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Influence of Catastrophes on Political Organization: The Sorokin Perspective
The vibrant complex life of the great late sociologist-philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968) was the fertile soil in which his ideas about humans and society flourished, as his many books show us still, including Man and Society in Calamity, published in 1942. One of his ideas was that catastrophes (he called them calamities) shifted control of social groups from individuals and private groups to governments. He identified four calamities: famine, pestilence, war, and revolution. In his words, “The main uniform effect of calamities upon the political and social structure of society is an expansion of governmental regulation, regimentation, and control of social relationships and a decrease in the regulation and management of social relationships by individuals and private groups.” (1,2) Sorokin continued: “The expansion of governmental control and regulation assumes a variety of forms, embracing socialistic or communistic totalitarianism, fascist totalitarianism, monarchial autocracy, and theocracy. Now it is effected by a revolutionary regime, now by a counterrevolutionary regime; now by a military dictatorship, now by a dictatorship, now by a dictatorial bureaucracy. From both the quantitative and the qualitative point of view, such an expansion of governmental control means a decrease of freedom, a curtailment of the autonomy of individuals and private groups in the regulation and management of their individual behavior and their social relationships, the decline of constitutional and democratic institutions.” (1) How did Sorokin come to this understanding of the effect of catastrophes on political organization? Was his understanding theoretical, practical, or both? Are his syntheses valid today? 1. Sorokin’s Childhood TrialsSorokin’s personal life experiences clearly informed his insights about the effect of calamities on a society’s political organization, as described below. His full name was Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin, and he was born on January 21, 1889, in the non-Russian village of Turya, Vologda Province, located in the vast cold and remote regions of Northern Russia. His Russian Orthodox father was Alexander Prokopievitch Sorokin, an itinerant artisan trained and apprenticed in Veliki Ustyug, an ancient city that played an important cultural, religious, and political role in the history of this part of Russia. His father crafted religious icons and ornamental works in gold and silver as he moved from village to village, repairing and restoring the works of small Russian Orthodox churches. (2)
Alexander Sorokin met and married his Pitirim’s mother while working in her Komi village. (3) The Komi people, whose homelands border Finland, are members of the Finno-Ugric tribes and have populated the area of modern Western, Northern, and Central Russia since prehistory. (3) The Komi subsisted by farming, supplemented by hunting, trapping, lumbering, and fishing. They lived in small towns and hamlets, which were usually built on the banks of the ubiquitous rivers and streams of the region. “The small villages of the Komi were like tiny islands in a huge and engulfing forest vastness,” notes one observer. (3) Pitirim described the peasant houses as “large and built with very heavy logs…In each village a church dominated all the other buildings. Its spire and blue cupolas soared far above the settlement, and its whitewashed brick edifice with green roofs was visible from a distance of several miles. In the vicinity of the church were grouped public buildings, school, village-hall and library…Their standard of living was higher than the rest of the Russian population.” (4) “The Komi were Russian Orthodox but along with their Christian faith they still maintained many beliefs, legends and rituals of their pre-Christian, pagan religion,” explained Pitirim. (4,5) “Each religion assimilated certain beliefs and practices of the other, resulting in a ‘paganized Christianity’ or ‘Christianized paganism.’ However, there was no conflict or ‘cold war’ between the elements of the two religions nor between the few sectarian believers in evangelical simplicity, peace, and non-violence and resistance to evil. The basis of this ‘peaceful coexistence’ was a commonly held conviction that the whole world is one living unity and that ‘Truth is one, but men call it by different names.’ Throughout all the years of my life among the Komi people, I do not remember a single case of religious intolerance or individual persecution,” Pitirim noted. (4) The Komi never knew serfdom or slavery. “They were always free and managed their local affairs autonomously through a direct self-government similar to the German Gemeinschaft or to the Russian mir and obschina”, recalled Pitirim. (4) Pitirim’s Komi mother bore three sons, Vassiliy, Pitirim, and Prokopiy, before dying in 1892 while her husband was away working. Alexander never married again. Pitirim remembered her death as “the first image etched on his memory. A smell of birch had filled the room as Vassiliy and a woman whispered over his mother’s still figure. Something in their posture alarmed the three-year-old, and a feeling or irreparable loss gripped him. The cold of the room, the shadows moving across the floor, and the withdrawn, shocked look on his brother’s face reinforced his feeling of catastrophe.” (2) His mother’s death resulted in Prokopiy, the youngest, living with his mother’s elder sister Anissya and her husband, Vassiliy Ivanovitch Rymskskh in a small hamlet named Rymia on the shore of the Vychegda River. (6) Pitirim and his older brother Vassiliy became nomads with their father and crossed Komi territory several times, repairing churches, before they split up. Life was becoming desperate as boys’ father lapsed into alcoholism and bouts of delusional psychosis (delirium tremens). During these rages, the boys would go to Anissya and Vassiliy’s house to find refuge from his fury. When Alexander struck Vassiliy in the shoulder and Pitirim in the mouth with a hammer, the boys left their father for good, and worked on their own repairing and painting walls or gilding spires, domes, and roofs. During their itinerant travels, they stayed in villages for up to several months, where they learned to read and write from local teachers and priests. Pitirim also learned about nature, magic, and folklore, from his Uncle Vassiliy who was “a man of the forest, a trapper and a peasant.” (7) Their father died when Vassiliy was 14 and Pitirim was 10 years old. (7) His funeral was over before they learned he had died. (8) Pitirim applied for entrance to a new advanced grade school in Gam in what is now the Komi Republic, and won a full scholarship. When he proved himself exceptionally bright, school authorities extended his scholarship for three more years. His intense secular training in school, exposure to the many forest spirits of his Komi heritage, and his deep experience with the Deity and saints of his Russian Orthodoxy, forced Pitirim to learn at a young age to try to integrate various perspectives, searching for “the mystical and material ties that made his life a unity”, according to a biographer. (9) II. From Teacher’s Seminary to PrisonFollowing graduation from the Gam advanced school at age 14 years, Pitirim Sorokin (hence Sorokin) in August 1903 entered the Russian Orthodox Khrenovo Teachers’ Seminary in the Kostroma Province in August 1903 to train as a teacher for the Russian Holy Synod’s elementary schools. He became a revolutionary against the Tsarist monarchy instead. Tsar Nicholas II occupied the throne from 1894 until his forced abdication in 1917. Sorokin was never a Bolshevik Communist. Sorokin wrote in his autobiography that he met students, teachers, “peasants, factory hands, clerks, clergy, government officials, doctors, writers, journalists, businessmen, leaders of local cooperatives, and representatives of different political parties—Social Revolutionaries, Social-Democrats (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), Monarchists, Anarchists, Liberals, and Conservatives of all shades.” He continued, “Through contact with these people I acquired many new ideas and values and became aware of social conditions. This new milieu, new acquaintances, and particularly my intensive reading of hitherto unknown books, journals, and newspapers rapidly broadened and deepened my outlook. My newly formed ideas were reinforced by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and particularly by the brewing storm which resulted in the [Russian] Revolution of 1905.” (9) The direct cause of the Revolution of 1905 was the wretched failure of the Tsar’s military forces in the Russo-Japanese War, but it also reflected an empire-wide struggle against the autocratic rule of the Romanov dynasty and calls for national liberation by non-Russians within the Russian Empire. Tsar Nicholas II put down the Revolution of 1905 with accommodation and force, and did increase the pace of reform in Russia, but not enough to prevent the second revolution in 1917 that resulted in his and his family’s execution by Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks led by Lenin often looked on the Russian Revolution of 1905 as the antecedent to their own revolution and rationale for their own coup d’état.
