It might seem strange to start an obituary of a seventy-seven-year-old by saying he was taken from us in his prime. But before Domenico Losurdo was struck down by a brain tumor, the Italian Marxist had been at the height of his powers. Just last year he published a sustained polemic against the pretensions of Western Marxism, following a 2016 work in which he took a critical look at projects for peace throughout history.

As an emeritus professor at the University of Urbino and president of the Associazione Marx XXI, deep into old age Losurdo maintained his globe-trotting activity of conferences and book presentations. Ever keen to promote his thought at the international level, until shortly before his death he was working on a new chapter for the English version of his Antonio Gramsci: From Liberalism to Critical Communism.

This is just one of three English-language Losurdo titles due to be published in the next year, continuing to make his work known to yet wider layers of readers. But he was already among the most renowned Italian Marxists at the international level, as a richly partisan historian of philosophy, always attentive to exposing the material realities, the historical and social conditions, that stood behind all philosophical systems and ideas.