Gli indifferenti. I sociologi, Pier Paolo Pasolini e la modernizzazione dell'Italia

Time of Indifference. Italian Sociologists, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the Process of Modernization. Poet, writer, and director Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most famous and outspoken Italian intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century. In the early 1970s Pasolini's interpretation of the process of modernization in Italy aroused a wide and harsh debate, in which sociologists, who had been studying the same topics since the late 1940s, only dimly and loosely participated. Using an implicitly Bourdieusian framework, I interpret the stance of social scientists toward Pasolini as the effect of a boundary-defending strategy, aimed at excluding literary and poetic understandings of Italian society from the then-unbounded field of Italian sociology. In the conclusion, I reflect on the possible uses of Pasolini's understanding of intellectual practice within the current, and recurring, crises of the social sciences.