Lucio Colletti (1924–2001) was born in Rome and took his degree in literature and philosophy at Rome University, where he later became professor of Theoretical Philosophy. In 1950 he joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and in 1957 was appointed to the editorial board of its principal cultural journal, Società. The PCI leadership closed the journal in 1962 and two years later Colletti resigned from the party, as a left critic of its political and ideological orthodoxy. He sustained this role for more than a decade, defending the political and philosophical positions he set out in this interview, which took place in 1974.

The end of the seventies marked a second, more drastic watershed in Colletti’s thinking. The compilation Tra marxismo e no (1979) signalled a crisis in his relations with Marxist tradition, and by the early eighties he had transferred his political hopes to the Socialist Party. His final political move took him unambiguously to the right, into the camp of Silvio Berlusconi, whose Forza Italia he served as a parliamentary deputy from 1996 until his death.