It is not surprising therefore that Mr. Sorokin believes our sensate culture is doomed and is rather happy that there is nothing we can do about it. He seems uncertain about what will replace it. In one place he asserts there is 'a low probability ' it will be followed by an ideational or idealistic culture of an authoritarian political character. In other places he is quite explicit that sooner or must result later this . Not a small difference.

The upshot of Mr. Sorokin 's method and social philosophy may best be gauged if we look away from these reckless generalizations and turn to a concrete issue which he seeks to solve by their use - the causes of war and peace. The gist of his analysis is that the main cause of war, international and civil, is the incompatibility of the 'values' of the belligerents. This is also the cause of murder which he interprets as individual war. All other causes are dismissed as completely subsidiary and peripheral. Consequently, the author concludes, peace can be achieved only when the basic values of all men are derived from the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule.

Since Mr. Sorokin admits that the norms of the Sermon on the Mount have never actually prevailed in any culture, one wonders why, in his theory, the world has not always been at war, and how it was possible for many cultures to enjoy long periods of peace. It is safe to affirm that the peoples of this world would settle for far less than a Utopia based on universal love - say, a peace for the next fifty years. Mr. Sorokin 's prescription is comparable to maintaining that there is no point in curing a man's illness unless we can give him an assurance of immortality.

To say that the cause of war, revolution and murder is 'incompatibility of values ' is either an empty tautology or an utter absurdity. If it means that the incompatibility of the values can be inferred only from the fact of conflict, then it is merely an arbitrary definition. If it does not mean this, it is palpably false. Germany and Turkey fought against Russian and England in World War I. Were the values of English and Russian culture less incompatible than those of English or German culture?

To pin one's hopes for peace, as Mr. Sorokin does, on the hope of converting Stalin to the values of the Sermon on the Mount is unreasonable. And a world of common values is not a necessary condition of peace. Required are not common values, but a set of common rules or procedures which will enable us to negotiate our very genuine - and sometimes desirable - differences in values with a minimum of coercion.

Of an entirely different order is Mr. Sorokin 's discussion of the relation of personality to culture. In this field his judgments are neither bizarre nor parochial, but very suggestive, even if incomplete. He maintains that the individual has as many social selves as there are different social groups to which he belongs and that he will be a well-integrated or disorganized personality depending upon whether or not these groups live in harmonious relations with each other. This seems to divide the individual without remainder, except for his biological traits, into a complex of social egos. It fails to account both for the unity of personality and for the fact that a well integrated person can sometimes be in revolt against the social groups of which he is a member.