Costanzo Preve, 69, born of Italian parents and with an Armenian grandmother, never had it easy; he chose the path of uncompromising philosophy, away from academic circles and cultural fashions. 

He graduated in Turin, but his intellectual journey was really accomplished later in Paris, with teachers like Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser, Jean Paul Sartre, Roger Garaudy and Gilbert Mury. 

Nothing today seems less attractive to the literary salons than his critical thought that inextricably links two great German thinkers that the second part of the 20th century has definitely shelved: Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.