ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to tease out elements of the theoretical and cultural complexity from which the concept of 'political violence' emerged in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The conceptual development of 'violence' in modern times departed considerably from the original meaning of the expression in ancient Greek and Latin. Some aspects of the new conceptualization of violence came from a renewal of interest in the source texts and documents of Marxist theory, and derived from a cultural reassessment of the Marxist heritage. This ideological trajectory followed an intellectual path that was non-academic in the spirit of Raniero Panzieri, a forerunner of operaismo and a driving force of Quaderni Rossi, one of the most interesting and influential Marxist journals of the 1960s. In considering the Brigate Rosse (BR), any discussion of the semantic cluster surrounding the word violence should make reference to two other important concepts, guerra and guerriglia, along with the military lexicon attached to such terms.
