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This short article pleads for research rather than rumor regarding Parsons' alleged role regarding the admittance to United States of an ex-Soviet citizen in 1948 or 1949. Some evidence on background issues that could be found among the Parsons papers at Harvard University Archives is being presented verbatim. I argue that the point is to refrain from fabrications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the creation of an intellectual biography of the U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons. The researcher discusses Parsons' doctoral dissertation dealing with capitalism that was analyzed by sociologist Max Weber, and how Parsons' work delivered sociology from social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. The author supports Parsons' work on the basis that he was a thinker and academician who did not use inconsistent analysis. The author utilized Parsons' archives at Harvard University, such as Parsons' paper "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change."

Various critics, mainly at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, charged Parsons with the inability to understand social change and with normative determinism. This criticism has been aptly contradicted in the 1980s. However, such recent rehabilitation of Parsons's ability to analyse conflict in society, epitomized by his views on National Socialism, still misses out on some important issues. One is that, visible even in the guise of the abstract formulations of The Social System, he not only used National Socialism as a subject of historical reference, but also developed a sociology of National Socialism in the 1940s. In it, systems theory addressed the practical problems of the day and attempted to contribute to their solutions by means of social-science analysis. An article published in 1945 was an obvious occasion where he made visible how his sociology of Nazism could contribute to a policy programme for the post-war democratization of Germany. That this involved economic integration of Europe as a most desirable strategy he explained in a number of memoranda written in 1945 for a government agency. These have not been analysed hitherto. In this context of economic planning for peace he devised some cogent suggestions that are strikingly similar to the ideas which subsequently inspired the Marshall Plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores various engagements of system theory with Germany and Japan, looking in particular at the theories of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Talcott Parsons based his sociological theory on the idea of a system of the values of a given society. Niklas Luhmann's extended version was based on the idea of self-reproduction (or 'autopoiesis') of social systems within all modernized societies. Two studies have recently re-examined system theory on basis of its engagement with Japan: Günther Distelrath has subjected Parsonian theory on Japanese modernity to a structural revisioning in Die japanische Produktionsweise (1996); and Peter Fuchs has reconciled what he calls the 'dividualism' of the Japanese psyche with the Luhmannian theory of functional differentiation in Kommunikation - Japanisch (1995). Distelrath critiques the Parsonian school of thought for giving Japan the status of a backward 'follower' of the West. Fuchs, in contrast, endorses the universalist premise of Luhmann's concept of society and makes Japanese 'dividualism' the paradigm of effective modernization. Following on from Fuchs, I argue that system theory has the potential to overcome cultural limitations and become a global sociology. Its theoretical agenda in the twenty-first century includes the refinement of its concepts of the psychical system, the revision of its notion of the public and the mass media, as well as a systematic contribution to environmental protection and ecological communication in a functionally differentiated world society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]