Talcott Parsons - Biography - Studies: Amherst College

Studies: Amherst College

Two term papers Parsons wrote as a student for Clarence E. Ayres' class in Philosophy III at Amherst have survived. These are referred to as the Amherst papers and have been of strong interest to Parsons scholars. The first is written on December 19, 1922 and is called "The Theory of Human Behavior in its Individual and Social Aspects." The second term paper is written on March 27, 1923 and is called "A Behavioristic Conception of the Nature of Morals." The papers reveal in part Parsons' early interest in social evolutionary questions. The Amherst Papers also reveal that Parsons did not agree with his institutionalist teachers, since he writes in the Amherst papers that technological development and moral progress are two structurally independent empirical processes.

As an undergraduate, Parsons studied biology, sociology and philosophy at Amherst College and received his B.A. in 1924. Amherst College had become the Parsons' family college by tradition; his father and his uncle Frank had attended it, as had his older brother. Initially Parsons was attracted to a career in medicine, inspired in this direction by his older brother Charles Edward Parsons, so he studied a great deal of biology and spent a summer working at the Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Parsons' biology teachers while at Amherst were Otto Glaser and Henry Plough. Gently mocked as "Little Talcott, the gilded cherub", Parsons became one of the student leaders at Amherst. Parsons also took courses with Walton Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Edwin Ayres, both known as "institutional economists". They exposed him to literature by Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and William Graham Sumner, among others. Parsons also took a course with George Brown in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and a course in modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, who was a great Kant interpreter. Parsons showed from early on a great interest in the topic of philosophy, which most likely was an echo of his father's great interest in theology in the tradition of which he had been profoundly socialized, a position that contrasted with his teachers' view.