The Parsons-Voegelin Correspondence: Notes on an Unexpected and Instructive Intellectual Encounter
Timelines: Newsletter of the ASA History of Sociology Section, No. 22, 2013
5 Pages Posted: 28 Aug 2014
Date Written: December 1, 2013
Abstract
Political scientist Eric Voegelin and sociologist Talcott Parsons met at Harvard University in the autumn of 1938. Their shared scholarly interests included the origins of National Socialism and modern anti-Semitism, the patterns of secularization set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, and (especially) the life and work of Max Weber. Between 1940 and 1944, Voegelin and Parsons maintained a vigorous written correspondence on these and other topics. Their twenty-five extant letters were first published together in the original English by the European Journal of Sociology in 2013, and stand as testament to a rare meeting of profoundly different minds. In this essay, we give an overview of our collaborative, interdisciplinary study of the Parsons-Voegelin letters. We describe the profound intellectual differences between Parsons and Voegelin that emerge gradually over the course of the correspondence, and suggest that the relative brevity of their exchange points to the inherent difficulty of sustaining fruitful intellectual dialogue across cultural and disciplinary lines.
Keywords: Talcott Parsons, Eric Voegelin, Max Weber, Alfred Schütz, methodology, Calvinism, secularization, interdisciplinary research
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