Talcott Parsons, the American sociologist who was born in Colorado Springs in 1902, has argued that the majority of adult men are “condemned to what, especially if they are oversensitive, they must feel to be an unsatisfactory experience,” deprived of their rightful inheritance. Parsons was the last of a generation of theoretical sociologists whose work was unencumbered, or as critics would charge, uninformed, by empirical research.[*]
