ABSTRACT
An awareness of the discordance between the violent means of political struggle and the objective of freeing men from oppression ran throughout Simone Weil's work. A similar awareness may also be found in the essays of Andrea Caffi, a fascinating cosmopolitan intellectual defined by Antonio Banfi as a "knight-errant of wars and revolutions". Towards the end of the 1920s, in order to avoid possible political persecution by the Fascist regime, Caffi moved to Paris. In those years, the French capital was a magnet for many anti-fascist politicians and intellectuals who were forced to emigrate due the violence and arrests perpetrated by the Fascist regime. The idea of Socialism proposed by Caffi was clearly articulated in his criticisms of the Soviet regime and Western left-wing parties. Caffi's rejection of mass politics, the state and parties as revolutionary instruments led him to criticise another fundamental feature of the Marxist tradition: faith in violent revolution.
