The search for a scientific sociology : the Sorokinian "system" in historical perspective
Date
1982
Authors
Beaveridge, Stuart Aubrey
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Abstract
Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968) was a sociologist who became well known for a variety of reasons, but who is not normally remembered for his efforts to make sociology scientific. Sorokin conducted this search for a scientific sociology when he was at the height of his career, and when his earlier works were probably more widely read and translated than those of any other living sociologist, but he published his ideas in Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937-41), the very work in which he also began uttering prophesies and making extravagant claims for his "integralist system" of sociology, utterances and claims which contributed to the rapid decline of interest in his work. Publication of the first three volumes of Sorokin's Dynamics also coincided with the appearance of Talcott Parsons' Structure of Social Action, a book which also claimed to provide a theoretical basis for a scientific sociology, and which initiated the rise of interest in Parsonian theory. Subsequent debates between Sorokin, Parsons, their critics and their partisans were usually couched in conceptual-analytical language which served to further obscure interest in Sorokin's substantive study of sociocultural change and the categories in terms of which he undertook it. Yet these constituted a sincere attempt to provide sociology with insights and techniques designed to make it more scientific. As such they belong to the history of such attempts.
The present study presents and discusses Sorokin's 1937 work, emphasizing ideas and findings which pertain to his search for a scientific sociology; similar but briefer treatment is accorded the better known ideas of Durkheim, Pareto, Weber and Parsons. It then examines Sorokin's ideas in relation to those of the other four. It concludes that, although Sorokin's studies constituted an imaginative effort to improve upon and to advance the thought of Durkheim, Pareto and Weber, his willingness to become involved in flights of fancy and in arid conceptual-analytical debate with Parsons and others contributed to the subsequent neglect not only of his own studies, but also of the very problem those studies had attempted to solve--the problem of discovering an adequate basis for the scientific study of sociocultural phenomena.