Department of Sociology
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Browsing Department of Sociology by Subject "Karl Marx"
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Item Open Access Dissemination and Reception of The Communist Manifesto in Italy: From the Origins to 1945(Taylor & Francis Group, 2009-05) Musto, MarcelloContrary to the predictions that after 1989 Karl Marx would fall into oblivion, Marx has returned to the attention of international scholars. One hundred and sixty years after it was written, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is celebrated as the text which contains the most formidable prediction of capitalist development on a world scale. This article considers how the writings of Marx and Engels were translated and assimilated in Italy, from its first appearance in 1889 to 1945 and, more generally, explores the misinterpretations of the fortune of Marx's works in Italy. From a close examination of the press of the newly established workers' movement and the first socialist writings, the reality of a counterfeited and theoretically impoverished 'Marxism' emerges. Antonio Labriola's Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, which were published between 1895 and 1897, were the only works in Italy that offered a rigorous interpretation capable of measuring up to the European levels of Marxism. Through the historiographical reconstruction of translated works and the development of the interpretations of Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, this article considers the debate on the 'crisis of Marxism' of the late 19th century in which Benedetto Croce was the most important figure, the limitations of the diffusion of Marx's theories in the Italian Socialist Party, the struggle between reformist and the union-revolutionary revisionism of the early 20th century and the repression of 20 years of fascism.Item Open Access The ‘Young Marx’ Myth in Interpretations of the Economic–Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844(Taylor & Francis Online, 2015-08) Musto, MarcelloFocusing on the dissemination and reception history of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, this article will critically examine the famous controversy surrounding the relationship between Marx’s ‘early’ and ‘mature’ writings. A review of all the major books published worldwide (especially in Germany, France, the Soviet Union and English-speaking countries) on Marx’s early writings is followed by a plea for a new and rigorous reading of Marx’s Paris manuscripts, which have been wrongly considered by almost all interpreters as a finished work. Careful textual analysis of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 alongside the so-called Paris notebooks makes it possible to refute conceptions of the former as a fully fledged text either prefiguring Marx’s thought as a whole (as Landshut or the French existentialists argued) or advancing a well-defined theory opposed to that of Marx’s ‘scientific’ maturity (as Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy or Althusser claimed).