Abstract

Unlike other European countries, Italy has never experienced a secular transformation such as the French Revolution or a religious one such as the Protestant Reformation. Thus, Marxism and socialism have been the only viable liberating ideologies available. Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that the tradition of Italian Marxism developed a distinctive character free of the undemocratic features of official Marxism-Leninism, the eclecticism of Social Democracy, and the political impotence of Hegelian or Western Marxism. Piccone proposes such a reading of Italian Marxism as having “redirected the aims of Marxist theory toward pedagogy and the creation of the conditions necessary for self-emancipation…the creation of a critical public able to sustain the Marxist project of social reconstruction” (p. 7).