This article analyses the role played by Eric Hobsbawm in the Italian historiography on early modern and modern history. Despite his personal relationships and ideological commitments, the impact of his studies was far from being limited to Marxist historians. His contributions on the debates over the seventeenth-century crisis and the transition from feudalism to capitalism - whether totally accepted or criticized - were fundamental to understand and interpret the Italian way of economic and political development, from "Rinascimento" to "Risorgimento". His model of social banditry, even if mostly criticized and considered excessively generalizing, remained crucial in all Italian studies on this topic, and helped stimulate them. His lessons on social history, the history of society, and subaltern studies were as important as the French "Annales school" was for Italian studies on social conflict and popular movements, as well as for the Italian "microstoria".

Hobsbawm regarded Marxism as a research programme meant to investigate events such as the social structure of society "revolutionized", the role of productivity, the relation between classes and the wider economy, the international division of labour. Even in early works he examines everything comparatively and counter-factually. The entire planet becomes his laboratory. Thus, in the "Age of Capital", he held the view that what "really" enabled the process of industrialization was the introduction in the first half of the 19th century of the railway, the steamer and telegraph which increased the potential size of the capitalist world. Note the centrality not of the class struggle or ideology, but of technological innovations or the central role of natural resources such as coal. Hobsbawm's capitalism thrives in a world which is increasingly unified and interdependent. The hallmark of this capitalism is insecurity and anxiety. The workers were rarely distant from the insecurity of dismal poverty. An accident at work would instantly project the worker into abject poverty. But the bourgeoisie too was anxious, and rightly so: the industrial revolution which was sweeping throughout Europe and North America was bringing about an unparalleled upheaval in social structure. Hosbabwm's capitalism is never a pure market mechanism, a machine for growth. The pages in which he describes the world of the bourgeoisie are masterpieces of social history. The belief that capitalism requires non-market relations pervaded his entire work. Capitalism relied on factors which have no intrinsic connection with the pursuit of individual advantage such as the "pride of achievement", the custom of mutual trust, but also the habits of obedience and loyalty. In other words, he wrote "capitalism has succeeded because it was not just capitalist".

Turin working-class and its cultural environment are the setting in which Paolo Spriano grew intellectually and politically. It is in Turin that Spriano's early journalism career began, as did his collaboration with the publisher Einaudi; and from Turin, much of his early historiographical research drew inspiration. Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci are the ideal referents for Spriano's political engagement - from his early partisan militancy in a "Giustizia e Libertà" group to his membership in the Italian Communist Party. Reflection upon the nexus between "liberal revolution" on the one hand and communism on the other, between Gobetti and Gramsci, is a recurrent motif in Spriano's works. In his case, it meant not merely untangling a historiographical knot, but rationalizing his own intellectual and political progress.

Paolo Spriano began working on Gramsci as early as the second half of the 1940s, at the start of his journalism career. However, the articles he published in the decade from 1947 to 1957 make no original contribution to Gramsci's biography. It is only in his 1960 volume on Turin during the First World War that Gramsci's activity is reconstructed within the context of socialism in that city. In his work immediately after this volume, Spriano continued to develop Gramsci's figure in the milieu of the Turinese socialist movement, while still not publishing anything of a specifically biographical nature. In the years that followed - with the exception of a brief biographical sketch aimed at a general audience - his contributions to Gramsci's biography are seen in his overall reconstruction of the history of the Italian Communist Party ("Storia del Partito comunista italiano"). Through the systematic use of Central State Archive and Comintern Archive documents, he brought out the figure of Gramsci as a political leader in an entirely new light, taking care never to isolate him from the context of international communism. After publication of this five-volume history of the PCI, he devoted his time to the events surrounding Gramsci's imprisonment, publishing hitherto unknown documents. And again, after the disputes over the relations between Togliatti and Gramsci, he took this matter in hand by both stimulating and undertaking new work. With his last, uncompleted work on the relations between Gramsci and the party, he again became the promoter of archive research, once more emphasizing the need for documentary reconstruction.

Before becoming an important historian, Paolo Spriano was a remarkable journalist. After a short experience at the Turinese daily newspaper "Giustizia e Libertà" - in whose ranks he had fought as a partisan - while in Turin he worked for "l'Unità", both reporting city news and reviewing history books (among others Gramsci's prison notebooks). By the mid 1950s, he grew more and more puzzled by the forms of development of Italian capitalism and their effects on the workers' conditions. At the same time, he began to question the Leninist conception of the State as unfit for the conditions in which the Pci was called upon to act in Republican Italy, under the rule of an advanced democratic constitution. Although strongly criticizing the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising, in 1956 he chose to remain in the Party. Thirty years later, as shown by his book "Le passioni di un decennio" and by his correspondence with Norberto Bobbio, Spriano proved capable of a balanced re-examination of Stalinism and its fallout with the Italian Left.

Albertina Vittoria analyzes Paolo Spriano's political involvement in newspapers, magazines, and the cultural organizations of the Italian Communist Party (Pci). In particular, she analyzes his collaboration with the weekly publication "Il Contemporaneo", his participation in the cultural committee of the Pci, and his activity in the brief period during which he was director of Istituto Gramsci (1980). For Spriano, his political involvement was not achieved exclusively through participation in the Pci's initiatives and organizations, but above all through his own research and studies on Gramsci, the Pci and the international communist movement, and their spread through numerous articles and presentations.

This paper examines the relationship between Paolo Spriano and the Einaudi publishing house, within the wider framework of the relations between the Pci and Italian culture after World War II. Through numerous unpublished letters, it follows the gestation of Spriano's most important books, as well as his relationships with editors and with Giulio Einaudi himself. The result is a rich and complex tapestry with a host of intellectual, academic, political and personal events, in the remarkably stimulating community that the Einaudi publishing house was able to be in the Italian postwar period, especially as it became an ideal political community attracting the participation of the time's leading intellectuals.

