ABSTRACT
Whether as a revolutionary youth in his Russian homeland, as immigrant in the United States, as refuge in exile, or as iconoclastic professor of sociology, his scholarly niche, Pitirim Sorokin spent most of his life as an itinerant stranger, a critical and marginalized outsider. Since sociology was not yet offered as an area of formal study, Sorokin specialized in criminal law and penology, a decision influenced by his own arrests and prison experience. Following the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and fall of the Czar in 1917, Sorokin was appointed secretary to Alexander Kerensky, Prime Minister of the new Provincial Government, and became one of the most outspoken critics of the Bolshevik faction. While Sorokin's early works were generally well-received and heralded as major contributions to American sociology, publication of his four-volume magnum opus, Social and Cultural Dynamics, between 1937 and 1941 marked the beginning of a long period of exile from the mainstream of American sociology.
