Abstract

There is a widespread tendency to inscribe the human and political experience of Giacomo Matteotti within a framework of exceptionality, to consider him an atypical socialist, to make him an isolated individual within his own political-ideal field. Even the possibility of relating him to the reformist strand of Italian socialism is sometimes questioned or shrouded with doubts. This article, which derives from a paper presented at a conference on the occasion of the centennial of Matteotti’s assassination by fascists, distances itself from these approaches, focusing on some crucial junctures of his political path and also presenting his most markedly individual traits as a particular articulation of Italian socialist reformism, a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single model.