The Search for a New Revolution. Leo Valiani and "Giustizia e Libertà"

In Paris, in the late 1930s, Leo Valiani, albeit still officially a Communist, intensively associated with Franco Venturi and Aldo Garosci, militants from the revolutionary antifascist group "Giustizia e Libertà" (GL). Valiani's increasingly critical (but clandestine) positions towards Stalinist Communism and Marxism found a common ground in the search for a new revolution carried out by GL. Those highly innovative intellectual exchanges deeply influenced Valiani in the first half of the 1940s, during his exile in Mexico and his later experience of the Italian civil war. My proposal will analyse his involvement in GL's intellectual experience and network, focussing on his peculiar conceptions of revolution, communism, socialism and democracy through a close reading of his texts. At the core of my analysis will be the Storia del socialismo nel secolo XX (published in Mexico in 1943 and in Italy in 1946), alongside his essays on "Quaderni Italiani" and "Quaderni dell'Italia libera". A peculiar attention will be devoted to the reception of one of the most influential scholar of socialism in that period, the French historian Elie Halévy, and to Valiani's personal interpretation of L'ère des tyrannies. In this way, it will be possible to understand a fundamental phase of Valiani's intellectual biography, and at the same time to re-think one of the crucial aspects of the GL's history and legacy.