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Italian sociology today is a flourishing discipline. This article explains the political and social factors, intellectual tensions and cultural openings which are responsible for Italian sociology's postwar developments. Postwar Italian sociology can best be analyzed in terms of five major political intellectual phases, each carrying its own specific sociological approaches and themes. The five phases are best described as follows. Sociology's postwar origins: sociology as intellectual rebellion in a postwar context of political, cultural and institutional marginality. Sociology's cultural centrality, emphasis on technological innovation. Sociology's professional consolidation, emphasis is placed on the political, cultural and economic aspirations of society as a whole. Sociology's crisis between reformism and radical change, emphasis on technology as alienation, on industrial sociology and on political voluntarism against technocratic planning. Sociology's national consolidation, as crossroads for Italy's principal social and political debates in the 1970s centering on the complex interpenetration of Italy's North and South both in social, economic and political terms.