Pitirim Sorokin

Pitirim Sorokin was a Russian-American sociologist who fled Soviet Russia after being sentenced to death for his political activity and went on to found and chair the sociology department at Harvard University. In Social Mobility (1927) he provided one of the first systematic sociological treatments of movement between social strata, and in his major four-volume work Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937 to 1941) he proposed a cyclical theory of civilizational change, arguing that cultures oscillate over long historical periods between an ideational phase oriented toward spiritual and otherworldly truth, a sensate phase oriented toward material and sensory reality, and an integrated idealistic phase that combines elements of both. In his later career Sorokin turned to the study of altruism and love as a force in social life, founding Harvard's Research Center in Creative Altruism.