Mario Alighiero Manacorda e la politica culturale del Pci

This article examines Mario Alighiero Manacorda’s role within the Italian Communist Party’s cultural policy from the Resistance to the early 1960s. It situates his intellectual trajectory in the broader transformation inaugurated by Togliatti’s “new party,” which sought to connect Marxism with Italian democratic, Enlightenment, and Risorgimento traditions. Through Manacorda’s writings in Rinascita and Riforma della scuola, the essay reconstructs three central axes of his engagement: the defense of a secular and democratic public school against clerical and centrist policies; a materialist interpretation of Italian history focused on the limits of the bourgeois revolution; and an enthusiastic, though later more complex, reception of Soviet pedagogy and educational reform. The study highlights Manacorda’s persistent anticlericalism, his commitment to linking education with social emancipation and productive labor, and his growing interest in Gramsci’s reflections on schooling. While broadly aligned with Communist cultural strategies, Manacorda also appears as an independent and sometimes uncomfortable figure, especially on school-work relations and religion. His thought reveals the tensions between Marxism, democratic constitutionalism, and the pedagogical ambitions of postwar Italian communism. By tracing continuities and changes across his interventions, the article offers a nuanced portrait of Italian militant intellectual work at the crossroads of history, politics, and pedagogy.