35 Facts About Domenico Losurdo

Domenico Losurdo was an Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician.

Domenico Losurdo was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences.

From 1988, Domenico Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought.

Domenico Losurdo was a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.

Domenico Losurdo died on 28 June 2018 at the age of 76 due to brain cancer.

From communist militancy, the condemnation of American imperialism, and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Domenico Losurdo was engaged concretely in national and international politics.

Domenico Losurdo included his works in the history of ideas and concerned the investigation of questions of contemporary history and politics, with constant critical attention to historical revisionism and the controversy against the interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Francois Furet, Karl Popper, and Ernst Nolte.

In particular, Domenico Losurdo has criticized a reactionary tendency among contemporary revisionist historians such as Nolte and Furet.

Domenico Losurdo turned his attention to the political history of modern German philosophy from Kant to Karl Marx and the debate that developed in Germany in the second half of the 19th and in the 20th century as well as a reinterpretation of the tradition of liberalism, in particular starting from the criticism and accusations of hypocrisy addressed to John Locke for his financial participation in the Atlantic slave trade.

Unlike many other thinkers, Domenico Losurdo thought that the Holocaust of the Jewish people is not incomparable, though he was willing to admit its tragic specificity.

Domenico Losurdo was a strong critic of the equation of Nazism and communism, made by scholars like Francois Furet and Ernst Nolte but by Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper.

Domenico Losurdo argued that in the Nazi concentration camps there was an explicit homicidal intention because the Jew who entered one was destined not to get out of it while in the Gulag there was not.

Domenico Losurdo took a critical view of Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolent resistance.

Autophobia was a concept developed by Domenico Losurdo to describe how sometimes victims tend to appropriate the point of view of their oppressors and begin to despise and hate themselves.

Domenico Losurdo extended this concept to social classes and political parties that have suffered defeat.

Domenico Losurdo stated his belief that communists suffer from autophobia, defined as a fear of themselves and their own history, a pathological problem that must be faced, unlike healthy self-criticism.

In excerpts from a conference, organized in 2003, to re-evaluate the figure of Stalin fifty years after his death, Domenico Losurdo harshly criticized the revelations contained in Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech".

Domenico Losurdo reiterated that he did not want to rehabilitate Stalin, but only to place him in the historical context and present a more neutral analysis of the facts, implementing a revisionism of the general experience of real socialism, considered as a past to be studied for the purpose of understanding the future dynamics of socialism.

Close first to the Italian Communist Party, then to the Communist Refoundation Party, and finally to the Party of Italian Communists, conflated in the Communist Party of Italy and in the Italian Communist Party, of which he was a member, Domenico Losurdo was director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.

Controversially, Domenico Losurdo contested the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, accusing Liu of supporting Western colonialism.

In doing so, these revisionist historians omitted two main moments that for Domenico Losurdo are indispensable in understanding the Second Thirty Years' War, namely the total war as an experience shared by all those involved in the war and colonialism as a common modern European phenomenon on the other.

Domenico Losurdo compared Adolf Hitler's struggle for Lebensraum in the East with the acquisition of a German India to the American frontier as part of the American conquest to the Pacific.

In Liberalism: A Counter-History, first published in English in 2011, Domenico Losurdo argued that while purporting to emphasise the importance of individual liberty, liberalism has long been marked by its exclusion of people from these rights, resulting in racism, slavery, and genocide.

Domenico Losurdo asserted that the origins of Nazism are to be found in what he views as colonialist and imperialist policies of the Western world.

Domenico Losurdo examined the intellectual and political positions of intellectuals on modernity.

In Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend, first published in English in 2023, Domenico Losurdo stimulated a debate about Joseph Stalin, about whom he claimed is built a kind of black legend intended to discredit the whole of communism.

Domenico Losurdo argued that totalitarianism was a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and that applying it to the political sphere required an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes, along with the Soviet Union and other socialist states, in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research.

Domenico Losurdo described his work on Stalin as a history of Stalin's image and not a biography or political history of the system with which his name is commonly associated.

Domenico Losurdo proposed not so much to save Stalin ", but "he refused to consider Stalin in merely negative terms.

Domenico Losurdo's work has been praised by Grover Furr, who started a mutual friendship with Domenico Losurdo, whom Furr praised especially for his 2008 book on Stalin.

Domenico Losurdo continued to cooperate with Furr, introducing him to an Italian publisher who published the Italian translation of Furr's book Khrushchev Lied in 2016, with Domenico Losurdo's introduction.

Additionally, Domenico Losurdo wrote a blurb for the back cover of Furr's 2013 book The Murder of Sergei Kirov and an introduction to the book which remains unpublished.

In Western Marxism, first published in English in 2024, Domenico Losurdo outlined a split between Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism.

Author Andreas Wehr does not consider these accusations tenable, as Domenico Losurdo did not in any way deny the crimes during the Stalin era and described them in detail.

Domenico Losurdo's work was derided by Italian liberal journalist Andrea Romano, who accused Domenico Losurdo and Luciano Canfora of "trying to create a harmless Stalinism".