Johannes Agnoli

Johannes Agnoli (February 22, 1925 in Valle di Cadore, Eastern Dolomites – May 4, 2003 in San Quirico di Moriano near Lucca) was a German-Italian Marxist political scientist, though he rejected the label Marxist, preferring instead - somewhat ironically - to call himself an Agnolist.

Agnoli grew up in Belluno, northern Italy. As a pupil, he became an admirer of Benito Mussolini's fascism and a member of the fascist youth organization, because this was considered a type of rebellion or non-bourgeois behavior. Graduating from school in 1943, he then volunteered for the Wehrmacht, the German military, and was sent to Yugoslavia to combat Partisans. In May 1945 he was captured by the British near Trieste and became a prisoner of war in the Moascar camp in Egypt. In the re-educational classes, he aided in the philosophy course using Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy thus also learning German. Released in the summer of 1948, he moved to Urach in Baden-Württemberg where he worked at a sawmill. Agnoli received a veteran's scholarship to study at the University of Tübingen. Naturalized as a German in 1955, Agnoli did his doctorate in political science about Giambattista Vico's philosophy of law under the supervision of Eduard Spranger.

In 1957, Agnoli also joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD); he would be expelled in 1961, for being a member of the Socialist German Student Union, the former college organization of the SPD, which then rebelled against the party. In 1960, he started working as the assistant of Ferdinand A. Hermens, the only political scientist at the University of Cologne at the time. In Cologne Agnoli got to know his future wife, Barbara Görres. Görres's devoutly Catholic family at first objected to her relationship with Agnoli, an atheist, even calling on Hermens to intervene. The two married in 1962. After it was reported that Agnoli called on the West German government to recognize the socialist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), he came into conflict with Hermens and his contract was not renewed. Wolfgang Abendroth, a renowned German left-wing academic, recommended Agnoli to Ossip K. Flechtheim of the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Agnoli worked as Flechtheim's assistant until becoming a professor in his own right in 1972.

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