Establishing the place and importance of Simmel's writings in Talcott Parsons' work is no easy task. In part, the responsibility for this difficulty lies with Parsons himself. In contrast to the manner in which he established his relationship to other European intellectual figures, Parsons never explicitly identified the role Simmel played in his own intellectual development or the development of his theoretical system (cf. Parsons 1959, 1970, [1978] 1981). This is not to say, however, that this task is impossible. References to Simmel in Parsons' published and unpublished writings provide the resources to reconstruct Simmel's role in Parsons' paradigmatic grounding of sociology.