Edward Tiryakian is a representative of the cohort of outstanding contemporary theorists. After six decades of intensive sociological studies and activities, he has produced a number of novel sociological concepts, approaches and theoretical trends. The basis of his theorizing is the original project of existential phenomenological sociology, and the study of religion, culture, nationalism, ethnic conflicts, disasters and social change.
Sociologists became interested in the works of Edward Tiryakian as long ago as the 1960s. In Soviet sociology, an influential paper was published by Leonid Ionin (1977), representing one of the best analyses of Tiryakian's ideas, although it was written under the critical censorship of “bourgeois sociology.” Certain aspects of Tiryakian's theory were considered in the rare studies of the history of existential sociology (Alijevova 1984; Kisil 1985; Raida 1998), and its systematic studies have begun only recently (Gasparyan 1997; Melnikov 2010). Today, the name of Tiryakian is increasingly found on the pages of sociological literature, including textbooks and encyclopedias.
Edward Tiryakian became acquainted with the ideas of existentialism in the 1950s during his studies at Princeton and Harvard, although the ascendancy of structural-functionalism, led by Talcott Parsons, and his great appreciation of Pitirim Sorokin also had great influence. Tiryakian also met Jacques Maritain and John Wild as teachers and friends. As a teaching fellow in a course on “Ideas of Human Nature” by Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray at Harvard, he was invited to give a lecture on existentialism, which in the 1950s became a rising alternative to analytical philosophy. While at Princeton, because of the young instructor, Harold Garfinkel, Tiryakian was introduced to phenomenological ideas as well.
In 1959, Tiryakian went to Paris, where he wrote his famous Sociologism and Existentialism, published in 1962 after discussions with Walter Kaufmann (Tiryakian 1962). The book presented a project for a new sociological discipline, called existential sociology. The logic of the book was a detailed comparative study and subsequent synthesis of the sociological views of Emile Durkheim and various existential thinkers, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nicolas Berdyaev and Gabriel Marcel. Tiryakian showed the contradictory aspects of this synthesis— for example, in sociological categories of collective consciousness and public opinion, which categories are senseless for the existentialists because they mask abstractions only and have no ontological references.
