Sorokin's 1928 classification of the first main branch (of eleven) of "contemporary sociology", that of the “mechanistic school of social thermodynamics”, all based on the thermodynamics of Rudolf Clausius. [3] |
“Life can never be at equilibrium. Complete equilibrium is never attained and would be fatal if it were attained, as it would mean stagnation, atrophy, and death.”
“Whole integrated culture, as a constellation of many culture subsystems, changes and passes from one state to another, because each of these is a going concern and bears in itself the reason of its change.”
“It is frequently asserted that everything in this world has a circular course. While transformations proceed in a certain direction in a certain place and time, other transformations take place in inverse direction at another place and time, in such a way that the same situations are reproduced generally and that the state of the universe remains invariable, when the phenomena are considered in their totality and in a general manner. The second fundamentally principle of the mechanical theory of heat, however, contradicts this opinion in the most decisive manner. It follows, from this, that the state of the universe must change more and more in a determined direction.”
“The activities of [a society’s] life career or destiny are determined mainly by the system itself, by its potential nature and the totality of its properties. External conditions can crush the system or terminate an unfolding of its immanent destiny at one of earliest phases of its development, depriving it of a realization of its complete life career; but they cannot fundamentally change the character and the quality of each phase of the development; nor can they, in many cases, reverse or fundamentally change the sequence of phases of the immanent destiny of the system.”
The lower right "flat" social structure (Marx-based), which is shown contrasted with the upper left "stratified" spinning top social pyramid (Pareto-based), seems to be what Sorokin is referring to in his 1927 quote (adjacent) about flat social groups (see: Harvard Pareto circle). [11] |
“Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is ‘flat’ and in which all members are equal.”
Contents of Sorokin's 1959 “The Mysterious Energy of Love” (see: audio), wherein he digresses on "love-energy" after had for so many years denounced all the mechanistic schools as pseudoscience; a case of hypocrisy par excellence. |
“Pitirim Sorokin, besides the Le Play School, refers to approximately 1,000 social theorists, students, and philosophers. His divisions, include: The Mechanistic School, with 19; The Geographical School, with 59; Biological Interpretation of Social Phenomena: Bio-Organismic, with 16; Sociological Interpretation of the Struggle for Existence and the Sociology of War, with 8; Sociological Interpretation of the Struggle for Existence, with 41; Sociological Interpretation of the Struggle for Existence and the Sociology of War, with 12; Bio-Social Branch: Demographic School, with 69; Sociologistic School, with 16; Sociologistic School: The Formal School and a Systematics of Social Relationship, with II; Sociologistic School: Economic School, with 8 I; The Psychological School, with 29; Psycho-Sociologistic Theories of Religion, Mores, Law, Public Opinion, Art, and Other Cultural Phenomena as Factors, with 23; Other Psycho-Sociologistic Studies of the Correlation Between Various Psycho-Social Phenomena and their Dynamics, with 169.”— Howard W. Odum (1929), An Introduction to Social Research (pg. 204)
“Take Winiarski’s [social] thermodynamic principles, as an example. They do not work at all, giving no help to the understanding of these processes and their development. Take any of the generalizations of the [social thermodynamics] school and try to apply them in any explanation of any social phenomena. The results will be the same, for they neither work nor explain anything.”— Pitirim Sorokin (1928), Contemporary Sociological Theory (pg. 35)