“The first experiment in a transnational dialog”: Il Caso Italiano and the 1970s crisis of the social sciences

The article retraces the history of a 1974 volume edited by Stephen R. Graubard and Fabio Luca Cavazza, Il caso italiano. The book was conceived as an attempt to “put Italy back on the map” of international social and political studies and envisage ways and means of preventing “the next economic and political crisis” of a very unstable country. The project hinged on activating transnational scholarly networks connected to then-waning modernization theory. Supported by the Agnelli Foundation, this work on the “Italian case” stands out as a singular, albeit failed, attempt to overturn the logic of expertise typical of the postwar social sciences.