Whatever one may think of Professor Pitirim A. Sorokin's controversial theories, "The Crisis of Our Age" is a valuable book, a single-volumed, relatively concise key to the thought locked in the prolix prose of the four-volumed "Social and Cultural Dynamics." Whatever one may think of these theories, Sorokin is worthy of a careful reading. By his own repeated confession here is the man who has made of sociology a super-social science, the only man who has successfully rationalized man's history, the only man who can successfully explain the crisis of our age--and then just throw in the solution for good measure. Excusing the man's incredible conceit, here is a mind that deserves careful study.

Briefly, Sorokin divides the history of Western civilization into a continuous oscillation among periods dominated by one of three types of culture: the Ideational, the Idealistic and the Sensate. Sensate may be translated "scientific" or "materialistic"; Ideational as the culture which looks beyond the material world for all its values and aspirations; Idealistic a happy medium. Thus the Middle Ages was an ideational period, the scientific and rationalistic 19th century a sensate one. Each period, each type of culture carries within itself its own inherent doom,--its tendency to degeneration which will lead to its fall and to the rise and dominance of one of the other types, which also declines, and so on. Just now we are tobogganing down the decline of the last sensate period, which phenomenon is the crisis of our age and the prelude to the ideational period which will follow to save Western civilization.

This brief outline is brutally unfair--you must read the book to appreciate fully the tremendous breadth of Professor Sorokin's knowledge--but it does allow of at least one equally sketchy criticism of the method of analysis; Sorokin has started out with the hunch that there are three cultural compartments and then amassed evidence to back the hunch. But it is possible to start out with the different theory of a linear, progressive history of Western civilization and amass evidence to prove it, or to take a theory of parallel lines of development. Sorokin's evidence to prove his oscillation among dominant types is far from conclusive.