Discipline and (academic) tribe: Humanities and the social sciences in Italy

Despite Italy had an outstanding tradition in classical and social studies, we cannot claim it occupies a central position in the contemporary field of humanistic studies. As our work aims to highlight, this mainly depend on two interwoven peculiarities of their institutionalization processes from the Italian Unification (1861) until nowadays. The first one concerns the extreme rigidity of the Italian Academic system since its origins, that is the strong control by the State both on the establishment of new chairs in new disciplines and the classification of curricula, organizational structures and disciplines. As a result not only professional autonomous was largely limited, but also the inception of the younger (social sciences) disciplines within the universities was considerably delated. Furthermore interdisciplinary communication and cooperation were very difficult, favouring conversely a sort of academic tribalization. The second one concerns the ambivalent relationships scholars cultivated with politics since the early years of the Italian Kingdom. Indeed, participating in the political field offered the possibility of influencing the development of own discipline, not only in terms of recruitment and institutions of new faculties, departments, etc., but also with respect to the definition of its epistemic and symbolic spaces.