Donatella Simon

D. Simon, The Problem of Man and Sociology: Filippo Barbano’s juvenile sources Filippo Barbano, one promoter of the ‘sociological renaissance’ in Italy after World War II, discussed as a student a thesis (1947) upon Personalism in the legal and christian philosophy. His main source was Norberto Bobbio’s historical personalism which concerned the Person as ‘relationship’ and normative value with a fundamental attitude to communication. Barbano enphasized then the role of the person as concrete agent, to whom Christianity provided a foundation for a joint and several living-together. Afterwards Barbano met american sociology and was confronted in particular with its attempt toward an ‘integrated science of man’ with special attention to the concept of ‘basic personality type’. This was declined in an anthropological sense at a high level, which recalled Marcel Mauss’ ‘total man’, concrete and far from the speculative trends of classical european sociology. All this lead Barbano to formulate (1955/58) a program for theory and research, which had to combine thought and experience, along the lines of the most recent american sociology, seeing man in action within a moving social context. Key words: person, science of man, action, communication, basic personality tipe, theory and research.

The essay discusses the sense and use of history in the sociological work as well as the utility of studying and making ‘history of sociology’ in a world under the sign of a more and more ‘fluid’ Modernity. For ‘classical sociology’ (that of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Benjamin etc: the Founding Fathers) history was a current term of comparison for constructing theories about the functioning of society as well as for being aware of the sense of contemporary time and actual action. From all these considerations then follows a strict invitation to read and re-read our Classics in order to verify through them current theoretical work, to enlarge our vision of time as well as to grasp consciousness of the potentialities of our still young and self-transforming discipline.