Marxism and Historiography

Eminent Italian historian Giovanni Levi once notably remarked that “no one is a Marxist anymore,” pointing to a paradox in Italian cultural history. While what is called "Marxism" was supposedly hegemonic over Italian culture, and especially history writing, for decades in the postwar period, it then seems to have suddenly disappeared.  

This study questions such a vision of a monolithic and hegemonic Marxism. It starts from the most effective anecdote to all ideologising narratives—that is, research into the texts themselves. It sees the Marxist historiography of the post-1945 period as a "history in the making," in which references to Marxian theory were a fundamental factor driving historiographical innovation. This allows the book to bring to light a highly original experience in the development of historiography, based on the long Italian tradition of reflection on historical knowledge.

• Marxism
• cultural history
• historiography
• labor movement
• Antonio Labriola
• political economy
• Gino Luzzatto
• Delio Cantimori
• Croceanism
• Historical materialism
• Capitalism
• industrialization
• philosophy
• political sciences
• Crisis of Marxism
• workers
• hegemony
• Gramsci
• Communist Party
• Italian Marxism

“This book revisits the relations between history and Marxism since the aftermath of World War II, taking an original approach within the current intellectual panorama.”

– Marco Di Maggio, Researcher in Contemporary History, La Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, for Cahiers d’histoire

“Without doubt, Paolo Favilli's book has the value of being a ‘stone sending ripples through the pond’, both because of the problems it poses and even more so because of those that it understandably leaves open.”

– Gianpasquale Santomassimo, Professor of History, University of Siena, Italy, for Passato e Presente

“Our judgement on this latest work by Paolo Favilli can only be a positive one. Its historiographical analysis, its philosophical problematisation, and its well-documented references make up the principal ingredients of this important study on Italian Marxism.”

– Carlo Scognamiglio, Institute for Social Economic Research, Italy, for Giornale di filosofia

“Favilli's book is a rich seam of cues and threads to follow. Not least among its merits is its constant emphasis on the centrality of the properly historical dimension — this, in a period in which this latter tends to be erased from studies and within universities.”

– Riccardo Bellofiore, Professor of Political Economy, Bergamo University, Italy, for Società e Storia

• Contemporary History, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

  Paolo Favilli

Paolo Favilli is retired Professor of Contemporary History and the Theory of Historical Research at Genoa University, Italy, where he is also former Director of the Department of Humanistic Studies. His main research focus is the history of Marxism, to which he has devoted numerous essays and volumes, including Il socialismo italiano e la teoria economica di Marx (1892-1902) (1980), Herausgabe und Verbreitung del Werke von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels in Italien (1988), Storia del marxismo italiano. Dalle origini alla grande guerra (1996), Marxismo e storia. Saggio sull'innovazione storiografica in Italia (2006), and Il marxismo e le sue storie (2016). His latest study, A proposito de «Il capitale»..., Il lungo presente e I miei studenti. Corso di storia contemporanea will be released in 2021.

Policies and ethics