ABSTRACT
The history of Marxism in Italy has been very well studied and documented for the period of the Second International. In fact, the work of an entire generation of historians at least in that phase of their intellectual life was dedicated to illuminating various aspects of the history of Marxism in Italy, with particular attention to its internal development and to the relationship between it and the workers movement in general and to the Socialist Party in particular. It includes histories of socialist doctrines from Plato to the nineteenth century and manuals describing workers organizations. In the field of academic culture with socialist leanings, one point which it considers is that of the meeting of Marxism with the positivist culture which in that period dominated many Italian universities. It also says that the constellation of socialist ideologies perhaps, the components of eclectic socialism with which Marxism meet: there is not only Darwinism, or Mazzinianism, or Benoit Malon, or anarchism.
