Social and Cultural Dynamics
* Book: Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. By Pitirim Sorokin
URL = https://archive.org/details/socialculturaldy0001soro
Contents
- v. 1. Fluctuation of forms of art.--
- v. 2. Fluctuation of systems of truth, ethics, and law.--
- v. 3. FLuctuation of social relationships, war, and revolution.--
- v. 4. Basic problems, principles, and methods
Abridged Version
- Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships. By Pitirim Sorokin and Michel P. Richard.
September 2017
"This classic work is a revised and abridged version, in a single volume, of the work which more than any other catapulted Pitirim Sorokin into being one of the most famed figures of twentieth-century sociology. Its original publication occurred before World War II. This revised version, written some twenty years later, reflects a postwar environment. Earlier than most, Sorokin took the consequences of the breakdown of colonialism into account in discussing the renaissance of the great cultures of African and Asian civilization. Other than perhaps F.S.C. Northrop, no individual better incorporated the new role of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic peoples in this postwar world. Sorokin came to view social and cultural dynamics in terms of three major processes: a major shift of mankind's creative center from Europe to the Pacific; a progressive disintegration of the sensate culture; and finally the first blush of the emergence and growth of a new idealistic sociocultural order. This volume is perhaps most famous for revealing Sorokin's remarkable efforts to understand the relationship of war and peace to the process of social and political change. Contrary to received wisdom, he shows that the magnitude and depth of war grows in periods of social, cultural, and territorial expansion by the nation. In short, war is just as often a function of development as it is of social decay. This long-unavailable volume remains one of the major touchstones by which we can judge efforts to create an international social science. There are few areas of social or cultural life that are not covered-from painting, art, and music, to the ethos of universalism and particularism. These are terms which Sorokin introduced into the literature long before the rise of functional doctrines. For all those interested in cultural and historical processes, this volume provides the essence of Sorokin's remarkably prescient effort to achieve sociological transcendence."
Other Books by P. Sorokin
- Book: The Sociology of Revolution. Pitirim Sorokin.
URL =
Summary:
"The Sociology of Revolution (1925) is strongly colored by Sorokin's revolutionary experiences.
He explains revolution, not in terms of historical or socio-economic movements as commonly conceived by writers on revolution, but as a destruction of the precarious balance between reason and disorganized antisocial instincts, with uncontrolled impulses coming to the fore. Since revolution results from the victory of man's upset biological drives over civilized reason, violent revolution is a disaster.
Sorokin does not attempt to explain why unreason overcomes reason at certain times but not at others; his analysis is essentially psychological rather than sociological or historical. This book bears the imprint of Freud, Pavlov, Pareto, and others who stress the nonrational aspects of behavior. A behavioristic influence is manifested continually; Sorokin speaks of reflexes of property, the stimulus to obedience, the reactions to authority. His main purpose is to chart the course of internal events in typical revolutions. Every revolution, he says, follows a cycle of license, reaction, repression, and new equilibrium. The belief seems implicit that no revolution really alters the state of affairs materially; the French Revolution, for example, is treated not as a triumph of democracy or of the bourgeoisie but simply as a temporary outburst of animalism like every other revolution."
(https://www.suz.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:00000000-36d7-41d4-0000-000064b51e55/simpson_sorokin.pdf)