ABSTRACT
Palmiro Togliatti's concept of "progressive democracy," sketched in 1944-1946, necessarily required for its actualization a nonvanguardist party—a mass, nonsectarian organization that represented the working class and allied strata within the framework of pluralist competition. The theoretical innovations that grew out of the Thirteenth Congress hastened the Italian Communist party's (PCI) liberation from past myths, legitimating in unambiguous terms its strategic adaptation to representative democracy and prefiguring the rise of Eurocommunism. For the French Communist party and PCI, the third road model had its origins in the antifascist struggles of the Popular Front and Resistance years of the late 1930s and early 194Os, from which the parties emerged as patriotic mass organizations committed to electoral politics and postwar "democratic reconstruction. " Within the international Communist tradition, the presence of more than a dozen parties adhering to a reconstituted democratic road strategy gives rise to tremendous diversity — in levels of political development, and even in degrees of attachment to ideological orthodoxy.
