Classical sociology is behind us, and its zenith was undoubtedly in the 1950s, the heyday of functionalism triumphant. The grandiose theoretical schema elaborated by Talcott Parsons as early as the end of the 1930s with The Structure of Social Action was an ambitious attempt to articulate the thought of classical authors in the field, beginning with Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto, as well as the economist Alfred Marshall. Parsons’ endeavour, in fact, constituted the highest level of integration that sociology has ever known. Parsons’ thesis of convergence made him the theoretician of the intellectual unity of the major trends in sociological thought prior to him, the incarnation of a synthesis that his predecessors could not have foreseen. Yet his theory has proved to be something of a giant with feet of clay: since the 1960s it has been challenged from outside sociology by the social movements that emerged in the United States and undermined its validity, and from within sociology by the onset of trends which, while renewing the approaches of the discipline, also entailed the destructuring and therefore the failure of Parsons’ synthesis.