The purpose of this paper is to show that the emotions were present in the sociology of Talcott Parsons, though clearly not as central to his thought as other themes and research interests. The definition of “normative” integral to his theory of social action and his reconstruction of Durkheim’s sociology of religion, both contained in The Structure of Social Action (1937), as well as some of his later writings on religion, reveal a certain attentiveness to the emotional sphere. The solution to the American sociologist’s fundamental theoretical problem, that of the social order, appears more concerned with the emotions than is made explicit in his work or noted to date by the secondary literature. Therefore the name of Parsons deserves to be included, alongside those of others, in a history of the classic sociology of emotions.
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