The combined impact of all these forces was so powerful that Sorokin rejected the Czarist monarchical regime and its “capitalist” economy, and became an enthusiastic missionary for the anti-Czarist revolution and the leader of the Social-Revolutionary Party in the school and adjacent regions. “In contrast to Social-Democrats [Bolsheviks], the Social-Revolutionary Party claimed to be the party of all labor classes—peasant, worker, and intellectual. Unlike Marxist materialism and the economic interpretation of man and history, the philosophy and sociology of the Social-Revolutionary Party were much more idealistic or integralistic. They emphasized strongly the role of creative ideas, voluntary efforts, the ‘struggle for individuality’ versus the ‘struggle for existence,’ and the importance of on-economic facts in determining social processes and human conduct. My previous Weltanschauung [worldview] was more congenial to this kind of ideology that to the ‘proletarian,’ ‘materialistic,’ ‘economic’ ideology of Marxian social-democracy. This congeniality explains why I chose the Social-Revolutionary over the Social-Democratic Party and why throughout my subsequent life I have never been ‘infected’ by most Marxian ideologies,” Sorokin explained. (9) At Christmas time in 1906, police arrested Sorokin for his revolutionary activities. He was shocked. A horse and sleigh carried him to the local prison in Kineshma City, where he was thrown into a dirty cell whose wooden bunk was crawling with bedbugs. He later was moved to a cleaner cell and learned that political imprisonment was “much less painful and frightening than he had imagined…During its last years the collapsing Czarist regime became quite humane,” he noted. “As a matter of fact, we political prisoners made the prison a safe place to store revolutionary literature and employed prison guards as liaisons with outside revolutionaries, freely visited one another, and, unhindered, met daily to discuss political, social, and philosophic problems.” (10) In early 1907, Sorokin was released and, having been expelled from school and with no possibilities for work, became Comrade Ivan, the itinerant anti-tsarist revolutionary organizer in the Volga River region. (11) A close call along the Volga convinced him that his situation was too dangerous, and he returned to his aunt’s farm in Rymia. After two months with his Aunt Annisya and little brother Prokopiy he decamped for St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia, which lay to the west of his native Komi region. III. University YearsUpon arriving to St. Petersburg, Sorokin lacked a high school degree (he had been expelled from the teacher’s academy), and thus had to pass an “examination of maturity” to enter a university. He located Professor K.F. Jakov, the “first Komi man to achieve the distinction of university professor” and a sympathizer with Sorokin’s Social Revolutionary Party. The professor arranged free admission for his Komi kinsman to one of the best night schools in St. Petersburg at which he taught: Tscherniayevskye Kursy. Between 1907 until he passed his examination of maturity in 1909, Sorokin worked to organize and integrated his trenchant experiences into a coherent worldview. Sorokin spurned the disorganized mind in which ideas simply “squat side by side”. (12) Sorokin enrolled at the newly opened Psycho-Neurological Institute rather than the University of St. Petersburg because of its greater flexibility, distinguished faculty, offering of courses in sociology, and an alive, revolutionary student body recruited from the lower, peasant-labor classes from which Sorokin came. (13) In 1911 his reputation among fellow radicals (he continued to plot ways to overthrow the tsar) brought attention from Tsar Nicholas’s spies. Once he needed to flee to Italy to escape capture, and in March 1913 the police successfully arrested him for writing an inflammatory political pamphlet. He spent three weeks as a political prisoner, reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Thus, Sorokin’s politics became intertwined with education in a dynamic mix. In 1914 he completed his undergraduate work, and in 1916 obtained the degree Magistrant of Criminal Law. In 1922 he finished his doctorate in sociology and created and chaired the first department of sociology at the University of St. Petersburg. IV. Holocaust: The 1917 RevolutionAlways studying situations and organizing his thinking, Sorokin noted about revolutions the following: “All great revolutions seem to pass through three typical phases. The first phase is usually of short duration. It is marked by the joys of liberation from the tyranny of the old regime and by great expectations of the reforms promised by all revolutions. This initial stage is radiant, its government humanitarian and benign, its policies mild, vacillating, and fairly impotent. ‘The worst of the beasts’ in man begins to awaken. This short overture is ordinarily succeeded by the second, destructive phase. The great revolution now turns into a furious tornado indiscriminately destroying everything in its path. It pitilessly uproots not only the obsolescent institutions but also the vigorous ones which it destroys along with the dead or moribund values; it murders not only the uncreative power elite of the old regime but also a multitude of creative persons and groups. The revolutionary government at this stage is ruthless, tyrannical, and bloodthirsty. Its policies are mainly destructive, coercive and terroristic. If the tornado phase does not utterly ruin the nation, its revolution eventually enters the third, constructive phase. With the destruction of all counter-revolutionary forces, it now begins to build a new social, cultural, and personal