You're listening to the LRB podcast, and I'm your host, Adam Shats.

My guest today is the Paris-based intellectual historian Enzo Traverso, who teaches at Cornell.

Over the last three decades, Traverso, who grew up in Italy, but writes in French,

has published an extraordinary series of studies of the 20th century,

including Marxism and the Jewish question, the origins of Nazi violence,

blood and fire, and the end of Jewish modernity. He writes in a tradition of dissident Marxism

with echoes of Gramsci, Isaac Deutsche, and above all Walter Benyemian. But his work is also distinguished

by its creative engagement with

thinkers outside the Marxist tradition, notably Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmidt, and Edward Saeed.

To read Enzo's writing is to experience the urgency, the still burning presence of the past

in our lives today. His latest book, Revolution and Intellectual

History, published by Verso, is no exception. It's a wide-ranging, remarkably ambitious study

of revolutionary passions, images, and ideas ranging across the French and Haitian revolutions, the Russian and Chinese

revolutions, the anti-colonial revolutions in the global south, and not least, the experiences

of revolutionary exiles, outcasts, and pariahs, the men and women who continued in defeat

and sometimes in despair to dream of a world transformed.

Revolution is also the first book Enzo has written in English, and it's a work of elegance and

admirable lucidity. Enzo, you were born in 1957 and raised in Piedmont. Your father was a communist. Your mother was a left-wing

Catholic. This was hardly a decade after the end of the Second World War. Italy, of course, had been

profoundly shaped by the experience of fascism and then the partisan resistance.

Can you talk a little bit about your experiences growing up in Italy in that period

and how the notion of revolution, the subject of your new book, resonated during that period.

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