Pitirim A. Sorokin was a notable sociologist who lived from 1889–1968. He was one of the first social scientists (sociologists) to raise the alarm about what he saw as an emerging modern materialist culture.
Sorokin was poor as a young man, growing up a peasant in Tsarist Northern Russia. He wrote a dark and cutting recollection of his first memory at about age three. It was the moment that Sorokin became aware that his mother was dead on the floor of their cabin and the subsequent funeral. He struggled to work to pay his way through the university during the Tsar’s time in Russia. He became a newspaper publisher and later an official in the post-Tsar government. The victorious Bolshevists jailed him. Lenin later released him, thanks to Sorokin’s supporters. He witnesses and documented the Russian famine of 1921.
Sorokin wrote six books in six years. Four of them defined their fields at the time:
- Social Mobility (1927)
- Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928)
- Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology (1929) with Carle C. Zimmerman (see at the bottom)
- A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology the first of the three volumes of work (1929) with Zimmerman and Charles J. Galpin.
Sorokin’s research into rural sociology, altruism, social change, social mobility, revolutions, war, the sociology of knowledge, and sociological theory unlocked new fields of study. It broadened the scope of existing specialties in sociology. His personal experiences as a peasant in a rural area indeed guided his research.
Sorokin artfully blended Eastern and Western philosophies melding what he saw as the truths in the trinity of human existence;
- The truths of the mind
- The senses
- The spirit.
The goal was to grasp “total reality” by employing integralism. Integralism is a combination of empirical, rational, and supersensory. Sorokin postulated that integralism would free us from the shortcomings of one-dimensional thought and instrumental knowledge. Sorokin believed that grasping that “total reality” was necessary to correct past societal failures, which resulted from the domination of a purely instrumental, “shortsighted,” and often destructive forms of knowledge.
He dug deep and far in all forms, areas, regions, and nations to cull the maximum amount of data to provide an unprecedented body of supporting evidence of his theorem. He delved into “sociology, including the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of art, political sociology, social stratification, methodology, and theory.” His “magnum” work, “Social and Cultural Dynamics,” encapsulated a broad-reaching theory regarding human culture, its dynamics, transitions, and variations. He plotted the history of cultures around the world, delving into their art, philosophy, conflicts, politics, wars, their forms of government, and much more. The conclusions and resulting theorem shocked the sensibilities of many, angered some. The unprecedented volume of empirical data analyzed in the research has made the findings very difficult to impugn.
The central theory focused on “Cultural Mentality Types.”
- The three of truth:
- Sensory
- Spiritual
- Rational
He tracked various phases of development throughout history.
He exposed the five principal cultural systems of a complex society:
- Law
- Art
- Philosophy
- Science
- Religion
Sorokin posited that reality is conveyed by the following means:
- Sensate (the senses)
- Ideational; revealed in a supersensory way
- Idealistic; it is considered an organic and dialectic combination of the two-previous means
More to come ……
