ABSTRACT
More than twenty years ago I enrolled as an undergraduate in Professor Sorokin’s best-known course, Principles of Sociology, officially catalogued as Sociology A, but commonly called Sorokin A by the irreverent Harvard Crimson’s Confidential Guide. My Saturday section man was R. K. Merton, who taught me a thing or two one day when he dispassionately atomized a juvenile term paper of mine. When in the course of events I became an instructor, one of my assignments would be to act as a section assistant in this same course. That association with Sorokin and Sociology A would last for several years, just before and just after the second world war. All that lay ahead, however.
