The news of the passing of professor Enzo Rutigliano was received with sadness at the University of Trento and in particular at the department of Sociology, where he was much admired. 
From 1976, when he started his academic career, until 2014, when he officially retired from teaching, professor Rutigliano passionately trained generations of students teaching History of sociological thought, one of the fundamental subjects of the study programme.
He is remembered as a thoughtful, qualified, meticulous teacher, a person of great culture with a critical mind and capable of analytical thinking. He arrived to Trento in 1968 as a student and was a protagonist of the birth and evolution of the department ever since, from its founding as Social science institute to Sociology as it is today.
Rutigliano helped to write the history of the University of Trento, including with his active participation in the student movement at the end of the 1960s.
He started to collaborate in particular with Franco Fornari and most of all with Gian Enrico Rusconi, who had been his thesis supervisor (title “Hegel: totalità e separazione”), and was part of the study group including Francesco Alberoni, a close friend of his.
Rutigliano was known at national level for his studies on Water Benjamin, Vilfredo Pareto, the Frankfurt school and Theodor Adorno more specifically. He was among the first scholars in Italy to study the sociological importance of the work of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti with whom he maintained a frequent correspondence on the subject of his book “Mass and Power”. This correspondence was the starting point for his book “Il linguaggio delle masse. Sulla sociologia di Elias Canetti” (Edizioni Dedalo, 2007), which included a number of unpublished letters in the appendix. More recently, he dedicated himself to studies on the sociology of war.
He was very fond of his studies and his department as he explained, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the death of Bruno Kessler, in a 2001 interview to “UniTn”, the university’s periodical which he co-founded in 1998, with Renato Porro and Antonio Scaglia, and directed.
To remember Enzo Rutigliano and underline his contribution to the development of sociological studies in Trento, tributes were paid on Saturday 30 June, at 11.00 am, in the inner court of the Sociology building.
More details in the press release