order. This order is constructed not only of new, revolutionary ideals but includes the restoration of the more vital of the pre-revolutionary institutions, values, and ways of life which had been temporarily destroyed by the second phase of the revolution and which revive and reassert themselves regardless of the wishes of the revolutionary government. The post-revolutionary order, therefore, usually represents a blending of the new patterns and way of life with old but vital and creative patterns of pre-revolutionary times.” (14) Sorokin personally experienced all three phases of the revolution of 1905-1908. In 1917 he experienced directly only the first and second stages of the life-cycle of that epochal revolution, which he documented in his book Leaves from a Russian Diary (1950) and his autobiography Long Journey (1963). The first day of the 1917 “February Revolution” was February 27 when, at 2:00 a.m., it came at last. On October 24-25, 1917, the Soviets, dominated and led by the Bolsheviks, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government in a coup d’état, and subsequently called this event Great October Socialist Revolution. The Bolsheviks finally caught up with and arrested Sorokin several months later on January 2, 1918, charging him with “an attempt on Lenin’s life.” (15) Sorokin and his comrades, though members of the Russian Provisional Government (the Constituent Assembly), had lost their struggle for power and became prisoners in the Fortress of Peter and Paul (Petragrad Bastille), which the Bolsheviks had stormed and taken over with 8,000 men on July 6, 1917. (16) The imprisoned Sorokin noted that he had been a prisoner of the Tsar and now of the Communists, and “from this varied experience I should emerge a practical as well as a theoretical criminologist.” (17) When someone mentioned hunger, Sorokin reminded him sarcastically that “since the Communists were the most advanced people in the world, they must know what was good for us.” In reality, Sorokin preferred the Tsar’s prisons to the Communists’ prisons as the latter were dirty and poorly furnished, books were rare, and prisoners were kept in their cells. Tuberculosis was rampant. On one horrible evening 60 people were executed, among them women and children. “This was the crucible that forged Pitirim’s hatred for the butchery and waste of Communism and revolutions,” notes biographer Johnston. (18) Sorokin’s wife Elena (they married on May 26, 1917, as the Communist tornado approached) managed his release from prison after 57 days. A week later, in early March 1918, they left St. Petersburg for Moscow where Sorokin met with Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970), since 1917 the second prime minister of the Russian Provisional Government. Sorokin became Kerensky’s private sectary and editor-in-chief of the governmental newspaper The Will of the People, thus returning to the mainstream of the resistance to the Bolsheviks. He led rebel fighters against the Bolsheviks until he was forced with his band into the forests half-starved where they subsisted for months. He finally gave himself up, was again jailed in a filthy prison, and was sentenced to death. Through the help of friends, in December 1918, Lenin ordered Sorokin’s release because Sorokin was “a valuable scientist who should be saved for the good of the country.”
V. Life in Death, 1919-1922: Communism Reigns ViciouslyThe year 1919 was marked with shortages in every aspect of life, as the newly emerging “Communist society” was based on “sharing scarcity”: not enough food, fuel, building supplies, paper, clothing, shoes, medicine or soap. This was the second stage of the revolutionary cycle explained by Sorokin above. Sorokin called himself and his family and friends “The Troglodytes”. “Not that we lived in caves,” he wrote, “but I am sure that the original cave-dwellers enjoyed more comforts than did ninety-five per cent of the population of Petrograd [St. Petersburg] in 1919. (18) In the bosom of the now-reigning Communist society, everything had to be ‘natural’. Sorokin wrote, “We certainly had a temperature in our dwelling, which was heated principally by our lungs. We had fuel cards but no fuel. The water in Petrograd at this time was so full of typhus and other noxious germs that it was impossible to drink a drop without boiling it first. In 1919 the most valuable present one could give was a piece of firewood. As for sanitary conditions, they are simply not to be described in the language of decency. All water pipes cracked under the intense cold of unheated houses, and in the upper stories people could neither use toilets nor get water…Broken windows had to be repaired with rages. To wash or to take a bath was almost beyond anyone’s power. The laundry, a bourgeois institution, disappeared. Soap was included in food cards, but it was never issued. What was perhaps hardest to bear was the darkness. The electricity was turned on only for about two or three hours in the evening, and very often it was not turned on at all.” (19) Typhus, influenza, cholera, starvation, and exposure raised death rates already inflated by suicides. “While dying was easy in Petrograd, being buried was another matter. Permits for burial were needed and often took several days. There was a coffin shortage, and burial plots were difficult to locate. The Communists did move on this problem by building a large crematorium in the city.” (20) In 1920 Pitirim and Elena found jobs at the Agricultural Academy of Czarskoe Selo (today called Pushkin) and relocated to the former country residence of the Russian royal family. Sorokin published his second book, The System of Sociology, which again brought him to the attention of Lenin’s secret police, but no