22

This article is divided into three parts: the first shows the situation of social history since the end of the Second World War, i.e. since the end of fascism and its radical hostility towards social sciences. In the 1940s, the study of the society was done under marxism and the communist party. However, outside of parties and universities, original works were carried out by writers and sociologists who took up research on the society as a civil rendez-vous. The second part, devoted to the 1970s, follows the debate on social history in its two versions, labor history and microstoria. The third part briskly studies production in social history in the 1980s as much on the microstoria side as that on labor history, underlining a kind of reciprocal influence for the contemporary period, an influence that is never admitted but that is obvious when looking at the displacement of centers of interest towards the territories and towards the role of society in the history of institutions. Even if international trends predominate today, the territory and microstoria remain the particular characteristics of Italian social history because they are very close to its geographical and historical specificities.