The Tailor of Ulm: A History of Communism

Description

The Italian Communist Party was once one of the most powerful and vibrant parties of the West. In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italian left, assesses the causes for its demise. The PCI survived almost a century of Italian history, from its founding in 1921 to the partisan resistance, the turning point of Salerno in 1944 to the de-Stalinization of 1956, the long '68 to the ""historic compromise,"" and to the opportunity - missed forever - of democratic transformation. With rigor and passion, The Tailor of Ulm merges an original and enlightening interpretation of Italian communism with the experience of a militant ""heretic"" into a riveting read - capable of broadening our insights into contemporary Italy and the twentieth-century communist experience.

Lucio Magri (1932-2011) was one of Europe's leading leftist intellectuals. He joined the Italian Communist Party in the mid 1950s. In 1969, he was expelled from the PCI along with the group of dissidents who had founded the journal il manifesto. Active in the Independent Left and the peace movement over the next two decades, Magri became one of the leaders of Rifondazione Comunista in 1991 and the editor of la Rivista del manifesto.

How should the Left think about the Communist experience today? A founding theorist of Il manifesto reflects on the need for critical examination of the past-and the lessons to be drawn for the future from the Italian Communist Party's trajectory. * New Left Review * The decline and fall [of Italian Communism] is the subject of Magri's extremely shrewd and despondent book ... the final cry of someone whose life belongs to a world that has gone for ever. -- Eric Hobsbawm * London Review of Books *