Pitirim Sorokin and His Sociology

PITIRIM A. Sorokin has long been one of the leading figures in American sociology. This paper will describe his career briefly and discuss some of his main contributions to sociological thought. Sorokin was born in a Russian peasant village in 1889. From there he went to St. Petersburg for his secondary and higher education. In 1913, at the age of only 24, he became co-editor of New Ideas in Sociology, a journal devoted primarily to translations of foreign sociological writings but with original Russian articles as well. In 1914 he began teaching at the Psycho-Neurological Institute in St. Petersburg; in the same year he published his first book, Crime and Punishment. In 1916 he started to teach at the University of St. Petersburg, continuing until the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917. Sorokin wrote seven books in Russian before he came to this country, including a two-volume System of Sociology in 1919. Not even his experiences during the revolutionary years, when he was a starving fugitive much of the time, made him cease his scholarly labors altogether. During his early years Sorokin was an optimistic social revolutionary, three times imprisoned by the Czarist government for revolutionary activity. He emerged from the Revolution embittered and conservative. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Sorokin became one of the founders of the AllRussian Peasant Soviet and of the Council of the Russian Republic, both revolutionary organizations. When Alexander Kerensky became prime minister of the provisional government in 1917, Sorokin was chosen as his private secretary and as editor-in-chief of the governmental newspaper, The Will of the People. He was elected a member of the Constitutional Assembly in 1918. Before and after the Bolsheviks ousted Kerensky, Sorokin was a vigorous opponent of Bolshevism while an undoubted progressive. Sorokin's hostility to the government was reciprocated with a vengeance. After the October Revolution in 1917 a large part of his activities consisted of organizing resistance to the Bolshevist regime, and when this failed, of fleeing half-starved through the woods to escape imprisonment. Finally he was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death; and only through the intervention of friends was he saved from execution and allowed eventually to exile himself from the Soviet Union on pain of execution. He fled to Czechoslovakia where he found friendly asylum under the aegis of such notables as Thomas Masaryk and Edouard Benes.' Soon after going to Czechoslovakia, Sorokin was invited by Professors E. A. Ross and E. C. Hayes to deliver a series of lectures on the Russian Revolution at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. He accepted this invitation, and the United States has been his home ever since. After lecturing for a time at Wisconsin and Illinois, Sorokin moved to the University of Minnesota in 1924. Here he established himself rapidly as a leader in American sociology. The roles of Professors Hayes and Ross in bringing Sorokin to this country have not been sufficiently recognized.2 Sorokin became head of the newly formed Department of Sociology at Harvard University in 1930. He remained in his position unusually long for a Harvard departmental chairman; chairmanships at Harvard normally rotate every three to five years. He did not enjoy administrative work, and asked several times to be relieved of his chairmanship; his request was granted in 1943. At that time some members of the Departments of Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology at Harvard established the Department of Social Relations. Sorokin neither opposed nor approved this experiment. He limited his activity in it to teaching during one semester per year, and set up and became director of the Harvard Research Center in Altruistic Integration and Creativity, a unit separate from the Department of Social Relations.3 The objective of this new center is scientific research in the nature of altruism and