Talcott Parsons may be one of the truly tragic figures in the history of sociology in the twentieth century. Although he struggled all his life to make sociological theory more concrete when it went beyond mere description of apparent social facts, hewas charged to remain unable to incorporate reflexivity into social thought. Although he aimed vigorously to account for the dynamics of meaning orientation in the increasingly pluralist modern society, hewas accused of mechanistic systems thinking fitting a hermetic Brave New World. Although he personally contributed to political program planning for democratization in post–Nazi Germany, he was suspected of shepherding a Nazi sympathizer into the United States. Although he remained a Weberian all his life subsequent to his encounter with Max Weber's intellectual genius during work on his doctoral dissertation, he had to defend himself against attempts, by younger colleagues, to rescue Weber (and also Durkheim) from the prongs of an allegedly false Parsonian interpretation.

My purpose in writing this book has been to make Parsons's sociological work more accessible, by documenting three things. For one, I wish to showhowa recognizable knowledge interest in sociological understanding of modern democracy, understood as both a methodological desideratum and an analytical-empirical program, pervaded Parsons's oeuvre from the 1930s to the 1960s (and beyond).

Second, I want to document how this focus on democracy had different forms of expression in the succession of periods of American history.