The birth of sociology in Italy is variously dated, depending on the causes that are adduced for it or on the perspective from which it is viewed. Indeed, even the conceptualization of sociology differs; hence, in a certain sense it is more important to determine when each "sociology" was born. We can distinguish two types of sociology and two corresponding ways of providing cultural and professional training. The first type is positivist (or neopositivist) sociology, tied to quantitative empirical research, which aims to discover the laws and the causal relationships that can be drawn from the data and from experience; the second type is humanistic sociology, which interprets its role as a critical science, raises questions, is more an approach to science than a science proper, and places social phenomena in their historical context. The two places for training professional sociologists are the research center and...