ABSTRACT
Gino Germani was one of the first social scientists who studied the phenomenon of populism in a systematic way. He was an Italian sociologist who, having escaped the fascist police, moved to Argentina where he started collaborating with the Buenos Aires Institute of Social Sciences. His analysis was profoundly conditioned by his direct experience of both fascism and Peronism. Germani focused on social modernization processes and their consequences in terms of social mobilization. In Germani's opinion, modernization itself is the result of a much bigger dynamic: secularization. Secularization is the main cause of modernity in twentieth-century societies, where the individual enjoys wider freedom, no longer limited by traditional and religious frameworks. Germani represents an essential read among populism studies and his merits are twofold: at the historiographical and theoretical level, both for his rigorous analytical method, and for the objective interpretation of historical facts that he had experienced first-hand but nonetheless are treated with Weberian detachment.
