“Explaining Modernity: Talcott Parsons’s Evolutionary Theory and Individualism”, in The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons, edited by J. Treviño, Anthem Press, Oxford, 2016, pp. 133-154.

This chapter focuses on one of the most ill-understood aspects of Talcott Parsons's work: the relationship between his theory of social change and his understanding of modern society. A strong hypothesis that calls into question the place and meaning of evolutionary theory in Parsons's intellectual development and his scientific research program is advanced in five sections: after a brief consideration of Parsons's work on social change in the 1950s and the 1960s, I focus on an essay titled "Evolutionary Universals of Society" (1964) and Parsons's understanding of the work of Herbert Spencer. In the third section I summarize and explain the twin volumes "Society" and "the System of Modern Societies", while in the fourth section I reconstruct his theory of modern society as embedded in so-called modernization theory. In the last section I explain the relationship between Parsons's evolutionism and his understanding of modern individualism.