Il dovere dei riformisti. Intervento pubblico e mercato nella cultura e nella politica socialista (1977-1987)

Between the end of the 1970s and the mid-1980s, intellectuals and ruling groups belonging to the PSI and to its cultural area undertook a deep ideological revision, aimed at redefining the Italian socialist reformism as well as the nexus between State, market and society. Significant was, above all, the contribution of the PSI’s internal left, linked to Antonio Giolitti and Riccardo Lombardi’s political legacy, defeated in the struggle for the control of the party but engaged in roles of responsibility both within the national government and the European Community. The experience of these Italian socialism’s milieux passed through this co-presence of socialist spokespeople in important ganglia of national and EC power, in an attempt to reconstruct on the European side those controls and regulations tools which growing levels of social-economic differentiation and global interdependence had compromised at the domestic level. Nonetheless, socialist thought remained subject to evident theoretical-doctrinal tensions and conceptual shifts. This caused frequent uncertainties in government activity between neo-Keynesian, neo-corporate, and deregulatory approaches, but also allowed mutual fertilization between neo-Keynesian and neoliberal-monetarist doctrines.