The first history in English of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), beginning with the exile period in 1926 and concluding with a study of the administration of Craxi, Italy's first Socialist prime minister.

This is the first English language history of Italian Socialism. It is based on extensive interviews with prominent Italian and American political personalities as well as on thorough archival research.

`Spencer Di Scala, the author of a fine study of Filippo Turati, Dilemmas of Italian Socialism, has now written an equally good history of the post-1945 Italian Socialist party (PSI) ... The result is a provocative, well-researched history of the PSI, based on a combination of archival work, interviews with major protagonists, and a comprehensive survey of socialist periodicals and secondary sources ... it is a tribute to the author's scholarship and objectivity that, despite his ultimately favourable judgement of Craxi, the reader has ample material from which to draw quite different conclusions about the new PSI.' Journal of European Economic History