According to Parsons, social institutions were made up of networks of interlocking roles, which in turn were played by individuals who were motivated by rational ends. At the same time, however, individual action was constrained by social norms, laws, and other mechanisms of control that were encoded in the institutions of which the individuals were a part. By exhaustively classifying all the various functions that different sorts of behavior could satisfy, along with the different social and cultural structures in which they took place, Parsons attempted nothing less than to describe all of society.

It was a grand edifice indeed, and Parsons’s name is generally listed among the great social theorists of the ages. But as with Spencer and Comte before him, the ink was scarcely dry on Parsons’s “general theory” before the critics tore it apart: it said little more than that “people do things because they want to,” it was not really a theory at all, but just a “set of concepts and definitions,” and it was so complicated that nobody could understand it.