CITY IN PITIRIM SOROKIN’S WORKS: FROM OPPOSITION TO VILLAGE TO RURBANISM

Abstract

The article presents a historical and sociological analysis of Pitirim Sorokin’s works devoted to study of city. Although the urban theme was not central for him, he proposed some original ideas about relation between city and village, which fit into the current discussions about city. In order to reconstruct the “urban aspect” in Sorokin’s works, the article considers biographical context reflected in his views on city, analyzing Sorokin’s works from early Russian, Prague and American periods. Sorokin’s approach to definition and study of city, proposed in his book “Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology” (1929, co-authored with Carle Zimmerman), is described. It is shown that in Sorokin’s works the opposition between village and city as two fundamentally different worlds is solved through the idea of rurbanism, a form of community organization in which specific rural and urban features are combined, preserving their positive aspects and mitigating their disadvantages. It is concluded that the idea of rurbanism anticipates Sorokin’s integral approach.