Page 56 - American Conservative September/October 2015
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Arts&Letters
Italy’s Philosopher Against Modernity
by ALVINO-MARIO FANTINI
The Crisis of Modernity, Augusto Del
Noce, McGill-Queen’s University Press, F336 pages
ewofushavetimetoreadseri- ous books these days. Fewer still have the patience—or the disci- pline—to engage in the kind of
rigorous philosophical analysis needed to understand the roots of the modern crisis. Rare indeed is the individual who can penetrate into deeper truths and reveal the underlying assumptions and conceptual distortions that obscure our view of social and political reality. The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce (1910-89) was just such an individual.
Considered one of the most impor- tant political thinkers of postwar Italy, his works have escaped the attention of most non-Italian-speaking scholars. But in The Crisis of Modernity, Carlo Lan- cellotti, a mathematics professor at City University of New York, has carefully selected and translated 12 essays and lectures by Del Noce. For those interest- ed in rigorous conservative critiques of modernity, this collection offers some- thing exotic and new.
Lancellotti says he struggled to se- lect examples of Del Noce’s thought that would give English-speaking audi- ences a sufficiently representative sam- pling of the “Delnocian” oeuvre while also maintaining some semblance of a theme. In the end, Lancellotti organized the selections into three thematic sec- tions: modernity, revolution, and secu- larization (Part One); the emergence of the “technocratic society” (Part Two); and the predicament of the West today (Part Three).
Also included is an appendix com- prised of a 1984 interview with Del Noce conducted by 30 Giorni magazine and two additional pieces that did not quite fit into the three main themes of
the book. The overall effect is dizzying, with diverse intellectual currents, com- peting ideological trends, and different political movements meticulously ex- amined by the late Italian thinker.
Born in Pistoia, in the region of Tus- cany, into an aristocratic family and raised in the city of Turin, Del Noce was from his earliest years a brilliant stu- dent. Although two thinkers dominated the1920sintellectualmilieuinwhich he grew up—the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce and the so-called “phi- losopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gen- tile—Del Noce charted his own course.
As a private student at the Sorbonne he became acquainted with French scholars such as Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Jean Laporte, and Henri Gouhier. As Lancellotti explains in his excellent introduction, “For Del Noce, Maritain was, more than anything else, an example of a philosopher fully en- gaged with history who had developed a deep and original non-reactionary interpretation of the trajectory of the modern world in the light of the classi- cal and Christian tradition.”
Profoundly influenced by Marit- ain and Gilson, Del Noce adhered to a traditional Catholic perspective, even when he became involved with Italy’s largely left-wing anti-fascist movement. “Almost all my anti-Fascist university classmates ... shared [a] liberal-socialist orientation,” he notes in the 1984 in- terview in the appendix. But Del Noce forged his own approach to contempo- rary problems.
Despite constant philosophical re- search, for most his life Del Noce was first and foremost an educator. He taught at a high school, worked at vari- ous think tanks, and eventually made his way through the “byzantine mecha- nism” of Italy’s university system. He landed a permanent academic post at the University of Trieste teaching the history of modern philosophy. Years lat- er he transferred to the prestigious Uni- versity of Rome “La Sapienza,” where he taught political philosophy and the his- tory of political ideas. He would spend
the rest of his life there—with the excep- tion of serving in the Italian senate, as a member of the Christian Democratic Party, for one term during the 1980s.
A natural teacher, he attracted many students. He became a mentor and a friend to future eminences like historian Roberto de Mattei, president of the conservative Lepanto Founda- tion and editor of Radici Cristiane, and philosopher-turned-politician Rocco Buttiglione. Both served as his assistants. In 1991 Buttiglione pub- lished a biography in Italian about Del Noce, admitting in the beginning that “It is difficult to write a book about a master and friend with whom one has shared an intellectual friendship for more than twenty years.” Nearly a quarter-century later, Buttiglione still says, “To be with him was to take part in an unending learning process that coincided with life itself.”
Del Noce’s dedication to constant learning not only made him an ideal teacher, it also makes him one of the most fascinating—if challenging— thinkers to read. He worked across dis- ciplines—philosophy, history, sociology, religion—and read various languages. Buttiglione tells me that Del Noce “was a man of enormous erudition and he sometimes presupposes in his reader a level of knowledge—especially of the history of philosophy—that goes far be- yond that of an ordinary scholar.”
Del Noce can quickly take the reader from Machiavelli, Kant, and Kierkeg- aard to Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger and then to Maistre, Maurras, and Pé- guy. Along the way, he might refer to Marsilius of Padua, Johan Huizinga, Thomas Muenzer, Karl Löwith, and Manuel García Pelayo. It’s daunting, to be sure. “Nevertheless,” Buttiglione assures me, “the reading is worth the while if you want to understand the world we live in.”
Lancellotti has helpfully provided ex- tensive and detailed explanatory notes. But even in the original Italian, Del Noce expects a lot from the reader, expressing complex ideas in a highly compressed
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