ABSTRACT
After an initial, very limited breakthrough in the first half of the 20th century, Marxism irrupted into historiography after the Second World War, when it established a solid position in the academy and deeply penetrated both the humanities and most social sciences, thus generating the ambition – suggested by Marx himself – of becoming a global theory of history. This “golden age” of Marxism lasted until the 1980s when it was swept away by the end of real socialism. During these decades, many Marxist categories – class, class struggle, ideological superstructures, reification, etc. – were very influential in historical scholarship, and, in parallel, the concept of revolution became a widespread regulative criterium for historicizing the past and defining its broad sequences. The so-called “crisis of Marxism” meant the eclipse of its “totalizing” pretentions, even if it still produced some significant and successful works. Since this turning point, the theoretical renewal of Marxism is occurring through the abandonment of both teleology and Western or Eurocentric views, the main features of its previous transformation into an accomplished and self-sufficient “science” of history. Thus, the end of Marxist historiography has coincided with the creative reinvention and transformation, within the history workshop, of many concepts inherited from Marx and his intellectual tradition.
