L’insegnamento di Sociologia nell’Università di Padova tra positivismo e socialismo: risultati di una prima ricognizione d’archivio con particolare attenzione al magistero di Loria

This work focuses on the establishment of the teaching of Sociology at the end of the 19th entury at the University of Padua, trying to fill a gap with respect to the initial history of the discipline in this University through archive research and literature analysis. In particular, periods of discontinuity as concerns the presence of teaching from the late 1800s to the 1940s are emphasized, attempting to reconstruct and differentiate their contexts. Finally, we examine the figure of Achille Loria (1857-1943), the first professor to hold a free course in Sociology in Padua in 1894, highlighting some aspects related to both the academic and cultural relations that contributed to his calling and to the themes of his teaching, so different and distant from current sociology. This discussion offers the opportunity to provide a preliminary interpretative framework about the institutionalization and cultural diffusion of Sociology during the period of Positivism up to the criticism, very destabilizing for the discipline, moved by Croce and by Idealism.