Even if seen as lagging the ideological-literary fashions of the age, Critica Sociale tried to inform its readers on new tendencies, giving judgments and appraisals filtered through its socialist outlook.

At the Livorno Conference of January 1921, the nascent Marxist-Leninist wing led by Amadeo Bordiga left the PSI to become the Italian Communist Party.

Deprived of resources, writers such as Turati, Anna Kulischov, Giacomo Matteotti, Claudio Treves, and Carlo Rosselli continued to defend the democratic order which was being swept away by the Fascists, and total censorship loomed.

Its last political article was published the day after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924, an act which Mussolini used to take absolute power in Italy.

Following the fall of the Fascist regime in 1946, it was reestablished, and has remained in print under a succession of editors-in-chief: Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi, Umberto Giovine and Carlo Tognoli (with Paolo Brera as deputy editor).

In recent years it has paid particular attention to the reinvention of British centre-left politics under New Labour, and has published articles by both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.