This is an extract from Major Corrections: An Intellectual Biography of Sebastiano Timpanaro, now available from Verso Books.
Sebastiano Timpanaro’s politics were one of the great organizing principles of his life. After his entrance into the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1947, he remained a staunch and committed Marxist for over fifty years, until the very end.
There were, of course, compressions and rarefactions, fluctuations and flattenings, along the way; stints of greater or lesser activity both inside and outside the official parties of the Italian left, and evolutions of stance in step with the rapid shifts in international politics that rattled the second half of the twentieth century. As new problems such as the ecological crisis emerged, Timpanaro took note and rethought.
But less remarkable than the occasional nuancing and inflection of his politics in this period is the fact of pure continuity. From the late 1970s onward, a moment in which former radical Marxist comrades were abandoning the socialist and communist ship in droves, Timpanaro’s basic politics barely changed at all. Timpanaro’s deeply felt Marxism was his North Star.
When Timpanaro entered the PSI after World War II, it was not in quite the rude health it had been in its heyday (it attained almost a third of the vote at the 1919 general election). But it was still the major leftist party in Italy, narrowly outperforming the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1946 elections. It was also a very different party in terms of…
Auteur: Tom Geue
