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Leo Ferrero Raditsa (born Switzerland, March 2, 1936, died Annapolis, Maryland, USA, February 22, 2001) was an American historian, cultural critic, teacher, author and editor.

Life

Leo Raditsa's father, Bogdan Raditsa (originally Croatian Radića) was a Yugoslav diplomat who broke with Tito and defected to the United States in 1946. His mother, Nina Lombroso Ferrero, was the daughter of the historian Guglielmo Ferrero and of Gina Lombroso, daughter of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Leo Raditsa was married for 25 years to the archeologist Larissa Bonfante.

With friends at Harvard, Raditsa founded and edited i.e. The Cambridge Review, a literary and artistic journal that published important work by Paul Goodman, Simone Weil and Herbert Marcuse. The cover design of the review was by Ivan Chermayeff, whose firm Chermayeff and Geismar later designed the corporate identities of Chase Bank, Mobil, and NBC.

After graduation, Raditsa worked as a literary editor and later as an instructor and assistant professor in New York, where he persuaded Roger Straus to republish the then banned works of Wilhelm Reich. After gaining his master's in medieval history (1962) and his doctorate in ancient history (1969) from Columbia, he taught from 1972 until his death in the Great Books Program at St John's College, Annapolis, where he edited the St John's Review from 1979 to 1983. This second editorship marked a shift to the right, Raditsa publishing work by, among others, Sidney Hook, Raymond Aron, and Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Works

Raditsa published himself on a wide variety of subjects. Scholarly articles in the Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt dealt with Rome's Macedonian wars, Julius Caesar and his writings and Augustus' marriage laws and regulation of sexual life. In 1978 the Philosophical Library published Some Sense About Wilhelm Reich, a meditation on Reich's life, personality, and teachings. Raditsa returned to ancient history with an essay on The Collapse of Democracy at Athens and the Trial of Socrates, and then shifted to modern history with Prisoners of a Dream: The South African Mirage (1989), a 400-page "historical essay" on Congressional hearings chaired by Senator Jeremiah Denton in 1982. This work largely defended the white South African tradition, and even the apartheid regime. Raditsa claimed deep penetration of the African National Congress by the South African Communist Party; emphasised the terror tactics used by the ANC; and pointed out that Nelson Mandela was never adopted as a political prisoner by Amnesty International, since his convictions related to setting up and equipping Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. Raditsa also wrote widely for American and occasionally Italian periodicals, often on Cold War or post-Cold War themes.