| Matteo Bortolini My name is Matteo Bortolini (Ph.D., Sociology, Un. of Bologna), a tenured assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Padua, Italy. My research focuses on social theory, the classics and the history of sociology, the sociology of culture and ideas, and political theory. I am on the editorial board of Sociologica, an online-only journal of sociology published by Italy's leading publisher in the social sciences, Il Mulino, which strives to reduce the distance between Italian sociology and the rest of the world. I have published essays and book chapters on Talcott Parsons, Emile Durkheim, Hannah Arendt, civil society, the Catholic church, and associative democracy. Most of my theoretical (and even normative) stuff focuses on the problem of pluralism in the public sphere and the search for non-Statist political institutions. I have also edited unpublished work by Parsons and Eric Voegelin. My first book was published in 2005 as L’immunità necessaria. Talcott Parsons e la sociologia della modernità (Necessary Immunity: Talcott Parsons and the Sociology of Modernity, Rome, 2005, in Italian). Consciously writing in a highly “presentist” vein developed from Niklas Luhmann works on the evolution of social theory, I created a “theoretical fiction” of Parsons’ works aimed at showing the theoretical decisions which led him to the creation of his complex and evolving theoretical system. My main claim was that many of Parsons’ theoretical decisions might be understood as attempts at resolving the paradoxes of a non-individualistic explanation of modern individualism, which I indicated a “the” question of classical and theoretical sociology. The book also sketched a comparison of Parsons’ and Norbert Elias’ conceptions of the individual that I will try to develop in the future. My current research project started as a case-study in the sociology of intellectuals titled The Parsonians. Its main questions were: What does it mean to be a well-known student of an exceedingly pivotal, disputed, loved and hated intellectual figure? What does it mean to carry on and try to develop the heritage of a master intellectual obsessed with filling each and every theoretical and empirical space, ready to extend his intelligence and insight to any field and object? What does it mean to find oneself into a professional world that has become abruptly a very hostile, and even dangerous, environment? These seemed to me the three most important intellectual challenges that the first and the second generation of sociologists who studied with Talcott Parsons had to face during and after their mentor’s demise as the most important inspirational figure in American sociology. Anyway, the original project progressively reduced its scope as I discovered the “pleasures” of historical research in the sociology of intellectuals. I first reduced my focus on three Parsons’ students – Robert N. Bellah, Neil J. Smelser, and Clifford Geertz, – then again to one, Bellah. I am presently writing Bellah’s sociological biography from the point of view of the main questions of my original project on “the Parsonians.” Bellah’s intellectual and academic career is a goldmine of interesting episodes, from his “problems” with McCarthyism in the 1950s to the so-called “Bellah Affair” at the IAS at Princeton in 1973, from his contribution to “modernization theory” in the 1950s to his attempt at a paradigm shift in the sociology of the religion in the early 1970s. Bellah’s rising status, from respected sociologist to academic star to pubic intellectual also helps to highight the different roles that an intellectual may play in disciplinary and public debates and the specific expectations and dynamics of intellectual fields. So far, this research has produced two papers: in the first (which has been submitted to a major journal for consideration), I outline the “American civil religion debate” started by Bellah’s influential essay, “Civil Religion in America.” In the second paper, I outline the so-called “Bellah Affair” at the IAS in Princeton. Both papers use historical materials to highlight theoretical questions: the traps of typecasting and the dynamics of reputation building. In a third paper, which I am currently writing, I close this “Seventies triptych” focusing on Bellah’s fascination with heterodox authors (Norman O. Brown, Herbert Fingarette) in the late 1960s and his failed attempt at a paradigm shift in the early 1970s, as he proposed the highly criticized idea of “symbolic realism.” This said, I have not abandoned the original idea of a more comparative work which will surely include an assessment and a study of Smelser’s intellectual career. I am sure that a comparison between Bellah’s and Smelser’s careers would, in fact, prove very fruitful to understand the dynamics of teacher-students relationship and the “take-off” of the intellectual as an individual voice. I also enjoy working as a translator of scholarly books from English into Italian. I am currently translating Shmuel Eisenstadt's book, The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity. Among my most recent translations are The Possibility of Naturalism by Roy Bhaskar, Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty, and The Politics of the Governed by Partha Chatterjee. Download English Vita Selected English publications and drafts The "Bellah Affair" at Princeton. Scholarly Reputation, Disciplinary Differentiation, and Controlled Oblivion, draft. Nothing Fails Like Success. Robert N. Bellah and the Civil Religion Debate, draft, long and short versions. “Parsonianism,” General Frameworks, Evolution. An Exercise in Reflexivity, draft. Analytical Sociology and its Discontents, in “European Journal of Social Theory”, 10, 1, 2007, pp. 153-172. Hannah Arendt, Council Democracy and (Far) Beyond. A Radical View, draft. |