding of democracy. The significance of this work is that it was both political and scientific. Because of the world situation of the 1940s, when the Holocaust in Germany was the nadir of civilization, Parsons believed that social science could contribute to the cause of making the world safe for future democracy. In the 1940s, this future depended on brave citizens, or such might have been Parsons' worldview. Targets envisaged for the 1950s, then, were community and citizenship in the newly democratic societies such as (West) Germany, the land that defeated Nazism.