Magazine “Sociologia”

The Sociology magazine is one of the oldest sociological publications published in Italy (1956). It was conceived by Luigi Sturzo during the years of his American exile, in a time when Italian culture tended to oppose the development of a discipline that at the end of the nineteenth century in our country had difficulty in establishing itself also for the theoretical weakness that had characterized his first expressions.

The rebirth of the discipline after the Second World War must therefore be largely due to the fact that in the United States Sturzo was already considered one of the most important foreign sociologists. The birth of the magazine marked, therefore, a modernization of studies related to the Italian social sciences and a reopening of the dialogue with the culture of overseas.
Scrolling through the issues of the magazine we can therefore follow the development of the discipline and the cultural maturation of those who, starting from the fifties, then established themselves as the most relevant Italian and foreign sociologists.

The scientific and cultural approach of the magazine has always been characterized by some particularly relevant lines of development which, starting from 2008, the starting date of the current direction, have been resumed, specified and analyzed. Development lines that are mentioned below.

A) Valorization of sociology as a general discipline. If you do not want to abandon Comte’s teaching, it must be considered that sociology constitutes a knowledge that looks at the social as a type of experience that allows us to understand the reasons for the development of the human story conceived as a whole. From this point of view sociology was born and developed on the basis of a dialectical and often conflictual relationship with philosophy.

B) Promotion of sociology as a particular science alongside other human sciences. In fact, the social, if it represents the fundamental modality of every type of expression of human experience, also constitutes something that is specific with respect to the phenomena that are the object of other social sciences: law, economics, anthropology, history …
Due to and thanks to these two dimensions, sociology can present itself both as a general theory and as a particular research aimed at reconstructing and interpreting relative social data and individual sectors of society.

C) Attention to sociology as a paradigm. Especially since the age of the industrial revolution, Sociology has given rise to a new paradigm, the sociological one, which has become something that has also characterized the neighboring disciplines. Think of the theory of expectations and the non-abstractly economic system of the economy, the anti-formalism that underlies all contemporary juridical sciences, the perspective that today qualifies the most advanced political science, the theology itself, which it is increasingly presenting itself as a ‘public’ theology, characterized from a sociological point of view, to historiography, which has been renewed since the early part of the twentieth century through the insertion of the sociological paradigm into the properly historical one, to epistemology , which in order to define the concepts of verifiability and falsifiability must ultimately rely on a sociological element, on the consensus of the scientific community.

Therefore, a sociology, which wants to be fully aware of its potential, must be in continuous dialogue with other disciplines; it must accept the ‘other’ reflections, precisely because it is opportune to be attentive to the function performed by its paradigm in the context of neighboring knowledge.

It is on these assumptions, in line with the teaching of Luigi Sturzo, that sociology, while remaining open to the different cultural orientations that characterize its scientific path, can return to that concrete historicity, to that dimension of effective experience that defines, deeper, his elective ground. It is to the experience, in fact, caught in the practice of research and in its theoretical, conceptual and reflective reading, that the sociological culture, to go beyond the abstract construction of the data, must direct its gaze. Sociology, if it wants to grasp the concrete character of life, must succeed in penetrating into the conceptual structures in which the historical constitution of the social is solved.

For these reasons, on the basis of the suggestions inherited from the most sensitive sociologists of the age of the rebirth of our discipline, the Sociology Review welcomes the reflections a) of sociological theory and the history of sociology, b) of empirical research and conceptual analysis, c) of the neighboring disciplines based on an eminently sociological system. For this reason, we believe that it is necessary to perform an unavoidable function within our cultural koinè, which is all the more necessary, since it is not always sufficiently promoted and valued at international level.

Director: Prof. Andrea Bixio

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