The Crisis of European Culture and Its Historical Transformations (the Work of Pitirim Sorokin)

Abstract

The essay is about the problem of the development of European historical Culture and its crisis - based on books by Pitritim Sorokin. That famous sociologist referring to the thought of the Russian Slavophiles. In his conception, cultures aretransformed into (in the historical process) a cyclical manner. History of the world has formed two main types of cultural systems: ideational (reality is spiritual) and sensate (reality is material). The third type (idealistic) is the combination of the other two. The crisis of modern European Culture was understood by Sorokin as the exhaustion of sensate culture. It meant abandoning faith in God (rejection of ideational culture).