The occasion of the publication of Parsons’Marshall Lectures is used to demonstrate Parsons’prescience and the contemporary relevance of his ideas. It is argued that these lectures are similar in intent to the recent work of Amitai Etzioni and his objective of creating the field of socio‐economics. The two works are compared and their relative strengths and weaknesses discussed. Parsons is shown to be well ahead of his time, not only in his effort to integrate social and economic concerns, but in the broader integrative intent of his overall theory. While Parsons was not able to begin to engineer a rapprochement with economics, such an intellectual integration may be more possible today because economics appears to be in greater crisis and sociology seems to have more to offer to disaffected econo