Pitirim Sorokin — sociology with roots in the Russian Empire
Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was born on 4 February 1889 (21 January, Old Style, by most accounts) in the village of Turya, in the Yarensky district of the Vologda Governorate, now in the Komi Republic of Russia. His father was a Russian itinerant artisan and icon maker; his mother, who died when he was five, was Komi. After his father's drinking turned violent, Pitirim and his elder brother left home at about eleven and supported themselves as artisans.
He studied at a teachers' seminary in the Kostroma province, joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and was arrested for anti-tsarist activity while still a teenager. In St Petersburg he attended evening school, then the Psycho-Neurological Institute and the university, earning a master's degree in criminal law in 1915 and teaching as a privatdozent.
In 1917 he sat on the executive committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasants' Deputies, served as secretary to the prime minister of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, for scientific affairs, edited the newspaper Volya Naroda and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. After the October Revolution he was arrested several times and at one point sentenced to death before being released. Returning to teaching, he founded the first department of sociology at Petrograd University in 1919-20 and defended his doctorate in 1922. That September he was among the scholars sent abroad by the Soviet government; accounts of the circumstances differ.
He went to the United States in 1923, taught at the University of Minnesota from 1924 and became an American citizen in 1930. That year the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, invited him to found and chair a department of sociology. His Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937-41) set out a theory of cyclical change between types of culture, a view of history that places him among the theorists of civilisation from Nikolai Danilevsky to Arnold Toynbee. He taught at Harvard until 1959 and directed the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In 1938 he met Kerensky again, in Boston.
He died in Winchester, Massachusetts, on 10 or 11 February 1968, aged seventy-nine.
Tracing the roots — Turya, Yarensky Uyezd, Vologda Governorate (now Komi Republic, Russia)
Born in 1889 in Turya, in the Komi lands of the Vologda Governorate, to a Russian father and a Komi mother, he became a professor in Petrograd, served as Kerensky's secretary in 1917, was elected to the Constituent Assembly and was sent abroad by the Soviet government in September 1922.
.svg?width=900)
Turya, Yarensky Uyezd, Vologda Governorate (now Komi Republic, Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The tragedy of our time is not that men are poor — all men know something of poverty. The tragedy is that men are not creative."