La Terza Via Theory, strategy, and practice 845 CHRISTOPHER PIERSON Department of Political Studies, University of Stirling, Scotland The grasp of "Eurocommunism" upon the informed public and academ- ic imagination proved to be brief. The advances of the French, Spanish, and Italian Communist Parties during the mid-1970s aroused the interest (and concern) of both academic commentators and practicing politicians but by the early 1980s - with the communists eclipsed by the socialists in France and Spain and withdrawing from their brief and rather unhap- py association with the "governmental arena" in Italy - such interest had largely evaporated. But such an episodic account of the rise and fall of Eurocommunism tends to mask the much more extended histori- cal development of a distinctively West European communist theory and practice. For the Italian communists, above all, the tenets of Eurocom- munism marked no decisive breach with previous theory and practice and its popularly assumed demise has occasioned no radical change in party policy. At the same time, while the PCF and PCE have been in- creasingly marginalized, the Italian communists emerged from the 1984 elections to the European Parliament as Italy's single largest party. For the PCI, this continuing advocacy of Eurocommunist strategy may be seen as a phase in their long-standing quest to define and pursue a distinctive "terza via al socialismo" - a "third road to socialism," grounded in national institutions (and experience) and distinct from the (much criticized) practices of either Soviet leninism or traditional social democracy. In this article, I consider the PCI's claim that the "Terza Via" constitutes just such a distinctive (though still Marxist) political theory, strategy, and practice, appropriate to the circumstances of con- temporary Western Europe and assess the extent to which this "third road" has effectively overcome the weaknesses and oversights of the "classical Marxist approach to democratic politics. At the same time, I shall argue that the acute difficulties that the PCI has had in generating a compelling theoretical and practical account of the "Terza Via" reflect Theory and Society 15:845-868 (1986) 9 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands