THE CITY IN THE WORKS OF PITIRIM SOROKIN: FROM OPPOSITION TO THE COUNTRYSIDE TO URBANISM

Abstract

The article presents a historical and sociological analysis of the works of Pitirim Sorokin devoted to the study of the city. Although urban issues were not central to him, he offered a number of original ideas about urban-rural relations that fit seamlessly into current discussions about the city. To reconstruct the "urban aspect" in Sorokin's scientific work, the article examines the biographical context reflected in his ideas about the city, analyzes Sorokin's works of the early Russian, Prague and American periods. The article describes Sorokin's approach to the definition and study of the city, proposed in his book "Fundamentals of the Sociology of village and City" (1929, co-authored with Karl Zimmerman). It is shown that the juxtaposition of the village and the city as two fundamentally different worlds in Sorokin's works is eliminated using the idea of urbanism, a form of community organization in which specific rural and urban features are combined, while preserving their positive aspects and mitigating their disadvantages. It is concluded that the idea of Rurbanism anticipates the integral approach of Sorokin.