Bismarck’s Orphan: The Modern World and Its Destiny, from “Disenchantment” to the “Steel Cage”

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 social goals and available resources to reach them. It is also a challenge for the decision-making power groups, unable to face the consequences of such rationality that begins as a liberation from traditional values and ends up in some sort of “steel cage”. Weber does not seem capable of suggesting a way out of this social and political contradiction

On the way to «Creative Empathy»: the concept of truth as a social community enterprise in G. B. Vico’s «New Science»

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 little I have managed to form an idea of what all philosophies up to now have been: they have been the confessions of their authors, a kind of autobiographical memoirs, without their wishing it, or being aware of this». As Nietzsche shows, besides the categories for analysing the sociology of knowledge, it is useful to take into consideration too the character factors of the individual philosophers, as constants determining not only the actual construction of theories but also, and chiefly, their intelligibility

On the strained relationship between philosophy and sociology

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 its philosophical foundation. Thus it turns out to be “social engineering”. The sociologist becomes a technical expert, rather indifferent to a synoptic or global view of society, and ready to offer his or her services to the best offer in the open market. Social theory is reduced to “model building” according to the changing needs of the economic agencies, from government bodies to private entrepreneurs. Contrary to social theory, a model is a purely intellectual arbitrary construct and, although conditioned by a basic congruity among its different parts, it is not historically rooted but essentially a “fictio mentis”. In this way sociology loses inevitably its problem awareness and it runs the risk of “quantifying the qualitative”, that is to say to accumulate bits of knowledge without knowing for what purpose

Italy in the Balance. Electrons and Bourbons. Thinking of the recent past in order to understand the present and to plan the future

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 where the traditional rules are still strong. The analysis will be carried out through an historical and sociological excursus both in Italian ascent memories and in political processes and events after the Second World War