Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was born in the rural north of Russia in 1889. Sorokin attended the Psycho-Neurological Institute and the University of St. Petersburg; there he was influenced by De Roberty, Kovalevsky, Bekhterev, Petrajitzky, Rostovtzeff, and Pavlov. With a broad foundation in philosophy, psychology, ethics, history, and law, he came to sociology by way of criminology and soon rose in the Russian academic ranks. He wrote more than thirty volumes, many of which—for example, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937-1941), Social Mobility (1927-1941), and Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928)—have become classics. His writings cover practically all fields of sociology, including the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of art, political sociology, social stratification, methodology, and theory. He was elected president of the International Institute of Sociology in 1936 and president of the American Sociological Association in 1964, and has received many other honors. His career may be broadly divided into two periods: the one before 1922, when he was banished from the Soviet Union for his opposition to the Bolshevik regime, and the one since then, which he has spent in the United States.

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