This site, developed and maintained by Roger W. Smith, is devoted to the Russian-American sociologist and social philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968).
This photo of Sorokin in the yard of his Winchester, Massachusetts home appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe of May 23, 1954 under the headline “Winchester Hillside Aglow With Azaleas, Grown by Harvard Professor.”
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See also my post
“Pitirim A. Sorokin residence”
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 2, 2019
See the comments posted below. They clear up some items (factual matters and questions) in my original post.
Sorokin, ‘Darkness, Despair, Death Grip Russian Educators’
Posted here as a Word document is my transcription of an article by Sorokin:
pg. A2
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How this article got published in the USA, or who delivered it, is not known. When it was published, in December 1922, Sorokin was in Czechoslovakia. He emigrated to the USA in November 1923 (not October, as biographies of Sorokin incorrectly state).
— transcribed and posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2019
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A PDF file is below.
Sorokin, ‘Darkness, Despair, Death Grip Russian Educators’ – NY Tribune 12-10-1922
Early photos of Sorokin are a rarity — particularly, it seems, photos of Sorokin the emigré newly arrived in the USA.
This photo is from the front page of the Minneapolis Daily Star of July 30, 1924.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2019
«Мы участвовали, участвуем и будем участвовать в борьбе с коммунистической бандой».
— Сорокин Питирим. Третье письмо другу // Борьба за Россию / La Lutte pour la Russie (Париж). 1929. 9 февраля. №116. С.2–5
“We have participated, are participating and will participate in the fight against the communist gang.”
— Pitirim Sorokin. The third letter to a friend // Fight for Russia (Paris). 1929. February 9. №116. pp. 2-5
quoted in
Дойков, Юрий
Питирим Сорокин. Миннеаполис. Миннесота. 1924–1930
Архангельск, 2009
стр. 113
Yuri Doykov
Pitirim Sorokin: Minneapolis. Minnesota, 1924–1930
Arkhangelsk, 2009
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2019
“I would rather have a man of common sense from the street as a ruler than a high brow social scientist.”
— Pitirim A. Sorokin, quoted in The Hammond Times (Hammond, Indiana), December 30, 1935, pg. 1
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Sorokin had a way of making headlines with pungent remarks that showed him to be the eternal gadfly. He often came off as the high-handed scholar showing off his erudition and scorning his contemporaries — he was not infrequently given to writing pompously — while, at the same time, he prided himself on his scorn of academic pomposity and intellectual sterility and his identification with common humanity.
— Roger W. Smith
March 2019
“Utopia you cannot make in a day. Russian tried to butter the bread of everyone and found it spread too thin to suit the taste of the people.”
— Pitirim A. Sorokin; quoted in Evening Times, Cumberland, Maryland, April 8, 1943, pg. 4
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Sorokin was indeed quotable.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2018
Photos of Sorokin during his early academic career are rare.
Here is an item from the Minnesota Alumni Weekly of May 4, 1929 (“Faculty Books,” pg. 540) noting the publication of Sorokin’s Social Mobility. Sorokin was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota at that time.
The photo caption reads: “…. he told us, very proudly, that he is in the process of becoming an American citizen, and he would soon be able to file for his second papers.”
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2019
Before accepting a position in the sociology department at the University of Minnesota, Pitirim A. Sorokin was a guest of Vassar College, where he gave lectures.
The following article appeared in the Vassar Miscellany News, March 18, 1931: “Scintillating Selz Sends in Successful Solutions”
The article noted that Katherine Selz ’31 was the winner of the college’s Chat Current Events contest.
The prize-winning answers included the following:
“Who said:
Q. ‘Men cannot be treated like mice and guinea pigs’?
A. Mr. Sorokin”
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This squib provides a revealing glimpse of Sorokin: the provocative lecturer and a sociologist who was firmly against what he called quantophrenia. And insight into what was Sorokin’s humanistic conception of sociology.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
March 2019
“Harvard’s Pitirim Sorokin, 66, a Russian artisan’s son who became the first professor of sociology at the University of St. Petersburg and later at Harvard. Brash, brilliant young Sorokin ran away from his father at the age of nine (“My father was good man, except when he was drunk”), managed to get himself enough education to enter the University of St. Petersburg. A social revolutionary, he was arrested three times by the Czarist police, served as one of Kerensky’s secretaries, was later arrested three more times by the Communists. Exiled in 1922, he soon came to the U.S., and with the publication of his monumental Social and Cultural Dynamics, a study of the fluctuations of “sensate” and “ideational” cultures, he set the academic world to wondering whether it had found a new Spengler. Today, a mysterious mixture of crackpot and genius, Pitirim Sorokin has his colleagues wondering still.”
— ‘Goodbye, Messrs. Chips,” Time, June 27, 1955, pp. 59-60
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Time magazine, it should be noted, was known and often parodied for its glib, snarky style.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
February 2019
Caustic without being bitter is Boston’s white-thatched, bow-tied Porter Sargent. The saltiest commentator on U. S. education, from which he makes his living but for which he has a certain amused contempt, Porter Sargent prefaces his famed annual catalogue of 4,000 private schools with his shrewd opinions on men and affairs. Last week, in the 22nd edition of his Handbook of Private Schools, he threw most of his custard pies at the two most popular favorites of U. S. higher education —President James Bryant Conant of Harvard and President Robert Maynard Hutchins of University of Chicago.
President Conant, glooms Porter Sargent, started out as Harvard’s head “with the naivete and boldness of a scientist,” but soon “sacred cows were jostled” and today Conant has subsided “to the dead level of mass alumni opinion.” Sprightly, 66-year-old Porter Sargent criticizes President Conant most severely for keeping as head of Harvard’s sociology department Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin, whom he calls a pseudo-scientist, a defeatist and a reactionary. “Harvard is maintaining him in a position of influence where he is misguiding and frustrating American youth. . . . The sociology department is the White Russian WPA.”
— “Plain Talker.” Time, May 30, 1938, pg. 39
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Porter Sargent (1872–1951) was a prominent educational critic/gadfly and founder of Porter Sargent Publishers. In 1949, he was described in an article in the Journal of Higher Education as “probably the most outstanding and consistent critic of the American educational scene.”
— posted by Roger W. Smith
February 2019
Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin 