Classic study of love.

Sorokin, P.A. (2002).

The ways and power of love: Types, factors, and techniques of moral transformation. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press. Paperback. xxviii+ 552 pp. $24.95. ISBN 1-890151-86-6.

Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968) was a controversial figure in twentieth-century sociology and a pioneer in the scientific study of unlimited love. He served as the founding chair of the sociology department of Harvard University and established the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism.

The Ways and Power of Love was first published in 1954 when Pitirim Sorokin was in the twilight of his career and heading the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. His expansive scientific analysis of love regarding its higher and lower forms, its causes and effects, its human and cosmic significance, and its core features, constitutes the first investigation on this topic of this magnitude in world literature to the present date. Consequently, the volume is considered to be a primary text for any study on love, as current and valuable today as when it first appeared.

Long out of print, the Templeton Foundation Press has reissued it with an introduction by Stephen G. Post, president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. The release of The Ways and Power of Love in the Templeton Foundation Press Timeless Classic series permits a new generation of readers to encounter Sorokin's brilliant mind and hopefully to move forward with his endeavor at a time when the world continues to need a comprehensive vision and understanding of altruistic love. Many will appreciate the re-issuing of this volume by the Templeton Foundation Press.

Post's introduction serves as a review of the work and its place in the history of thought. Post serves as professor of biomedical ethics at Case Western Reserve University and is president of the newly formed Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. His most recent book is The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease.

Sorokin was born in Russia and lived among the Russian peasants. He absorbed their traditional spirituality and ethics. As an adolescent he became a student leader in the anti-Czarist Socialist Revolutionary party. On Christmas Eve of 1906 he was arrested and spent five months in a Czarist jail cell. He attended the Psycho-Neurological Institute and then the University of St. Petersburg. In 1916 he was granted a master's degree in criminal and administrative law and then began his pursuit of sociology. He supported the Provisional Government of 1917, serving as Secretary to President Kerensky. Sorokin was popular with the public which led to his arrest by the Bolsheviks on the trumped-up charge that he was plotting to have Lenin killed. In 1920 he became head of the Department of Sociology at the University of St. Petersburg. At this time his System of Sociology was published. Given the repressive environment of Communist Russia, Sorokin and his wife went into exile in Prague in 1922. He produced several major books at this time before immigrating to the United States in 1923. In 1924 he received an appointment as Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Harvard University established its new Department of Sociology in 1931 and made Sorokin the founding chair. He served at Harvard through 1959, and was responsible for training several generations of prominent sociologists.

There is no question that Sorokin's Russian roots influenced his thinking and work. Some appreciation of their impact can be gleaned from Sorokin's preface where he recalls being imprisoned and condemned to death by the Russian Communist Government. He writes, "During ... my stay in Communist Russia I underwent other painful experiences and observed to the heartbreaking point, endless horrors of human bestiality, death, and destruction." A diary entry concludes, "... cruelty, hatred, violence, and injustice can and never will be able to create a mental, moral or material millennium. The only way toward it is the royal road of all-giving creative love, not only preached but consistently practiced" (p. xi).

Sorokin was a unique sociologist for his time. He was opposed to the thoughts of both the Social Darwinists and the Chicago School. He was unimpressed with many of the techniques of Talcott Parsons and his students. Sorokin, whose concerns were quite broad, even cosmic in scope, brought criticism from some peers, whose work he perceived as the anti-intellectual, technocratic aspect of sociology. His scientific interest in altruistic love was seen by other sociologists as a topic that should be left to theologians and preachers. Love is a good topic for preaching but certainly not teaching and research. Post writes, "Sorokin is probably best described as a creative and idealistic social thinker devoted to scientific observation but with too wide-ranging an intellect to rest content with a purely technical rationality" (xvi). He had little, if any, appreciation for the rise of positivism in scientific and intellectual thought during his era.

