SR leader imprisoned by both Tsar and Bolsheviks, who became founder of Harvard's sociology department
In an open letter written from the Cheka basement in Veliky Ustyug in 1918 while awaiting execution, Sorokin renounced his SR party membership and declared an end to his political activity.
A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) during the Russian Revolution, Sorokin served as secretary to Prime Minister Kerensky and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Imprisoned three times by the Tsarist regime, he was sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks after 1917 and exiled in 1922 on the 'philosophers' ship.' In the United States he founded Harvard's department of sociology in 1930, becoming one of the 20th century's most important sociologists through his work on social stratification, social mobility, and the cyclical theory of sociocultural dynamics in his magnum opus Social and Cultural Dynamics.
Career Timeline
- 1906Joined SR party; arrested and imprisoned in Kineshma
- 1909–1914Graduated from St. Petersburg University, Faculty of Law, in criminology
- 1917SR leader, secretary to PM Kerensky, Constituent Assembly deputy
- 1919–1922Professor at Petrograd University; founded Russia's first sociology department
- 1922Exiled from Soviet Russia ('philosophers' ship')
- 1924–1930Professor at University of Minnesota
- 1930–1959Professor at Harvard; founded and chaired sociology department
- 1965President of the American Sociological Association
Related historical events
Social and Cultural Dynamics: The Sensate–Ideational–Idealistic Cycle
Pitirim Sorokin's magnum opus, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937–1941, 4 vols.), is a monumental work of historical sociology that statistically analyzed 2,500 years of Western civilization's art, philosophy, science, law, and war data, from the 6th century BCE to the 20th century, to identify three cyclically alternating culture types.
Sorokin proposed that all cultures can be classified according to how they define the nature of reality. The "Ideational" culture holds that true reality is supersensory and spiritual: medieval Christian Europe being the archetype. The "Sensate" culture regards only the material world as real, exemplified by modern Western civilization since the Renaissance. The "Idealistic" culture synthesizes both, recognizing sensory and supersensory reality in balanced measure; Classical Greece (5th–4th centuries BCE) and the High Middle Ages–Renaissance period belong to this type.
These three types do not evolve linearly but alternate cyclically throughout history. Sorokin traced the Greco-Roman civilization through Sensate → Ideational → Idealistic → Sensate phases, and found Western civilization following the same pattern. His diagnosis of the 20th-century West was stark: it had reached the overripe, decadent stage of a Sensate culture, dominated by materialism, relativism, and sensory stimulation, with wars and crises proliferating as symptoms of disintegration. Sorokin predicted that a new Ideational or Idealistic culture would emerge from this crisis, and argued that humanity could make this transition peaceful through a conscious turn toward "creative altruism."
Social and Cultural Dynamics is regarded as a landmark attempt at empirical historical sociology. It established Sorokin, alongside Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, as one of the 20th century's seminal theorists of civilizational cycles.