arrest was made. By 1921, the situation in Russia had become desperate. “Peasants had no seeds to plant, factories had no fuel, the railway system broke down, schools closed, and buildings fell into ruins. Communism was in a crisis, and order was maintained only through the bloody practices of the army. Revolts, demonstrations, and protests were everywhere.” (20) Major confrontations in February 1921 forced” the 10th Congress of the All-Russian Communist Party to introduce economic reforms and announce the New Economic Policy. (20) Private ownership was restored to small parts of the economy, especially farming (but not to the land itself). “It replaced the policy of ‘War Communism introduced by Lenin in 1918 as an emergency plan to help the Bolsheviks win the Civil War in Russia.” To explain the NEP, Lenin said, “We are not civilized enough for socialism”, referring to Russia’s primarily agrarian economy. (21) The changes came too late. Peasants, especially along the Volga River, one of the most fertile areas in Russia, had no backup seeds for planting and were then struck with a drought. Their crops failed and they faced starvation and imminent death. VI. Sorokin Studies Russia’s FamineSorokin observed the famine of 1921-1922 first hand. He knew that famines had been constants in human history—in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, China and Persia, and Russia and many medieval societies, and that they were particularly common in times of war and revolution. (22) The Bolsheviks actually provided him with a laboratory to study famine and, in the winter of 1921, he set out to see for himself the areas of Russia hit hardest by the famine: Somara and Saratov Provinces along the Volga River. (20) “The shock of what he saw there precluded any type of scientific research. He “broke down completely before the spectacle of the actual starvation of millions.” (23,24)
Johnston writes, “Having grown jaded to urban hunger, he [Sorokin] was unprepared for the living skeletons he saw in these areas. There was simply nothing left for people to eat. The straw thatch from roofs, all livestock, and even dogs, cats, and crows had been eaten. Constables had to lock away corpses and guard graves because people were stealing the bodies for food. Murders were even occurring for that desperate purpose. One woman ‘had killed her child, cut off his legs, cooked and ate them.’ The twenty days that Pitirim spent in the districts made him fearless in his attacks on the revolution. In May 1922 his book on hunger and human behavior was being circulated. Though cut by censors, it was still a moving firsthand account of the devastation and ruin of people in these districts. As an intellectual and emotional testimony to their sufferings, it guaranteed that this lesson of revolution would not be forgotten.” (25) VII. Soviet Assault on Scholars and Departure of Sorokin from RussiaIn August 1922, while in Moscow, Sorokin learned that the Chekha, the strong secret, or political, police on which the Bolsheviks relied to buttress their rule, was conducting a nationwide assault on scholars, scientists, and writers. These intellectuals were rounded up and banished from the country. Sorokin realized that this would be a good time to leave Russia and turned himself over to the Chekha and prepared for voluntary exile. The Chekha gave him ten days to prepared for departure and he and Elena on September 22, 1922 left Moscow for Berlin, Germany. From there they went to Czechoslovakia, by invitation of President Thomas G. Masryk, and from there to America where he and Elena lived for the rest of their lives, as described elsewhere. (7,8) VIII. Sorokin’s Ideas on the Relationship between Calamities and the General Increase of Governmental ControlSorokin reviled expansion of government control to complete totalitarianism but, as discussed below, could explain why a people sometimes not only accepted expanded government control, but demanded it. Four brief definitions of complete totalitarianism are 1) “absolute power, especially exercised unjustly or cruelly; 2) a political doctrine advocating the principle of absolute rule; 3) a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state; 4) a dictatorial form of centralized government that regulates every aspect of state and private behavior.” (26) Sorokin explained that social relationships fluctuate during the four calamities, which he reduces to three later on in his life: war, economic impoverishment, and social emergency of any kind. “Other conditions being equal,” he wrote, “governmental control in a given social system tends to increase in periods of great social emergency; and of these emergency conditions, particularly in the times of strenuous war and in severe economic crises where there is scarcity of the most important means of subsistence for a large part of the population. The emergency conditions call forth an extraordinary effort on the part of the state government, which leads naturally to expansion of its activity, control, and regulation.” (27)
