Little has been written about the importance of human emotion in Talcott Parsons’s early writings on normative values. This article attempts to remedy this by re-reading The Structure of Social Action (1968 [1937]) alongside other texts, so as to uncover the key role of emotion in both Parsons’s exegesis of Durkheim and his related voluntaristic theory of action. This discussion will provide the basis for constructing a new set of thematic defences against those critics who have, for so long, pigeon-holed Parsons as a thinker who was only concerned with the rational aspects of human action. If Parsons’s early action scheme is to be properly understood, critics must incorporate this emotional dimension into their existing accounts of his work. A deeper and more comprehensive understanding of Parsons’s work that takes into account his interest in both rational and non-rational human elements is therefore needed before these interpretational weaknesses can be overcome.
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