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style. As Lancellotti explains, part of this is due to Del Noce’s lifelong determina- tion to “reconstruct intellectual gene- alogies” by systematically exposing the “deep metaphysical premises of social and political movements.”
In his youth, Del Noce began with a systematic study of Marx. Lancellotti tells us that this marked a turning point in his thinking as he realized that “all of Marx’s thought is a consistent develop- ment of the radical metaphysical prin- ciple that freedom requires self-creation, and thus the rejection of all possible forms of dependence, especially depen- dence on God.” In Marxism, Del Noce saw that atheism was “not the conclusion but rather the precondition of the whole system.” And it laid the groundwork for the permissive, secularized, and techno- cratic society of today.
Del Noce’s other early scholarship focused on the roots of fascist thought and its relationship to other ideologies. He methodically revealed the revo- lutionary spirit behind fascism and described its relationship to violence. Fascism, he argued, really grows out of communist ideology, and is one of sev- eral stages in the long process of West- ern secularization.
This—combined with the permis- siveness, eroticism, and what Del Noce calls the “libertine philosophy” of the sexual revolution—has brought the West to ruin. “The question of eroticism is first of all metaphysical,” he argues. And it arises in the context of a de-sa- cralized West, “which today has mani- fested itself as never before.”
Tracing the origins of eroticism, Del Noce says the ideas of sexual freedom had already been fully formulated be- tween 1920 and 1930, beginning with the anti-rationalist Surrealist writers and then further developed by Wil- helm Reich (1897-1957). Reich died in an American prison, “almost com- pletely forgotten,” Del Noce notes, “after having been condemned by the still moral United States.” But the “vari- ous beat and hippie movements then rediscovered him.”
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Del Noce thus sees the countercul- tural revolution of the 1960s as the apo- theosis of various long-dormant revo- lutionary strains. He elaborates: “The French ‘May Revolution’ was marked precisely by the hybridization of Marx- ian themes with Freudian themes and themes inspired by de Sade.” But he also faults the global entertainment industry and the arts, as well as the media and other powerful elites, for having partici- pated in an aggressive “campaign of de- Christianization through eroticism.”
For the revolution against the tran- scendent to tri-
Del Noce applied this understanding to his analysis of political phenomena like fascism and communism and to more recent trends like consumerism and commercialism. He provides the “conceptual tools to see the world you live in [from] a completely different per- spective,” Buttiglione tells me. “The only kindred spirit I can think of in recent American culture is Russell Kirk.” There can be no more powerful exhortation to read Kirk’s works today than to have Buttiglione compare him to his mentor.
But thanks to Lancellotti, we can also
umph, explains
Lancellotti, “every
meta-empirical
order of truth”
had to be abol-
ished. Recreation-
al sex replaced the
truth of conjugal love. And the ideas of procreative sex and indissoluble mo- nogamous marriage were destroyed since they presupposed, Del Noce says, “the idea of an objective order of un- changeable and permanent truths.”
Del Noce was clearly a highly astute observer of societal trends. But as Lan- cellotti points out, he also sought to understand “philosophical history”— which he insisted had to be understood given how profoundly affected the West had been by the philosophies of ear- lier centuries. Atheism, empiricism, historicism, materialism, rationalism, scientism, etc. had all led to the “elimi- nation of the supernatural” and a “rejec- tion of meta-historical truths.”
At the same time, Del Noce was a staunch critic of the modern West’s af- fluence, commercialism, and opulence. The loss of belief in the transcendent, he said, had produced a rootless society in which there was nothing to support beliefs in anything other than science and technology, entertainment and the erotic. And behind everything, as Del Noce demonstrated, is nihilism—and the rejection of the Incarnation itself. Thus, the crisis of modernity is really a crisis of spirituality.
Del Noce’s dedication to constant learning not only made him an ideal teacher, it also makes him one of the most fascinating thinkers to read.
now read Del Noce. It’s true that at times the translation seems a bit awkward. It’s difficult to say how much is due to the difficulty of the original text or to an overly literal approach to translation. It’s almost as if the English rendition de- liberately preserved the same elliptical sentence construction and parenthetical expressions that appear in the original Italian. Still, we must be grateful.
This book is not for dilettantes or neo- phytes. But for those who are sufficiently motivated and whose interest is piqued by questions about the nature of mo- dernity, it may be quite rewarding. Del Noce’s thinking is so advanced and his analysis so sophisticated that it will be years until he is properly appreciated by scholars.
In his biography of Del Noce, Butti- glione writes that “the thought of Del Noce is a common patrimony of Italian culture.” I would suggest a slight revision to this statement: with the material that Carlo Lancellotti has made available to the English-speaking world, Del Noce is now—finally—part of the common pat- rimony of the West.
Alvino-Mario Fantini is the editor in chief of
The European Conservative.
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