The crisis of modernity / Augusto Del Noce ; edited and translated by Carlo Lancellotti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Del Noce, Augusto, 1910-1989, author.

Contributor:

Lancellotti, Carlo, 1965- editor, translator.

Series:

McGill-Queen's studies in the history of ideas ; 64.

McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas ; 64

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civilization, Modern.

Secularization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 p.)

Place of Publication:

Montréal, Québec : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Translator's Introduction

Part One Modernity, Revolution, Secularization. The Idea of Modernity

Violence and Modern Gnosticism

Revolution, Risorgimento, Tradition

The Latent Metaphysics within Contemporary Politics

Secularization and the Crisis of Modernity

Part Two The Advent of the Technocratic Society. Toward a New Totalitarianism

The Shadow of Tomorrow

The Death of the Sacred

The Roots of the Crisis

The Ascendance of Eroticism

Part Three The Predicament of the West. Authority versus Power

A "New" Perspective on Left and Right

Appendices. The Story of a Solitary Thinker

Notes on Secularization and Religious Thought

Eric Voegelin and the Critique of the Idea of Modernity.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed January 5, 2014).

ISBN:

9780773596740

0773596747

9780773596733

0773596739

OCLC:

900244288