ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors aim to construct first of all a theoretical model of Italy’s social structure to help in their efforts to understand it, and then a variety of models designed to account more specifically for such phenomena as the power-system, the value-system, the way in which authority is legitimated, etc. One point at least stands out from the various considerations brought forward by way of introduction: the study of Italian society must take into account the sort of development that brought it into existence. The uneven quality of the developments experienced by Italian society does, in fact, lend itself in some ways to a sociological model and in others to more ethnological models of interpretation. By vertical structure the authors mean the way in which the population belong or fail to belong to the different productive sectors of Italian society: agricultural, industrial, services, inactive or only marginally active.
