Notes for the History of Marxism Project

Abstract

In the European summer of 1978, Eric J. Hobsbawm signed the Preface to Il marxismo ai tempi di Marx, the first volume of Storia del marxismo, a collective work published by Einaudi of Turin from that same year. In a footnote, he indicated that the text that opened the work was a “slightly modified version” of a “memorandum” distributed among the different collaborators. Some copies of said “memorandum” are kept in the Andreas Hegedüs Fund preserved in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, in the Fonds Georg Haupt deposited in the Archives of the Maison des Sciences de l 'Homme (Paris) and in the Library Aricó of the National University of Córdoba. Although, as Hobsbawm himself points out, he only made certain formal changes and some additions, we consider it interesting to offer the original version of the “memorandum”, as received by future collaborators, in a direct translation from English.