Flashback: The Dean of American Sociologists Harvard's Talcott Parsons Was a Socialist

Academic Room reports on the dean of American sociologists Talcott Parsons:

Writing in 1923 for a liberal student publication,

Parsons said he had learned at Amherst "that the economic and social order was a

matter of human arrangements, not one of inevitable natural law, and hence that it

was subject to human control." He chaired his chapter of the Student League for

Industrial Democracy, successor to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and appar-

ently considered himself a socialist. As Parsons recalled later, he was one of the

"enthusiasts for the Russian Revolution and for the rise of the British Labor Party . . .

firmly in the opposition to the current United States regime during the presidencies of Harding and Coolidge.

In 1924-1925, he went to the London School of Economics, where he studied

with the economic historian and advocate of ethical socialism R. H. Tawney.

Just a reminder: those who were socialists before the great Depression were socialists of the most committed type. What better proof than this that socialism is a movement of tenured professors with authoritarian personalities???