Pitirim Sorokin

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin is the most encyclopaedic and the least assimilable of the sociologists who built the discipline in America. He gave it the first comprehensive study of social mobility, a sweeping cyclical theory of change built on the idea of cultural supersystems, a famous assault on the statistical fashions of his colleagues, and finally a programme for the scientific study of altruistic love. Few sociologists have written so much on so wide a front; few have been so thoroughly outflanked by the profession they helped to found.

His work refuses two things he thought equally shallow: the belief that societies progress in a straight line, and the belief that social life can be captured by measurement alone. Against the first he set recurrence — cultures rise, exhaust their governing premise and swing towards its opposite. Against the second he set the claim that sociology must study meanings and values, since a social system is held together by what its members believe reality to be.

Life and intellectual formation

Sorokin was born in 1889 in Turya, in the Komi region of northern Russia, to an itinerant craftsman, and his early life was one of poverty and interrupted schooling. Active in the Socialist Revolutionary party, repeatedly imprisoned under the Tsar, briefly a secretary to Kerensky, condemned to death and then reprieved under the Bolsheviks, he was expelled from Russia in 1922. The biography matters: a man who had seen revolution, civil war and famine at first hand was unlikely to accept theories of smooth evolution.

In the United States he taught at Minnesota, where he wrote Social Mobility, and in 1930 was invited to found the sociology department at Harvard — where his junior colleagues and students included Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton. The relationship with Parsons soured as structural functionalism became the dominant American theory and Sorokin's own system was marginalised. He founded the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism in 1949, and in 1964 was elected president of the American Sociological Association by a write-in campaign of colleagues who felt his neglect had gone too far.

Social Mobility (1927) is the founding text of the field, and most of its vocabulary is still in use. Sorokin defined mobility as the transition of an individual, social object or value from one social position to another, and drew the basic distinction between horizontal mobility — movement between positions at the same level, such as a change of employer, residence, religion or spouse — and vertical mobility, movement up or down the hierarchy. Vertical mobility subdivides into ascending and descending currents, each occurring in two forms: the infiltration of individuals into a higher or lower stratum, and the collective rise or fall of a whole group.

Three arguments carry the analytical weight. First, no society is either perfectly closed or perfectly open: even the most rigid caste or estate order permits some circulation, and even the most fluid democracy retains barriers of birth, wealth and education, so the question is one of degree and rate rather than presence or absence. Second, mobility works through identifiable channels of vertical circulation — the army, the church, the school, political organisations, professional associations, wealth-making organisations and the family, especially through marriage. Each channel is also a testing, selecting and distributing agency, a sieve that sorts people by the qualities a society happens to prize, which is why the relative importance of channels shifts as, for instance, education displaces the army. Third, mobility has costs as well as benefits: it promotes efficiency, the diffusion of ideas, invention and tolerance, but also superficiality, isolation, mental strain and loosened family bonds. There is no optimum rate valid for all societies. Because he defined mobility broadly, his framework travels easily to caste in India, where collective ascent rather than individual infiltration is the characteristic form.

The four volumes of Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937–1941) rest on one proposition: every integrated culture is organised around a premise about the nature of ultimate reality, and its art, philosophy, science, law, ethics and forms of authority all express that premise. From this Sorokin derived three cultural supersystems.

An ideational culture holds that true reality is supersensory and spiritual; needs are spiritual and are met by minimising rather than satisfying them; art is symbolic, truth is truth of faith, ethics are absolute. Medieval Europe and much of classical Indian civilisation are his examples. A sensate culture holds that reality is what the senses perceive; needs are physical and to be maximised; art is realistic and sensual, truth empirical and technological, ethics hedonistic and relative — the modern West is his case. Between them lies the rare idealistic culture, a genuine integration of the two, exemplified for him by fifth-century Greece and thirteenth-century Europe. He added an unintegrated fourth type, the pseudo-ideational, in which spiritual forms persist without conviction under duress.

Two principles govern change. The principle of immanent change holds that a sociocultural system changes chiefly through forces inherent in it, unfolding its own possibilities as a seed unfolds into a plant, with external factors only accelerating or retarding the pattern. The principle of limits holds that each premise is partial, so as a system realises its possibilities it exhausts them and its inadequacies accumulate, generating a swing towards the opposite premise. Change is therefore recurrent but not repetitive — Sorokin insisted on trendless cycles and creative recurrence, and explicitly denied any law of progress. From this came the diagnosis of The Crisis of Our Age (1941): the West is in the overripe, disintegrating phase of a sensate order, and its wars, relativism and cult of sensation are symptoms of that exhaustion.

The critique of method and the turn to altruism

Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology (1956) is his polemic against the discipline he had helped establish in America. He coined quantophrenia for the obsessive quantification of matters not usefully quantifiable, and attacked what he saw as a testing mania that mistook the administration of scales for knowledge. He charged his colleagues with amnesia and the rediscovery of the already known under new jargon, with sham operationalism, and with pretentious terminology substituting for thought. The complaint was not against measurement but against technique displacing problems that matter.

What mattered to Sorokin, after two world wars, was the reconstruction of moral life. His later work argued that sociology must study altruistic love as seriously as it studies conflict, and proposed a discipline he called amitology — the systematic study of friendship, love and the making of altruistic persons. The Ways and Power of Love (1954) classifies love by intensity, extensity, duration, purity and adequacy. The turn is often dismissed as mysticism, but it follows from his cyclical theory: if the sensate order is dying, sociology's work is to help build what replaces it.

Criticisms

The objections are serious. His supersystem types are so broad that almost any evidence can be fitted to them, which makes the theory hard to falsify; his massive data on art, philosophy and war rest on classifications only he applied, so the quantities never really settle the argument — an irony given his attack on quantophrenia. Immanent change verges on tautology, since a system said to unfold its own nature explains change by restating it, and he never specified how much external factors matter. Many read Dynamics as a philosophy of history in the manner of Spengler and Toynbee rather than as sociology, with prophecy and moral judgement doing work that evidence should do. His periodisation has been faulted as Eurocentric and his civilisations as too monolithic. Finally, his combative style and refusal to build a school left him without the following that carried Parsons and Merton.

Legacy

Sorokin's fate is to be used without being credited. The study of mobility proceeds on distinctions he drew, and stratification research still asks his question about openness and its consequences. His insistence that meanings and values are constitutive of social systems anticipates the later cultural turn; his critique of method reads as a first draft of Mills on abstracted empiricism; and the current research literature on altruism has retrospectively vindicated a project once treated as an embarrassment.

For the UPSC answer

Sorokin is examined most often on mobility, so lead with horizontal and vertical, then the individual and collective forms, then the channels of circulation, and close with his rule that no society is wholly open or wholly closed — a line that works well on caste and mobility in India, where collective ascent dominates. In questions on theories of social change, place him as the leading cyclical theorist alongside Spengler and Toynbee, and be exact about the three supersystems and the principles of immanent change and limits, since candidates routinely garble the terms. Use his denial of progress to separate him sharply from evolutionary theorists, and bring in quantophrenia where a question asks about the limits of quantitative method. End with the standard evaluation: unmatched in scope and prescient about culture, but weak on testability and closer to philosophy of history than to empirical sociology.

References & further reading

Sorokin, P. A. (1927). Social Mobility. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Sorokin, P. A. (1928). Contemporary Sociological Theories. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Sorokin, P. A. (1937–1941). Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. New York: American Book Company.
Sorokin, P. A. (1941). The Crisis of Our Age. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Sorokin, P. A. (1954). The Ways and Power of Love. Boston: Beacon Press.
Sorokin, P. A. (1956). Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences. Chicago: Henry Regnery.