In April 1980, the sociologist and political theorist Göran Therborn declared in the British journal Marxism Today that Eurocommunism was the legitimate heir of the social rebellion of the 1960s and the genuine answer to the crisis of Western advanced capitalism. Yet today, Eurocommunism has completely disappeared from the Left’s vocabulary. It is consigned, like other old-fashioned expressions such as “entryism” or “maximum program,” to the ideological fracas of the twentieth century, whose legacy — if there is one — seems impossible to determine. Not even Communist nostalgia, which has taken such a place in bookshops recently, has recovered the lexicon or ideas from this theoretical and political experiment.

Yet, in a short period in the 1970s and early 1980s, Eurocommunism did bear real sway on the Left’s imagination. It provided a significant moment for envisioning a different relationship with the state and a radical-democratic opposition to “inhumane and exploitative” capitalism.

Albeit imprecise, and for most of its critics naïf, the term “Eurocommunism” nonetheless embodied the aspiration for an adaptable version of socialism in which freedom of expression and pluralism complemented the “humanist” potential of class solidarity. It reclaimed an “open” and “Western” Marxism in which the road(s) to socialism could not be separate from the historical struggles to enlarge traditional (read: liberal) European parliamentary democracy and — in the words of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader Enrico Berlinguer — build a “progressive and substantial democracy.”