The Ways of Power and Love by Sorokin is very much a pioneer work interfacing religion and science. The work is presented in five parts. Part one bears the title: "Love: Its Aspects, Dimensions, Production, Transformation, and Power." Part two addresses: "Structure of Creative Personality." "The Ways of Altruistic Growth" is the title of part three. Part four presents the "Techniques of Altruistic Transformation of Persons and Groups." Part five discusses "Tragedy and Transcendence of Tribal Altruism." Sorokin covers a wide scope of material in the twenty-three chapters of this book.

Sorokin defines love as a "life-giving force," citing studies indicating that altruists live longer than egoists do. He also describes love as the "loftiest form of freedom"--for where love is, there is no coercion. Being methodologically committed to scientific knowledge, he pinpointed and analyzed seven aspects of love: religious, ethical, ontological, physical, biological, psychological, and social. He also identifies and analyzes five dimensions of love: intensity, extensity, duration, purity, and adequacy. These five dimensions provide a measurable model that remains workable for scientific research into love today.

Sorokin gives attention to the spiritual-religious aspects of love. Of significant interest to him was the love of such persons as Jesus, Al Hallaj, Damien the Leper, and Gandhi, all of whom, though assailed and persecuted, were able to show love. Sorokin maintained that this love, which appears to exceed ordinary human limits, suggests that some human beings, through various spiritual and religious practices, participate in a love energy that defines God.

Sorokin believed in the "enormous power of creative love" (p. 48). He enumerates many cases of love stopping aggression and enmity, fostering love in turn, contributing to vitality and longevity, curing mental illness, sustaining creativity in individuals and in social movements, and providing a basis for ethical life.

He was convinced that with the dawn of the atomic age humanity needed more than ever a quantum leap both in the scientific understanding of altruistic love and its practical application. By the late forties he was quite interested in discovering more about how love for others is related to felt participation in a Presence that is higher than humanity's and that serves as a source of unlimited love across all the divisions and barriers of tribal, religious, political, and ethnic loyalties.

Why should this book be read, even today, given that it was first published in 1954? There are several reasons.

1. The book is still relevant. It's a pioneering work and a classic. Nothing has surpassed it. Its intent and message speak to the dangers of the world in which we live.

2. The book exists in a friendlier environment for being heard than when it was first published. Today there is much interest in the interface of science and faith; this book deals with those issues in a remarkable way.

3. Sorokin's canvas of thought is large and provides a way of doing interface thinking. Indeed, he provides a paradigm for relating science and faith. He is anything but a parochial, sociological thinker.

4. His understandings and insights into love are important and can be related to the theory and practice of therapy.

5. Tools are provided for conducting research on unlimited love. Such research using his insights needs to be encouraged in masters and doctoral programs preparing clinical psychologists and others working in the human sciences.

6. Given Sorokin's appreciation for faith issues, especially Christian, his work is quite compatible with any Christian who sees the primary characteristic of God as being love.

There is much to appreciate and to learn in reading this outstanding work.

Edward A. Tiryakian of Duke Univeristy has observed that Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons were men of equal brilliance, but Parsons founded a major sociological tradition while Sorokin left no school or intellectual imprint on the discipline. Post writes, "This assessment may be unfair, as Sorokin's work is now enjoying a renaissance ... Sorokin was undoubtedly a creative genius of the highest order; it may be that the integrative emphasis in today's academia, coupled with the remarkable interest in the field of religion and science, will allow Sorokin the legacy that he so clearly deserves ..." (pp. xxvii-xxviii).

BOOK REVIEWERS FOR THIS ISSUE

LEWIS, PHILLIP, M.D. Recently retired from service as a senior medical officer in the U.S. Army. Dr. Lewis currently works and teaches at Biola University.

CHARTIER, MYRON R., Ph.D., is retired. He has served in a variety of positions in his years of active ministry: Campus ministry, theological education, regional denomination work, and local church ministry. For 13 years he was on the faculty of the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wynwood, PA, and served as its Director of Doctoral Programs. He serves as a contributing editor to JPT. He received his B.A. (University of Colorado) and M.A. (Fort Hays Kansas University) in history, his B.D. from the American Baptist Seminary of the West, and his Ph.D. in human communication studies from the University of Denver.

Reviewed by MYRON R. CHARTIER, Ph.D.