CONSERVATIVE

eligion—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 beyond that of an ordinary scholar”. Del
Noce can quickly take the reader from Machiavelli, Kant,
and Kierkegaard to Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger and
then to Maistre, Maurras, and Péguy. 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 extensive 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 style. As Lancellotti explains,
part of this is due to Del Noce’s lifelong determination
to “reconstruct intellectual genealogies” by systematically
exposing the “deep metaphysical premises of social and
political movements”.
In his youth, Del Noce began with a study of Marx,
which marked a turning point in his thinking. He realized
that “all of Marx’s thought is a consistent development
of the radical metaphysical principle that freedom requires selfcreation,
and thus the rejection of all possible forms of
dependence, especially dependence 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
technocratic 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 revolutionary
spirit behind fascism, described its close relationship to
violence, and saw it as one of several stages in the long
process of Western secularization. This—combined with
the permissiveness, 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-sacralized West, “which today has
manifested itself as never before”.
Tracing the origins of eroticism, Del Noce says the
ideas of sexual freedom had already been fully formulated
between 1920 and 1930, beginning with the antirationalist
Surrealist writers and then further developed
by Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Reich died in an American
prison, “almost completely forgotten”, Del Noce notes,
“after having been condemned by the still moral United
States”. But the “various beat and hippie movements then
rediscovered him”.
Del Noce thus sees the countercultural revolution
of the 1960s as the apotheosis of various long-dormant
revolutionary strains. He elaborates: “The French ‘May
Revolution’ was marked ... by the hybridization of Marxian
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 participated in an aggressive “campaign of de-
Christianization through eroticism”.
For the revolution against the transcendent to
triumph, explains Lancellotti, “every meta-empirical order
of truth” had to be abolished. Recreational sex replaced
the truth of conjugal love. And the ideas of procreative sex
and indissoluble monogamous marriage were destroyed
since they presupposed, Del Noce says, “the idea of an
objective order of unchangeable and permanent truths”.
Del Noce was clearly a highly astute observer
of societal trends. But he also sought to understand
“philosophical history”—since the West had been
profoundly affected by the philosophies of earlier
centuries. Atheism, empiricism, historicism, materialism,
rationalism, scientism, etc. had all led to the “elimination
of the supernatural” and a “rejection of meta-historical
truths”.
But he was also a staunch critic of the modern
West’s affluence, 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 lay
nihilism—and a rejection of the Incarnation itself. Thus,
the crisis of modernity is really a crisis of spirituality.
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
perspective”, 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
own mentor.
Thanks to Lancellotti, we can also 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 deliberately 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 neophytes. But for
those who are sufficiently motivated and whose interest is
piqued by questions about the nature of modernity, 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, Buttiglione 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 patrimony of the
West.
Alvino-Mario Fantini is the editor in chief of The European
Conservative. This review previously appeared in the September/
October edition of The American Conservative. It appears
here by permission.
36
Summer 2015