The concept and the term “industrial revolution” are far from being universally accepted. Historians and economists with a conservative inclination tend to criticize them more or less severely. My general theses is that the “industrial revolution” has been, in the first place, a true revolution, tha…

In July 1973, at the age of 78, Max Horkheimer passed away In the Swiss town of Montagnola. If not the founder, he has at least the most important director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, from which the famous name “Frankfurt School” is derived. Actually, if we ca…

A curious paradox must be faced at the very outset: nothing is perhaps more culturally inclined than the various counter-culture movements. In other words, writing and working against the prevailing culture amount to an essentially cultural enterprise. Culture seems to be inescapable. A supposedly d…

If it were possible, just for an instant, to forget the sufferings and worries of the everyday, if, in other words, it were possible to distance ourselves and somehow see ourselves from outside, I think we should have to agree with Goethe’s confession: «I have the great advantage of being born in an…

The main contention of this article is the following: sociology, like all the modern sciences, was born out of philosophy. But, ungratefully enough and perhaps because of a deepseated inferiority complex vis-à-vis the older well established sciences, sociology tends to forget or at least to blurr it…

The aim of the paper is try to make a dynamic picture of the modern (or post-modern) Italian identity, from a political, social and cultural point of view. The status of this country is in the balance, between a fast industrialization without an analogous industrial culture and a lumbering memory wh…

Chronicle of a fantastic day, in a Rome invaded by an epochal rain, moving from the “masterly” words of Bauman in Roma-Eur to the pearls of wisdom of another great giant of sociology: Franco Ferrarotti. To discover that sometimes the answers are found in the intersection of unexpected lines.

The major contribution of Max Weber, according to the author, is to be seen in the concept of the “modern world” and its destiny as a society based on rational calculation. Such modern rationality is technically equipped and formal from a logical point of view. It provides a link between desired soc…

There is no need to have recourse to sociology and to psychology in order to refute many worthy philosophers, in arguing that philosophical ideas, the history of philosophy, and philosophy itself, cannot be reduced to a chaotic and impersonal flux of problems and ideas. As Nietzsche says: «Little by…