Franco Ferrarotti, the dean of Italian sociology, has died. He was born in Palazzolo Vercellese in 1926 and discovered the positivists of the nineteenth century while studying at a college in Sanremo. He graduated in Philosophy from Turin in 1941, approached Einaudi and Adriano Olivetti, translated from English for the series of his friend Cesare Pavese, and joined Olivetti, where he was inspired by the fervor for innovation of the Community group. This drive for innovation remained with him throughout his long intellectual life. He saw America as a fertile ground for indications and suggestions for what had previously been a "new science," and he would travel there very soon, in 1951, with the support of Camillo Olivetti. That same year, he founded the Quaderni di Sociologia journal with Nicola Abbagnano, his professor and mentor. What Ferrarotti learned most in America was to look at the factory environment from a secular and non-ideological perspective ("The Dilemma of of American Trade Unions" is his significant work released in 1954). From the very beginning, however, he was an eclectic scholar, attentive to everything, almost in a state of joyful intellectual voracity. He explained that "like jazz, before it was almost completely absorbed into the orthodoxy of bourgeois, leftist salons, rock too was a music of opposition, liberating and alternative". He was even dragged to the Woodstock Festival by his American students, but he claims he did not stay until the conclusion. He was an innovator, first and foremost concerned with identifying what was radical in society.