Pitirim A. Sorokin was a Russian-American Sociologist. Academic and Political Activist in Russia, he immigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923. He founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He is best known for his contribution to the social cycle theory.

A successful growth of Sri Ramakrishna and of the Vedanta movements in the West is one of many symptoms of two basic processes which are going on at the present time in the human universe. One of these changes is the epochal shift of the creative centre of mankind from Europe to the larger area of the Pacific-Atlantic, while the other consists in a double process of continued decay of sensate culture and society and of the emergence and growth of the new—Integral or Ideational— socio-cultural order.