The Protean Master and His Disciple

How was it that a scholar known and esteemed globally by readers from all walks of life, between the 1920s through his death in 1968, could have become by the early 1940s a source of embarrassment to his immediate colleagues at Harvard, unable or unwilling to form a “school” of acolytes and apparently destined to be forgotten posthumously? Moreover, how could it be that this man, demonstrably more creative, adventurous and productive than virtually anybody else in the guild of sociologists—which he himself had done so much to foster, first in Russia between 1919 and 1923, and then in the United States—had to wait until the eleventh hour of his professional life to be elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), an honor that many times had gone to far lesser scholars? One could believe that “cognitive dissonance” was invented as an analytic term just to illuminate this one man's life, so great was the gap between what he accomplished and how he was regarded by the most prominent practitioners of his craft during the last third of his life (see Nichols 1996 for concise details about this long-term battle). It is partly to address this puzzle that one man's scholarly labors and personal influence can be brought into play.

In a letter of February 27, 1963, Pitirim Sorokin (then 74 years old) wrote to Edward Ashod Tiryakian, 40 years his junior, to say he was “deeply touched by this superlative manifestation of your and [the] contributors’ friendship to me.” Sorokin was responding to the Festschrift in the former's honor, which Tiryakian had assembled over six long years of frustrating struggle. The “first copy today reached me. The volume [Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin] is excellent in all respects. Your preface and [Arthur K.] Davis's article extol my achievements beyond their merits. I ascribe this high estimate to the generosity of yours” (emphasis added).