There are few areas of social or cultural life that are not covered-from painting, art, and music, to the ethos of universalism and particularism. This long-unavailable volume remains one of the major touchstones by which we can judge efforts to create an international social science. In short, war is just as often a function of development as it is of social decay. Contrary to received wisdom, he shows that the magnitude and depth of war grows in periods of social, cultural, and territorial expansion by the nation. This volume is perhaps most famous for revealing Sorokin's remarkable efforts to understand the relationship of war and peace to the process of social and political change. Sorokin came to view social and cultural dynamics in terms of three major processes: a major shift of mankind's creative center from Europe to the Pacific a progressive disintegration of the sensate culture and finally the first blush of the emergence and growth of a new idealistic sociocultural order. Northrop, no individual better incorporated the new role of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic peoples in this postwar world. Earlier than most, Sorokin took the consequences of the breakdown of colonialism into account in discussing the renaissance of the great cultures of African and Asian civilization. This revised version, written some twenty years later, reflects a postwar environment. Its original publication occurred before World War II. This classic work is a revised and abridged version, in a single volume, of the work which more than any other catapulted Pitirim Sorokin into being one of the most famed figures of twentieth-century sociology. The paper concludes by summarizing a position that it is not necessary for us to privilege (other than for personal preference) any one integral theory. The contribution offered is succinctly outlined primarily with reference to temporal ontonomic considerations. This is supported by an analysis of a sequence of combinations and exemplar demonstrations from various integral theorists. The difference in an alternative approach for integral evaluations is framed by way of explication. With these considerations in mind, this paper begins with an initiating proposition and a recognition of strengths.
In a reflexive reconsideration, perhaps there is virtue in the alternative paradigmatic approach to ‘embrace and befriend’. An approach of ‘transcend and include’ validates the higher by the potential overshadowing of the included lower. With each abstraction in meta-theoretical recursion the capacity for accuracy (and humility) can become harder to find, particularly in the subsumed assumptions of prior self-affirmations. In claims of being the highest, fullest, widest embracing, and most inclusive, the capacity for inter- subjective self-reflexivity recedes slightly with each extension. The difficulty for any integral epistemology is the absence of criticality. This paper, prompted by that opportunity, seeks to ask an additional question of how might we illustrate the respective contributions of multiple integral conceptions in forming ‘co-constructive ontologies’. From within difference there is often found deep similarity in nuances of practice, conventions of speech, and emphases of philosophy. The consideration of distinctive alternatives in integral ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies expands both practice and the practitioner.
The widening of even the widest of embraces holds great merit, simply by its idea and more so by its authentic enactment. The prospect of the coming together of different integral explanatory theories invites the potential for connection, comparison and enlightening conversation.