The History of Italian Marxism: From its Origins to the Great War

In The History of Italian Marxism, Paolo Favilli offers an articulated analysis of the different levels at which Marx’s ideas - and ‘Marxism’ as a doctrinal ‘system’ - were received in Italy from the time of the First International up till the eve of the First World War. Rejecting any linear understanding of the relation between Marx’s texts and the assumption of Marxism as the ideology of the burgeoning workers’ movement, Favilli explores the growth of different forms of Marxist culture through the period of the Paris Commune, the late-nineteenth-century debate on ‘revisionism’, and the rise of revolutionary syndicalism. Asking in each case whether ‘Marxism’ meant a science, an ideology, a way of doing politics, a utopia, a myth or a religion, Favilli goes on to assess which of these ‘Marxisms’ died with, and which have survived, the ‘crisis’ at the end of the twentieth century.

With a new preface to the English edition.

First published in Italian as Storia del marxismo italiano: dalle origini alla grande guerra, FrancoAngeli s.r.l. Milan, 1996.