The intellectual depth of this book surpasses the rigid disciplinary borders in our contemporary academic world. Mangone goes beyond these superimposed limitations and navigates with expertise the waters of other disciplines, first and foremost the always turbulent psychological ocean. Indeed, this book is an interdisciplinary dialogue that follows other examples of the same kind in our SpringerBrief series (Rayner 2017). Both biology and sociology are constructive interlocutors for psychology in its efforts to break out of the behaviourist and cognitivist straightjacket of the twentieth century and to establish its own domain of expertise. Sorokin's ideas — informed by his long life experiences in Russia and North America — make his intellectual efforts worthy of a careful analysis in our time.

Mangone makes an important contribution to a new look at Sorokin's ideas. She carefully documents how Sorokin went about creating sociological principles for understanding the changes of sociocultural systems. Since the declared aims of our SpringerBrief Series is to look at the developmental processes from different theoretical angles, Sorokin's unceasing quest for explaining the basic dimension of the sociocultural dynamics kept our "intellectual sympathy" and thanks to Mangone's accurate work, we also found numerous points of convergence with Cultural Psychology and Sociology. According to Sorokin:

"We do not know any empirical sociocultural system or phenomenon which does not change in the course of its existence or in the course of time. In the whole empirical sociocultural world there has existed hardly any system which has remained unchanged. This observation is incontestable. The objection possible is that though change is unquestionable, it remains unknown to what it is due: to purely immanent forces of the system, or to an incessant in uencing of it by a set of external factors" (Sorokin 1998: 241, added emphasis).

So many "unquestionables" and "incontestables" — and yet sociology has had similar trouble in moving to a consistently developmental perspective in the half century since Sorokin's death. Sorokin proposed a third possible answer: an Integral perspective that conceives the change of any sociocultural phenomena as the result of the combined external and internal forces. Yet the precise ways in which such combination functions remained unrevealed by him — and continues to be so until our time. Social systems are still viewed as they are (ontologically), rather than in their transformations. There are many descriptions of societal transformations, but no sociological or cultural psychological theory of revolutions has emerged (Wagoner et al. 2017).

The problem raised by Sorokin — that social phenomena exist as relations with environment — was not new in the history of psychology. William Stern (1935), for instance, in his personological account of the human mind sets the present boundary between the person and the world as the locus of synthesis of any kind of novelty. Nevertheless, what has been missing here as well as in most of the formal thought models in psychology (and in the social sciences at large) is the time perspective. This is a topic that may benefit from a new look at Sorokin's efforts.

Sorokin made an attempt to introduce an historical and dynamic view of society. His monumental classificatory work about the ideological tendency of temporalism (focus on emergence and development) and eternalism in European society (Sorokin 1985) reminds us of the history of macro-scale societal changes over the centuries. Yet, the micro-scale analysis of the making of such changes remained beyond his scope.

In this vein, as Mangone shows in her interdisciplinary effort, Sorokin's heritage has numerous resonances with what has been developed in the field of Cultural Psychology over the last decades and especially the shift from the epistemology of being to the epistemology of becoming in psychology (Marsico 2015; Marsico and Valsiner 2017; Valsiner et al. 2016). This focus on becoming is a central axiom that can open the door for reunification of the issues of memory and imagination as partners in the human progress. In addition, the claim of Sorokin for sociology as a generalizing science of sociocultural phenomena (see Chap. 2) reverberates in Cultural Psychology as the science of human being which develops through careful investigation of the phenomena under study, together with the advancement of high-level abstract generalizations.

Scientific knowledge, in fact, entails generalization that happens on the border of what is already known and what is not yet known. As Prigogine pointed out: Our time is one of expectation, of anxiety, of bifurcation. Far from an "end" of science, I feel our period will see the birth of a new vision, one of new science whose cornerstone encloses the arrow of time; a science that makes of us and of our creativity the expression of a fundamental trend in the universe (Prigogine 1996: 42).

Science is a passionate affair. Sorokin's professional and personal life shows how the researcher and his "qualifed guessing" is the primary source for any advancement in the knowledge construction. The contrast between being a political prisoner in newly established Bolshevik Russia waiting for his death sentence to be carried out (only to be converted to what was seen as even greater punishment — expulsion from his homeland) and his final years of local fights with fellow Harvard faculty — inmates of a different social enclave — was huge. Sorokin survived both — a tough man as he was. We wish the reader similar stamina to consider the sociological quest that Mangone sets up in her study of Sorokin's legacy. We hope the reading of this Brief will be setting new horizons in the current scienti c debates of science, society, and human psychology.

References

Marsico, G. (2015). Striving for the new: Cultural psychology as a developmental science. Culture & Psychology, 21(4), 445–454. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X15623020.
Marsico, G., & Valsiner, J. (2017). Beyond the mind: Cultural dynamics of the psyche. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Prigogine, I. (1996). Science, reason, and passion. Leonardo, 29(1), 39–42.
Rayner, A. (2017). The origin of life patterns—In the natural inclusion of space in ux. New York: Springer.
Sorokin, P. (1985). Social and cultural dynamics (2nd ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Sorokin, P. A. (1998). On the practice of sociology. In B. V. Johnston (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stern, W. (1935). Allgemeine Psychologie auf personalistischer Grundlage. Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Valsiner, J., Marsico, G., Chaudhary, N., Sato, T., and Dazzani, V. (Eds.) (2016). Psychology as a science of human being: the Yokohama manifesto. Vol. 13 in Annals of Theoretical Psychology. New York: Springer.
Wagoner, B., Moghaddam, F., and Valsiner, J. (Eds.) (2017). From rage to revolutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.