The Crisis of Modernity (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas, 64) (Volume 64) - Softcover

Del Noce, Augusto; Lancellotti, Carlo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0773544437 ISBN 13: 9780773544437

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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).

From the Back Cover

Series editor: Philip J. Cercone

McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas is a series devoted to Western intellectual history, from antiquity to the twentieth century. It includes scholarly monographs, critical editions or translations, and occasionally, thematically unified collections of essays.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0773544437
• ISBN 13: 9780773544437
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336