Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was born in 1889 in Turia, a small town in the wild and remote forests of Tsarist Russia. Turia was near the Finnish border of Russia with its mostly rural and independent Turkic-Finnish ethnic minority, the Komis. Sorokin would later reveal that that independent spirit of Turia was the reason for his independent intellectual position. Although the Komis, had been converted to Christianity in earlier times, they still maintained some of their previous pagan beliefs and rituals. Hence there was a spiritualist and heterodox Christianity. Sorokin named this heterodoxy “Christian Paganism” or “Pagan Christianity” in his autobiography. Based their moral understanding of the Golden Rule and Ten Commandments, the Komis had a social organization in which collective property and mutual aid prevailed as the core principles of the community. Both his adventurous childhood and the lifestyle of Komis played crucial roles in shaping Sorokin’s value system and philosophy. Sorokin traces his idealist understanding in which God, nature, goodness, righteousness, and beauty are all integrated with each other in his early experiences among the Komis (Sorokin, 1963, p. 40). Besides these biographical experiences’ roles in shaping Sorokin’s philosophy, the social and political world of that time and its impact on Russian thought played a significant part. Sorokin, a “lifelong Russian thinker,” as Nichols put it, devoted his life to the historical adventures of cultural systems and changes in cultural systems and civilizations since early times, with the influence of Danilevsky, one of the most important representatives of this socio-cultural world. Although he was inspired by Pareto’s idea of system and Vico’s and Spengler’s cyclical history approach, he had always a critical eye on those views and managed to establish his own philosophy.

Sorokin deals with society and culture from a historical and dynamic point of view. His major works on culture and civilization are Social and Cultural Dynamics, Society, Culture, and Personality, The Crisis of Our Age, Modern Historical and Social Philosophies, Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time and Sociological Theories of Today. In Social and Cultural Dynamics, a macro-scale reading has been done by focusing on mentality transformations across centuries; but micro-scale transformations have been left out. Sorokin names these mentalities behind social transformations “truth systems”. Sorokin asserts that these mentalities or truth systems are all diffused into all layers of social tissue and it is thanks to these mentalities or truth systems that social-cultural structure is integrated. According to Sorokin, “any empirical cultural system passes through three basic stages: i) the conceptualization of two or more meanings, values and norms to form a coherent system or conglomeration (invention, creation, union); ii) objectification of the ideological system or the conglomeration in the means; iii) socialization among people in ideological or behavioral and material forms” (Sorokin, 1962, p. 537).

For Sorokin all the interrelations of the various elements of culture can be reduced to six basic types: i) spatial adjacency and perceptual similarity; ii) spatial adjacency and mechanical dependence; iii) indirect causal-functional; iv) direct causal-functional; v) meaningful; vi) meaningful-causal-functional unities. At first, cultural elements merely exist on the same or adjacent spatial positions because they are located side by side. Secondly, an external factor is influential in the combination of cultural elements., As an example of these types of conglomerations, Sorokin says that the winter season in Northern Russia is an external factor that brings together the heaters, sleds and boots in a village house. In causal or functional integration, what we are referring to is the cultural elements brought about by a single causal/functional relation. Causal/functional unity often refers to spatial adjacency at the same time, but not every spatial adjacency is causal/functional unity. Sorokin asserts that a mutual dependency is in charge if the cultural elements come together around such a cause/ function; and that these cultural elements are both dependent on each other and on the whole system. Any cultural synthesis, one in which the remaining elements are indirectly influenced by the change of one of the elements can be considered a functional unity. According to Sorokin, an element of this cultural unity, if it is carried away to another cultural synthesis, will spark a certain change in the new cultural synthesis: either the element of former cultural synthesis will change itself or it will force the latter cultural synthesis to change. In the cultural unity that Sorokin calls a meaningful-causal-functional integration, all the parts of unity cease to be parts and become invisible in the whole. According to Sorokin, this is the most advanced form of integration (Sorokin, 1937 (I), pp. 10–19). 

Sorokin points out that the main research object of cultural studies is cultural mentality, which includes the inner experiences, imagination, will, feelings, and emotions of a culture. According to Sorokin, one who cannot comprehend that cultural mentality cannot understand it. From a sociological point of view, Sorokin sees two main types of culture, sensate and ideational, which have their own mentalities, knowledge and truth systems, philosophy and worldviews, perceptions of religion and sanctity, fair and false judgments, artistic and literary forms, moral and common laws, and social relations (Sorokin, 1937 (I), p. 66). Between these two cultural types, which do not exist in their pure state, there lies the idealist culture system. This third type of culture system is a perfect mixture of two extreme types. Sorokin argues that these cultural types are differed from each other in terms of i) the nature of reality; ii) the needs and objectives to be satisfied; iii) the extent to which these needs and objectives are satisfied; iv) the way of satisfying these needs and purposes (Sorokin, 1937 (I), p. 70).

Sorokin states that sociocultural change can take place both by external factors and immanent dynamics; he focuses more on the latter in his sociocultural theory. Therefore, the main cause of sociocultural change is immanent to the system itself. The sociocultural system, which changes by immanent dynamics, in turn forces its environment to change. Sorokin, who does not accept any progressive and/or linear tendency in the dynamic of sociocultural change, underlines that on the other hand; insisting on a certain/plain rhythm will be reductionist as well. For this reason, it is not possible to talk about the processes of sociocultural change that are all the same and repetitive. According to Sorokin, the determining effect behind the due date of rhythm/cycle is again the immanent dynamics those force the system to change within itself. According to Sorokin, sociocultural change process consists of depression, purification, charisma, and revitalization phases. For Sorokin, the depression of Western civilization also leads to significant destruction both at the individual level and the social level. However, despite the present demolition and depression, sociocultural systems provide another sociocultural system from within.

Social and Cultural Dynamics, which is considered Sorokin’s magnum opus, is neglected by many sociologists and often subjected to intense criticism. However, as pointed out in this work, Sorokin has brought a critique of modernity with theoretical and conceptual frames; and releases studies on culture and civilization from being a part of a speculative and naïve history and social philosophy. All in all, Sorokin analyses that the changes and transformations that are experienced by civilizations not from purely progressive or cyclical viewpoints, but explains these transformations in successive short and long intermittent cycles at macro level by providing certain methodical and conceptual tools those can be employed in various alternative readings of civilizations as well.