For example, as soon as a society enters war, the “curve of government interference at once jumps and the state network of social relationships becomes more complicated. Instead of normal laws, martial law and a state of siege are introduced, which means an enormous expansion of government control. Many economic relationships heretofore uncontrolled by the State now become regimented by it: production, distribution, and consumption…Military rule is absolute; it may concern anything that is urgent from a military standpoint; it imposes upon the population anything that is deemed necessary for military purposes. It may impose not only the draft into the army, but even mass execution of groups in the population. In a word, the fact of a sudden expansion of government control in time of war is unquestionable.” (27) The reason for this “totalitarian swing” (his term) is the need for victory. “Of two nations equal in other respects, the nation that imposes a centralized and rigid discipline upon its population has more chances of being victorious than the nation whose efforts are not organized; which does not have a centralized system and strong discipline,” Sorokin wrote. (27) The army is by its very nature a totalitarian institution, he asserted. “The best creators of totalitarianism, including the state socialism and state communism, have been not Marx or Engels or Lassalle or Lenin, but the greatest organizers of military forces and military empires: Jenghiz Khan, Tamerlane, Caesar, Napoleon, and the like.” (28) What is the role of expanded government control in famine, impoverishment, and severe economic crises? Abundance of a necessity makes unnecessary any governmental regulation, he posits. For example, “since we have plenty of air to breathe, our need is satisfied without any compulsory regulation.” (29) If there is a scarcity of this necessity, the regulation appears unavoidable. “An increase of governmental economic control in the periods of famine and impoverishment has been regularly manifest in the following phenomena:
Sorokin applied this architectonic to the Communist regimes in Russia and China. In Russia, the First World War caused a decrease in supply of necessities in 1915. The Russian government began to expand its control in the economic field through decrees in August 15, 1915 and October 25, 1915, which give the right to officials to search, to tabulate, to confiscate, to requisition all private food and necessities, which, Sorokin believed, was the beginning of what later on developed into “Communism” (his quotes). (30) He continued, “Owing to the growth of impoverishment, due to the war, this process necessarily grew also. As the revolution only aggravated the economic situation, governmental control continued to grow during the Provisional Government [Sorokin was a member], whose policy in this respect only pushed further that of the Czarist Government. At the time of the overthrow of the Kerensky regime private trade and commerce were almost annihilated; private industry and agriculture were greatly restricted, state control was expanded enormously. Owing to the factors of the civil war and the growth of impoverishment the Bolsheviki pushed this process up to its possible limits. In this way appeared the so-called “Communist regime,” which, in the present terminology of the Communists themselves, was nothing but ‘Military and Starving Communism’.” (30) When the civil war in Russia finally ended in 1920, “Communism” ceased to work, noted Sorokin. “At the same time everyone, except a small group of Communists and swindlers, was ruined. Economic differentiation disappeared. An equality in poverty was established.” (30) Sorokin then noted that if his hypothesis was true (i.e., that governmental control increases with social emergencies), then Lenin’s New Economic Policy (described earlier), which amounted to a decrease in governmental control, should work the opposite way in affecting living conditions, i.e., should make them better. That is what one would expect according to Sorokin’s hypothesis, and this is what actually happened. “In 1921 the Bolsheviki were forced to introduce the New Economic Policy. It meant a step toward the so-called ‘capitalist regime’; it represented a reduction of the governmental control of economic life and an increase of private control, initiative, and autonomy. With peace and improvement of economic conditions, this trend was continued up to the Second World War, when it was replaced by a new flare-up of totalitarianism,” Sorokin concluded. (30). IX. Inferences of Sorokin Totalitarianist IdeasIf Sorokin’s hypothesis is true—that calamities and increase in government control are linked, then it serves as the basis for the following four inferences developed by Sorokin:
X. Why Societies Accept Expansion of Government ControlSorokin noted, “If the expansion [of government control] corresponds to the wishes of the members of the State or other organized group, a totalitarian character of government is neither felt as a limitation of the liberty of the members, nor is it regarded as tyranny. It is estimated as a real social service, rather than an encroachment on the freedom and the rights of the members. In many religious sects, in many family groups, and generally in a group with a predominant familistic relationship, such a totalitarianism is welcomed and viewed as a positive value. Even in periods of war and emergency, dictatorship in a state and a swing to totalitarianism have often been willingly accepted.” (31) Sorokin proposed that “[w]hen in a group, especially in periods of calamity, the members wish the most vigorous action from the government, and when the government fails to give it, such an abstention from expansion would be qualified by the members as a mere impotence and inefficiency of the government, and as a failure to render the social service expected.” (32) “On the other hand, the policy of the government laissez faire in many cases is not a service to the liberty of the members of the group, but serves often the opposite purpose; it is like the noninterference on the part of an onlooker into the relationship where a cruel gangster tortures a child, or a physically powerful person coerces, without any just reason, the weaker party into an activity or conduct harmful to that party.” (32) Sorokin continued: “These considerations show why totalitarianism per se is not necessarily a limitation of the liberty of the members; and