CONSERVATIVE

A Critique of Modernity
Alvino-Mario Fantini
Few of us have the patience—or the discipline—
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 such an individual.
Considered one of the most important political
thinkers of post-war Italy, his works have escaped the
attention of most non-Italian-speaking scholars. But in
The Crisis of Modernity, Carlo Lancellotti, a mathematics
professor at City University of New York, has carefully
selected and translated 12 essays and lectures by Del Noce.
For those interested in rigorous conservative critiques of
modernity, this collection offers something new.
Lancellotti has organized selections from Del
Noce’s varied writings into three thematic sections:
modernity, revolution, and secularization (Part One); the
emergence of the “technocratic society” (Part Two); and
the predicament of the West today (Part Three). Also
included is an appendix comprised of a 1984 interview
with Del Noce conducted by 30 Giorni magazine. The
overall effect is dizzying, with different intellectual
currents and political movements meticulously examined
by the late Italian thinker.
Born in Pistoia, in the region of Tuscany, into an
aristocratic family and raised in the city of Turin, Del Noce
was from his earliest years a brilliant student. Although two
thinkers dominated the 1920s intellectual milieu in which
he grew up—the idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce
and the so-called “philosopher of fascism”, Giovanni
Gentile—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 engaged with history
who had developed a deep and original non-reactionary
interpretation of the trajectory of the modern world in
the light of the classical and Christian tradition.”
Profoundly influenced by Maritain and Gilson, Del
Noce adhered to a traditional Catholic perspective, even
when he became involved with Italy’s largely left-wing antifascist
movement. “Almost all my anti-Fascist university
classmates ... shared [a] liberal-socialist orientation”, he
notes in the 1984 interview in the appendix. But Del Noce
forged his own approach to contemporary problems.
Although he never stopped doing research, Del
Noce was first and foremost an educator. He taught at a
high school, worked at various think tanks, and eventually
made his way through the “byzantine mechanism” of
Italy’s university system. He landed a permanent academic
post at the University of Trieste teaching the history of
The Crisis of Modernity
Augusto Del Noce
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015
modern philosophy. Years later he transferred to the
prestigious University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where he
taught political philosophy and the history of political
ideas. He would spend the rest of his life there—with
one term spent in the Italian senate as a member of the
Christian Democratic Party,.
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 Foundation and editor of Radici Cristiane, and
philosopher-turned-politician Rocco Buttiglione. Both
served as his assistants. In 1991 Buttiglione published
a biography in Italian about Del Noce, admitting in the
beginning that “[i]t 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 quartercentury
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—and challenging—thinkers to read. He
worked across disciplines—philosophy, history, sociology,
The European Conservative 35