The almost convergence of Mises, Parsons and Popper
This is the draft of the paper on Mises, Parsons and Popper which was forshadowed in the previous post. Since that time progress has been slow and so I have decided to post the draft without further delay.
It may help to see this paper in the context of the research program sketched in the first post of this series.
Going on about Talcott Parsons a bit more, one of the strange things about his achievement was the way he reinvented the Austrian wheel without reference to Menger apart from a footnote referring to the methodenstreit. Weber was his main man but he managed to avoid mention of Mises and all the other Austrians.
For more about what went wrong after The Structure of Social Action.
For an account of the trajectory of his most energetic and ambitious follower, Jeffrey C Alexander, ending up with "the strong cultural program".