Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin

Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin (born Jan. 21, 1889, Turya, Russia—died Feb. 10, 1968, Winchester, Mass., U.S.) was a Russian-American sociologist who founded the department of sociology at Harvard University in 1930. In the history of sociological theory, he is important for distinguishing two kinds of sociocultural systems: “sensate” (empirical, dependent on and encouraging natural sciences) and “ideational” (mystical, anti-intellectual, dependent on authority and faith).

The first professor of sociology at the University of Petrograd (1919–22; St. Petersburg), Sorokin was expelled from the Soviet Union for his anti-Bolshevism. Before going to Harvard, he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he specialized in rural sociology (1924–30). Among his writings are A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, 3 vol. (1930–32); Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vol. (1937–41); Man and Society in Calamity (1942); Altruistic Love (1950); and an autobiography, A Long Journey (1963).

Sorokin believed that the postmedieval Western sensate culture was in its last stages and that the study of nonsexual altruistic love as a science was needed to avert worldwide chaos. In his view, this necessity followed from his principle of polarization, according to which the moral indifference prevailing under ordinary circumstances is supplanted, for the duration of a crisis, by the extremes of selfishness and altruism.