“Pareto's studies show that, properly taken, the social physics of the seventeenth century is not a mere dream of a bold human mind, but may be developed into a real scientific sociology which will probably not be able to disentangle all the ‘mysteries’ of human behavior and human history, but may clarify, to some degree, the more important of them.”

— Pitirim Sorokin (1928), Contemporary Sociology (pg. 62); cited: American Sociological Theory (pg. 310)

“No synopsis of the book can possibly provide an idea of the richness of its content. One of its major contributions, however, is Sorokin's classification of the various schools of sociological theory. It should be noted that these "schools" are for the most part single-factor interpretations of the structure of society and of social change. They are various ways of interpreting society, not, as is so often the case, various ways of interpreting sociology. They have nothing to do with such approaches to sociological inquiry as functionalism, exchange theory, symbolic interactionism, and others. The first chapter, for example, deals with the mechanistic school, those who have regarded society as some kind of a machine, exhibiting the operation of both centripetal (associative) and centrifugal (dissociative) forces. Among these writers Sorokin includes the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and especially the so-called social physicists of the seventeenth century (Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, and, a little later, Berkeley), Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte, and Quetelet also appear on Sorokin's mechanistic roster. His principal attention, however, is devoted to social energetics and includes such names as H. C. Carey, Voronoff, Haret, Lotka, Barcelo, Solvay, Ostwald, Bekhterev, Carver, and Winiarsky—names that do not ordinarily appear in the histories of sociology. In any event, Sorokin dismisses them all as writers who have contributed nothing to the understanding of social phenomena. The concepts of physical force and physical energy, such as the conception of society as an astronomical system, are little more than absurd. To one writer in this school he gives favorable, but critical, treatment, and that is Pareto. He regards Pareto's ideas as "sound and promising," but defective nevertheless.”

— Robert Bierstedt (1981), on Sorokin's 1928 Contemporary Sociology; in: American Sociological Theory (pg. 309-10)

“Lundberg and Dodd are not the Copernicus and Newton of the social sciences, as they so earnestly and industriously aspired to be. Very few today read Foundations of Sociology (1939) and Dimensions of Society (1942), yet Lundberg was the leading protagonist of the scientific method in sociology, of the purification, by operational means, of the concepts of sociology, and on the notion of society, as a natural phenomenon, susceptible to inquiry by the methods of the natural sciences.”

— Robert Bierstedt (1981), American Sociological Theory (pg. 387)