Taking bearings

When Parsons was ‘converted’ from biological to social science in Walton Hamilton's economics course, the problem of capitalism and the structure of western society were the central issues. Within the modern world some societies had greater links with their past than others, and at the back of the institutional critique of economics was the way in which American scholars appropriated European intellectual developments. This is a most important dimension of our attempt to appraise Parsons' reasons for neglecting the American theoretical developments which had emerged prior to his own discovery of Max Weber.

Seckler points out that the institutionalist critique emerged against the background of Historismus and Methodenstreit, and the appropriation of the legacy of the German historical scholarship in the American context. Seckler goes on to point out that the misidentification of institutionalism with Historismus has meant that much of the criticism of Veblen simply missed the mark.