the laissez faire per se is not necessarily identical with the regime of freedom of the members. Everything depends upon the kind of totalitarianism and the kind of laissez faire. If the former is familistic, it is the best realization of the liberty of the group members. If it is compulsory, it is undoubtedly a limitation of their liberty. The same is true of the laissez faire. If it is in accordance with the wish of the members of the group and if the members are highly social and properly behave themselves in regard to one another, as “’brothers’, the laissez faire is a free regime. If the wish of the majority of the members suffering from the pseudo-contractual relationship is for a just and strong government that can help them and bridle the coercive section of the group, then the laissez-faire government is a shrine for a compulsory regime.” (32) Many totalitarian regimes are compulsory, not familistic, noted Sorokin. “The very presence of its harsh and severe coercive means used overliberally, without any restraint; its martial (juridically or factually) laws; the immense number of its victims and of its opponents; its reliance upon an unrestrained physical coercion—these and other symptoms are a fairly reliable barometer that it is not totalitarianism that is desired by all or even a large portion of the population” of the totalitarian countries. (32) XI. How Is Compulsory Totalitarianism Curbed?Sorokin noted that compulsory “totalitarianism must turn either into familistic totalitarianism or into a regime of open and rude coercion which sooner or later will either be overthrown or curbed.” (32) XII. Assessing Sorokin’s IdeasThree questions were posed at the beginning of this essay: How did Sorokin come to his understanding of the effect of catastrophes on political organization? Was his understanding theoretical, practical, or both? Is his synthesis valid today? In answer to the first question, Sorokin came to his understanding of the effect of catastrophes through two routes:
The answer to the second question, “Was his understanding theoretical, practical, or both?” is “both”. He integrated his personal experiences with his intellectual assessments of Russian society throughout his life, in large part, to forge a mental unity of worldview and, one might conclude, maintain his sanity. The third question, “Are his syntheses valid today?”, is “yes”, from the perspective of this writer. Sorokin’s hypothesis that calamities induce a shift to increased government authority was proved during the Great Depression when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt whipped out the comprehensive “New Deal”, which was a vast increase in governmental authority over private individuals and groups, even more so when later coupled with World War II. FDR and the U.S. Congress responded in a “familial”, some might even say, “compulsory” manner that was accepted by the American majority, as measured by FDR’s re-elections to the office of the presidency. As the U.S. returned to a peacetime existence, the government controls and intrusiveness fell away under the later Truman years, and the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon administration years, just like Sorokin’s hypothesis predicted it would. Indeed, during the Nixon administration the military draft was ended. Another example is more recent: the Islamist terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, which led to a strong reaction on the part of the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. Congress. A new federal department, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, came into existence as a result of this terrorist attack. This huge department embraced many older organizations and processes and introduced some new ones, all to strengthen the safety and economic security of the U.S. A proportion of Americans would interpret this move as governmentally intrusive and controlling. Yet, the systems emplaced have in general been accepted by most Americans, judging from election results to date, as a necessary evil in return for improved protection and economic security. This reality agrees with Sorokin’s hypothesis that “[w]hen in a group, especially in periods of calamity, the members [may] wish the most vigorous action from the government…” (32) A third example is even more recent: the Katrina and Rita hurricanes of 2005, which shredded the U.S. Gulf states. In this case, the initial perceived laissez faire approach of the federal government, as embodied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency led by Michael Brown, was bitterly reproached by many Americans. The perceived initial federal response to this calamity supports the Sorokin view that “the members wish the most vigorous action from the government, and when the government fails to give it, such an abstention from expansion would be qualified by the members as a mere impotence and inefficiency of the government, and as a failure to render the social service expected.” (32) XIII. ConclusionThe writings of Pitirim Sorokin are perhaps more valuable today than when they were written, because his hypotheses have been proved with additional calamities over time. Each time a calamity occurs one can watch for a predictable tightening of government controls, and then a falling away as “normality” returns. If a government does not let up on its calamity mode of operation after the calamity has been traversed, the governed will eventually 1) do something to curb the government power or 2) perish along with the government (Sorokin’s idea). Some people have remarked that Sorokin merely states the obvious. I disagree. His ideas help order chaotic realities. Sources:
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