Abstract

Turin working-class and its cultural environment are the setting in which Paolo Spriano grew intellectually and politically. It is in Turin that Spriano's early journalism career began, as did his collaboration with the publisher Einaudi; and from Turin, much of his early historiographical research drew inspiration. Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci are the ideal referents for Spriano's political engagement - from his early partisan militancy in a "Giustizia e Libertà" group to his membership in the Italian Communist Party. Reflection upon the nexus between "liberal revolution" on the one hand and communism on the other, between Gobetti and Gramsci, is a recurrent motif in Spriano's works. In his case, it meant not merely untangling a historiographical knot, but rationalizing his own intellectual and political progress.