The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique.

Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

"The perfect meditation for our melancholy age." - Boston Review

"An exciting, original, and illuminating discussion, which sets the contemporary Left's feeling of disorientation and loss into a rich and varied landscape of memory practices and emotional states." - American Historical Review

"Left-Wing Melancholia’s breadth is impressive, almost intimidating." - H-Net Socialisms, H-Net Reviews

"This brilliant book seeks to recover a hidden, discreet tradition: that of 'left-wing melancholia.'" - Against the Current

"[This] wide-ranging study is triumphant in plumbing the depths of socialist despair." - Times Higher Education

"Spirited, engaging, and almost panoramic." - History and Theory

"Traverso makes a persuasive case." - Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

"A stirring . . . call for the left to challenge this narrative and rethink its past. . . . A brilliant piece of historical study." - 3:AM Magazine