Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin is a Russian emigrant, founder and professor of the sociology department at Harvard University. Acquaintance with Sorokin’s ideas in the field of sociology and culture is the key to understanding the deep processes of social development and the source of crises that arise in society. His theory of successively replacing supersystems, built on the basis of a deep experimental and statistical study of religion, law and art and explaining the causes of cultural decline, is considered a classic of sociocultural thought of the 20th century.