The Crisis of Modernity

by Augusto Del Noce, Carlo Lancellotti

Overview

In his native Italy Augusto Del Noce is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers of the period after the Second World War. The Crisis of Modernity makes available for the first time in English a selection of Del Noce's essays and lectures on the cultural history of the twentieth century. Del Noce maintained that twentieth-century history must be understood specifically as a philosophical history, because Western culture was profoundly affected by the major philosophies of the previous century such as idealism, Marxism, and positivism. Such philosophies became the secular, neo-gnostic surrogate of Christianity for the European educated classes after the French Revolution, and the next century put them to the practical test, bringing to light their ultimate and necessary consequences. One of the first thinkers to recognize the failure of Marxism, Del Noce posited that this failure set the stage for a new secular, technocratic society that had taken up Marx’s historical materialism and atheism while rejecting his revolutionary doctrine. Displaying Del Noce's rare ability to reconstruct intellectual genealogies and to expose the deep metaphysical premises of social and political movements, The Crisis of Modernity presents an original reading of secularization, scientism, the sexual revolution, and the history of modern Western culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773544437
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2015
Series:	McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas , #64
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	529,846
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989) was a professor at La Sapienza University of Rome and a distinguished philosopher, political thinker, and public intellectual. Carlo Lancellotti is a professor of mathematics and a member of the graduate faculty in physics at the City University of New York (College of Staten Island).

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction ix

Part 1 Modernity, Revolution, Secularization

1 The Idea of Modernity 3

2 Violence and Modern Gnosticism 19

3 Revolution, Risorgimento, Tradition 49

4 The Latent Metaphysics within Contemporary Politics 59

5 Secularization and the Crisis of Modernity 73

Part 2 The Advent of the Technocratic Society

6 Toward a New Totalitarianism 87

7 The Shadow of Tomorrow 92

8 The Death of the Sacred 118

9 The Roots of the Crisis 137

10 The Ascendance of Eroticism 157

Part 3 The Predicament of the West

11 Authority versus Power 189

12 A "New" Perspective on Left and Right 247

Appendices

A The Story of a Solitary Thinker 263

B Notes on Secularization and Religious Thought 272

C Eric Voegelin and the Critique of the Idea of Modernity 287

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

"The selection of essays collected in The Crisis of Modernity now offers to an English speaking audience a glimpse of the richness and fecundity of Del Noce’s thought and its relevance in this global society of the third millennium." – Voegelin View


“The Crisis of Modernity provides an indispensable manual for scholars approaching research on the specifics of Del Noce’s thought and very valuable insights into Italian and European philosophy of the twentieth century.” Luca Cottini, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Villanova University


"Carefully chosen to provide a representative selection of Del Noce's mature thinking without being too eclectic. The translation is excellent, and very readable. Lancellotti has also somewhat lightened the burden of Del Noce's constant commentary on and

From the Publisher