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The decline of interest among sociologists in the works of Talcott Parsons over the last several decades has been driven in substantial respects by a belief that he was personally conservative in his political views and that his theoretical formulations were rigidly tied to a conservative view of social order. The present paper reviews Parsons' major political involvements through the course of his career from his student days through the last decade of his life. The review demonstrates that Parsons was a typical academic liberal of his time and that his liberalism was expressed especially in several major applied essays. In the 1930s, he was an early and active opponent of Nazism. During World War II, he taught professionals to administer occupied territories and nations effectively. After the war, he advocated for government support of the social sciences, citing the important contributions they had made to the war effort. In the 1950s, he wrote a famous critical analysis of the Joseph McCarthy movement in American politics. In the 1960s, he contributed supportive essays to the Civil Rights movement. Later in the decade and in the 1970s, he contributed to the protection of academic freedoms while also proposing accommodations to the demands of the student movement for more "relevant" teaching and greater participation in university governance. Throughout his career, he taught and worked closely with students of various political views and sought to protect their rights of freedom of political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Charles Sanders Peirce contributed significantly to the founding of American sociology, doing so at the level of philosophical presuppositions or meta-sociology. I emphasize two of his ideas. One is semiotics, which is virtually the same as the anthropologists' concept of culture. This latter concept in turn was essential to clarifying the sociologists' idea of the social or society. Peirce also created the modern theory of the dialogical self, which explained the symbolic character of human beings and proved foundational for social psychology. Politically Peirce was a right-wing conservative, but his ideas eventually contributed to the egalitarian views of cultures and sub-cultures. In addition his ideas contributed, by way of unanticipated consequences, to the 20th-century human rights revolutions in the American legal system. Thus he was both a founder of sociology and a founder of American political liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]