On the basis of detailed textual evidence from Gramsci's writings, this article aims at fully establishing the importance of Gramsci's interest in Kipling, and at putting forward a new interpretation of this interest. Existing secondary literature only includes a few contributions on this topic, focusing mainly on Gramsci's explicit references to Kipling's prose. This article shows a more pervasive presence - including echoes of Kipling's poetry - in diverse and significant writings by Gramsci, and goes beyond the explanations that Gramsci himself provided for his interest in the work of the Anglo-Indian writer. A particular sense of proximity emerges to certain episodes and themes in Kipling's literary work which revolve around questions of personal identity, more or less directly related to the historical context of colonialism. This proximity is a subtle indicator of Gramsci's perception of his own life and socio-cultural background, and - as suggested in the final part of the article - may also provide useful elements to further our understanding of Gramsci's intellectual trajectory and of the biographical roots of his reflections on recent Italian history.

This essay reconstructs Luigi Longo's itinerary as an emblematic one: Longo known as "Gallo" was among the top leaders in the Italian Communist Party, from the line of "social fascism" and the "united front from below" to the politics of unity of action with the Socialist Party and the anti-fascist Popular Fronts. While in 1933 - when a self-criticizing rethinking began in the two wings of the labour movement and the PCd'I directed its first unitary proposals to Socialists and Republicans - Longo was in Moscow as Italian representative at the Comintern and from there he set out for Togliatti his reflections and recommendations for the Communist International. Starting in 1934, upon his return to Paris, he became a leading figure in united-front dialogue. It was he who led the PCd'I's delegation at the meetings with the Socialist delegates, which gave rise to the unity of action pact, for which he found Pietro Nenni as his main interlocutor. At the same time, the PCd'I and Longo wished to expand their political unity to the other anti-fascist forces, with the goal of building the "Popular Front" in Italy as well. Hence the contacts also made with the "Giustizia e Libertà" group, and the complex dialogue with Carlo Rosselli. For the Communists, the "popular front" in a country with a Catholic and fascist majority had to aspire to involve Catholic workers and those who were in the regime's mass organizations. The dialectic between class unity and a larger anti-fascist policy, which was developed in Longo and the PCd'I in the 1930s, was to be at the basis of the liberation struggle of 1943-45.

This paper examines the Popular Fronts policy adopted by the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I) in the mid-1930s. During the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, a political vision emerged and took shape in the PCd'I's foreign centre, to deal with typical aspects of Italian fascism that were deeply rooted in the country and thus strongly influenced the international political debate. From that moment on, the development of the PCd'I's political thinking focused on identifying partial political goals aimed at activating the working masses. The appeal to the "brothers in black shirts", made in the summer of 1936, fits into this strategy. The investigation and the historical evaluation of the origin and the political meaning of this appeal were mainly focused on its political ambiguity, which resulted from a choice on which the top leaders of the Communist International and Togliatti himself would not have agreed. However, the available sources allow us to retrace the different phases that led to crafting the appeal. In this way, one may see that it resulted from a decision made among the leaders of the Communist International (IC). As a matter of fact, the leaders started discussing it at least as early as February 1936, in the context of the broader long-term analysis of fascism and in connection with the political planning that the PCd'I was to apply to Italy

Hobsbawm regarded Marxism as a research programme meant to investigate events such as the social structure of society "revolutionized", the role of productivity, the relation between classes and the wider economy, the international division of labour. Even in early works he examines everything comparatively and counter-factually. The entire planet becomes his laboratory. Thus, in the "Age of Capital", he held the view that what "really" enabled the process of industrialization was the introduction in the first half of the 19th century of the railway, the steamer and telegraph which increased the potential size of the capitalist world. Note the centrality not of the class struggle or ideology, but of technological innovations or the central role of natural resources such as coal. Hobsbawm's capitalism thrives in a world which is increasingly unified and interdependent. The hallmark of this capitalism is insecurity and anxiety. The workers were rarely distant from the insecurity of dismal poverty. An accident at work would instantly project the worker into abject poverty. But the bourgeoisie too was anxious, and rightly so: the industrial revolution which was sweeping throughout Europe and North America was bringing about an unparalleled upheaval in social structure. Hosbabwm's capitalism is never a pure market mechanism, a machine for growth. The pages in which he describes the world of the bourgeoisie are masterpieces of social history. The belief that capitalism requires non-market relations pervaded his entire work. Capitalism relied on factors which have no intrinsic connection with the pursuit of individual advantage such as the "pride of achievement", the custom of mutual trust, but also the habits of obedience and loyalty. In other words, he wrote "capitalism has succeeded because it was not just capitalist".

Historical research has clearly identified sharp peaks in changing values around 1800 and 1900. Sociological surveys, also related to political sciences, as well as recent historical research, now indicate that the 1960s and 1970s represented another such wave of accelerated change in values. This article will deal with what this last, third wave of changing values looked like, and how it can be explained. Its focus is the internal debate of the Italian Communist Party on the divorce law, introduced in Italy in 1970 and then reconfirmed with a referendum in 1974, and on changes in the family more generally. This debate was to see intensive development: first was the Female Section of the Party that in the early 1960s criticized the abstract conceptions of the communist family; then the ruling group, moving from the political agenda, also began to elaborate a renewed family model. This was the product of different reflections: partial acceptance of cultural and ethical change, a reconfirmation of the idealistic and class-based vision of society, and special strategic attention to the position of the Catholic party and the Vatican. From these various and conflicting expectations, a new family model can be formulated, that has only a partial relationship with the change in values currently underway in Italian society. The article begins with a reconstruction of the historiographical debate on the changing values in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s.