The problems relevant to the political engagement is one of the most discussed and important themes of Neorealism’s history because it involved all the intellectuals of the time either in the literary production, either in the essays and in the political journalism.
The Neorealism’s development had at least two important phases: the first one, characterized by a spontaneous creativeness, that goes up to 1947/48 and a second one, more conditioned by the presence of the PCI, either if there have had a full adhesion to it, and if there have had a polemic and dialectical attitude with it.
The causes of this evolution are tied to some historical facts and to some political-cultural events both. The historical fact of relief was the victory of the Christian Democracy Party in the 1948 political elections, victory that was seen by the forces of left as a moment of regress towards the ideal of the Resistance that imposed a new struggle and a new type of political engagement of the intellectual inside the party. The event of cultural nature was the publication of Quaderni dal carcere by Gramsci that provoked an ample debate on the function of the intellectual in the society and in the party. Naturally not all joined, as Jovine and Pratolini did, to the theses of the party’sdirection and, while someone, for the characteristics of their poetic personality, was gradually assuming diversified positions without traumatic separations from the party, others as Vittorini assumed open positions of polemic, vindicating the autonomy of the art and of the literature from predetermined ideological courses and refusing "to play the pipe to the revolution."