The Demon of Politics: Mario Tronti’s Volume I: 1958-1980

Mario Tronti is considered one of the most important Italian Marxist philosophers of our time, as well as one of the most influential European political theorists of the post-war period. Largely untranslated and hence unknown in the anglophone world, this is the first volume of a two-volume translation, The Demon of Politics, presenting an invaluable picture of Tronti’s political life and intellectual activity through a selection of his most relevant writings.

Volume I paints a fascinating picture of Tronti’s work in the 1960s, when he made landmark contributions to a new reading of Marx, and in the 1970s when he again joined the Communist Party and worked towards a theory of the political that led to lively debates and even splits within workerism. An introduction written by the editors contextualises the writings of the first part of Tronti’s career, while also providing the biographical and political details necessary to understand the evolution of his thought during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Footnotes throughout the volume provide valuable precisions and elements of contextualisation.

The volumes of The Demon of Politics offer the most comprehensive edition of Tronti’s works available to students and scholars.

Mario Tronti + (1931-2023) was a philosopher and politician. In the 1960s he was among the founders of operaismo and later he played a leading role in the Italian Communist Party. He has been a newspaper editor, university professor, president of the Centro per la Riforma dello Stato, and Senator of the Italian Republic. He was the author of Workers and Capital and many other books in Italian.

Michele Filippini is Associate Professor in History of Political Thought at the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests include the history of Marxism and post-Marxism (Gramsci, workerism, Laclau), the early modern political thought (Machiavelli, Hobbes), mass society in XIX and XX century, and the forms of political legitimation and political power.

Jamila M.H. Mascat is Assistant Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Programme and a research affiliate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. Her transdisciplinary research works across the fields of Political Philosophy (German Idealism and Marxism in particular), Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Theories, and Critical Race Theories. Her current research interests focus, on the one hand, on theories of partisanship and political engagement and, on the other hand, on theories of postcolonial justice and postcolonial reparations.

Matteo Cavalleri is an adjunct professor in Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy. He has also held teaching positions at Humboldt University of Berlin and at University of Bergamo. In 2015 he won the Vittorio Sainati Prize. His research interests are developed at the intersection of theoretical analysis and political-historical investigation, with particular reference to the work of G.W.F. Hegel and the theme of freedom; the relationship between anthropology and the historical dimension; the aesthetics and politics of memory and the dialogue between political thought and literature.