Sorokin's Data Versus His Conclusions

The organism of the Western society and culture seems to have not merely a number of local or superficial ailments, but to be undergoing one of the deepest crises of its life .... It is the crisis of a Sensate culture, now in its overripe stage, the culture that has dominated the Western World during the last five centuries. It is also the crisis of a contractual (capitalistic) society associated with it. In this sense we are experiencing one of the sharpest turns in the historical road, a turn as great as any of the other few made by the Graeco-Roman and Western cultures in passing from Ideational to Sensate, and from Sensate to Ideational, phases .... We are seemingly between two epochs .... We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day.... The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us and the coming generations, perhaps with their nightmares, frightening shadows, and heart-rending horrors. Beyond it, however, the dawn of a new great Ideational culture is probably waiting to greet the men of the future

Sociology · Demography · Digital Games and Media · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics

• Sorokin's Contribution to American Sociology

  Open Access•Samuel P Oliner•Nationalities Papers•1976

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• A 'Scientific Revolution

  Open Access•Henrika Kuklick•Sociological Inquiry•1973

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