<P> In the prevailing discussion between neoclassical economics and the institutionalists, which was one of the conflicts that prevailed within the field of economics in the 1920s and early 1930s, Parsons attempted to walk a very fine line . He was very critical about neoclassical theory, an attitude that prevailed all the way through his life and is reflected in his critique of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker . He was opposed to the utilitarian bias within the neoclassical approach and do could not embrace them fully . However, he agreed partly on their theoretical and methodological style of approach, which should be distinguished from its substance . He was thus unable to accept the institutionalist solution . In an interview in 1975, Parsons would recall a conversation with Schumpeter on the institutionalist methodological position: "An economist like Schumpeter, by contrast, would absolutely have none of that . I remember talking to him about the problem and...I think Schumpeter was right . If economics had gone that way (like the institutionalists) it would have had to become a primarily empirical discipline, largely descriptive, and without theoretical focus . That's the way the' institutionalists' went, and of course Mitchell was affiliated with that movement ." </P> <P> Parsons returned to Germany in the summer of 1930 and became a direct eyewitness to the feverish atmosphere in Weimar Germany during which the Nazi Party rose to power . Parsons would receive constant reports about the rise of Nazism through his friend, Edward Y . Hartshorne, who was travelling there . Parsons began, in the late 1930s, to warn the American public about the Nazi threat, but he had little success, as a poll showed that 91% of the country opposed the Second World War . </P> <P> Most of the US thought also that the country should have stayed out of the First World War and that the Nazis were, regardless of what they did in Germany or even Europe, no threat to the US . Many Americans even sympathized with Germany, as many had ancestry from there, and the latter both was strongly anticommunist and had gotten itself out of the Great Depression while the US was still suffering from it . </P> <P> One of the first articles that Parsons wrote was "New Dark Age Seen If Nazis Should Win ." Parsons became one of the key initiators of the Harvard Defense Committee, aimed at rallying the American public against the Nazis . Parsons' voice would sound again and again over Boston's local radio stations, and he also spoke against Nazism during a dramatic meeting at Harvard, which disturbed by antiwar activists . Together with graduate student Charles O. Porter, Parsons would rally graduate students at Harvard for the war effort . (Porter would later become a Democratic US Representative for Oregon .) During the war, Parsons conducted a special study group at Harvard, which analyzed what its members considered the causes of Nazism, and the topic's leading experts participated . </P>

Major theoretical perspective on society based on parsons