Communication

A communication will be considered only if it relates to an article or review published in this journal; publication is solely at the editor's discretion. The AHA disclaims responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by the writers. Letters may not exceed seven hundred words for reviews and one thousand words for articles. They should be submitted in duplicate, typed double-spaced with wide margins, and headed "To the Editor."

ARTICLES

To the Editor:
It was refreshing to read an article in the AHR devoted to teaching, and David Pace's essay was an excellent summary with a number of compelling insights. His first sentence, however, offers a key to much of the problem: "Consider two lecturers." As he notes, the evidence on effective teaching is limited, but nearly all studies agree that the lecture method is one of the least effective means of stimulating student learning.
The article discusses several innovative strategies for teaching, but as long as universities pack hundreds of students into large lecture halls to "listen," not much is going to change. A brilliant and creative lecturer is a treasure and may be why many of us chose the profession, but the lecture method, the standard history textbook, and a weekly "discussion section" taught by a graduate student is not the model for learning.
Thomas J. Noer Carthage College

David Pace does not wish to respond.

The Editors

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

To the Editor:
In his review of Apostles and Agitators: Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (AHR, June 2004), James Martin criticizes me in two ways for linking left-wing Italian terrorism to Marxism. The first criticism is theoretical. According to Martin, by focusing the analysis on Karl Marx and the Italian intellectuals who interpreted him in a revolutionary way, my argument "implies, unconvincingly, that violence is the outcome of a badly conceived theory." This is an odd criticism from someone who presents himself as a defender of Marx. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that, left to themselves, the workers would never overthrow the capitalist system. They needed the assistance of "bourgeois ideologists ... who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole." In short, without theory and the intellectuals who created it, there could be no revolution. Within the Marxist tradition, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács further elucidated how an understanding of revolutionary politics requires a careful examination of the role that intellectuals play in the history of class struggle.
Martin's second criticism of the way I establish connections between the Marxist revolutionary tradition and Italian terrorism is political. He accuses me of suspicious motives in "passing the buck straight to Marx" instead of looking at the failures of the liberal order. The reaction of Italy's foremost Marxist radicals to the failings of liberalism is the starting point for every chapter in the book. It also must be said that the terrorists themselves passed the buck straight to Marx. In courtroom testimony and autobiographical writings that I examined in The Aldo Moro Murder Case (1995) and summarized in Apostles and Agitators, these individuals unanimously pointed to revolutionary Marxism as their ideological inspiration for attacking the Christian Democratic status quo in Italy. The Red Brigadists killed for these Marxist revolutionary ideas and for no other.
The question about Marx and Italian terrorism is not whether but how he influenced it. Revolutionary Marxism came to Italy through the partial translation of Capital by Carlo Cafiero, who had known Marx and Engels in London. Cafiero also pioneered in Italy the revolutionary interpretation of Marxism, in opposition to the reformist interpretation of Andrea Costa. By the revolutionary interpretation of Marxism, Cafiero meant that certain individuals would have to be put in their graves prematurely. He included in this last category reformist Marxists, such as Costa, whose life he called upon the proletariat to end at the earliest opportunity. All of the figures who come after Cafiero in my book—Antonio Labriola, Arturo Labriola, Benito Mussolini, Amadeo Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci, and Palmiro Togliatti—embodied the violent interpretation of Marxism. Each acted in a specific historical context, but the Marxist revolutionary tradition exhibits striking uniformities through the generations. The extraparliamentary left, of which Red Brigadism was one element, championed this tradition in the 1970s and 1980s. In explaining their reasons for killing government labor economists Massimo D'Antona (1999) and Marco Biagi (2002), the current Red Brigadists denounced them, in the classic language of revolutionary Marxism, for their reformist ideas.
In claiming that I fail to consider other interpretations of Marxism, Martin overlooks my sustained mention of Filippo Turati, who relentlessly criticized all the major figures in the book. Consequently, he moves in and out of the narrative as the supreme embodiment of the reformist Marxist tradition. Like Eduard Bernstein, Turati wanted to democratize Marxism and to humanize it. Giacomo Matteotti and Elio Vittorini, who also appear in the book, carried on this reformist struggle within the Italian left, as did Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the Communist Party during the heyday of the Red Brigadists. To draw attention to the Marxist cultural dimension of Italian terrorism is not the exercise in Cold War liberalism that Martin accuses me of performing. It is rather an attempt to understand how ideas, in Perry Miller's phrase, become "coherent and powerful imperatives to human behavior."
Richard Drake University of Montana

James Martin does not wish to respond.

The Editors

ERRATUM

The cover illustration for the October 2004 issue was mistakenly credited to the Hagley Museum of Wilmington, Delaware. It was actually reproduced with kind permission of the Newark Museum, and the editors regret the error.
The title of Helen Sjursen's book, reviewed in the October 2004 issue (pp. 1202–1203), was incorrectly rendered. The correct title is The United States, Western Europe and the Polish Crisis: International Relations in the Second Cold War. The editors regret the error.

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