The untold friendship of Kenneth Burke and Talcott Parsons

This study treats the relatively unknown fact of Kenneth Burke and Talcott Parsons's personal friendship as a context within which to develop a dramatistic account of friendship and its character in the theoretical inquiry of sociology. Friendship is formulated according to four dramatistic properties in Burke's work—identification, dialectical substance, an ultimate perspective, and the comic attitude. The example of Burke and Parsons's relationship is used to explicate the significance of these four properties for articulating the symbolic action of friendship in both theoretical inquiry and everyday life. The result is the construction of a theory of friendship with universal and critical import, a construction which honors these two important theorists.