After Modernity presents a critical appreciation of the thought of Augusto Del Noce, Simone Weil, and Alasdair MacIntyre, organised around key themes driving the ‘crisis of modernity.’ Although hailing from different philosophical traditions, these thinkers share a concern with the faultlines they perceive to underlie liberal modernity, their insights converging with respect to a good society and polity properly ordered to true ends. Particular emphasis is placed on the loss of transcendence and the need to recover transcendent standards by which to inspire and orient behaviour.
The study opens with the work of Augusto Del Noce and his analysis of the ‘crisis of modernity.’ Here, Del Noce focuses upon the process of secularisation and the systematic rejection of a metaphysics based on transcendence. The loss of transcendence entailed the loss of moral absolutes, which in turn led ethics being replaced ‘scientism’ and ‘sociologism.’
The principal focus is placed upon Del Noce’s critical examination of Marxism in relation to what he identified as its internal contradictions. The decomposition of Marxism - the loss of its ‘messianic’ (emancipatory-revolutionary) dimension - entails its disintegration and concomitant reintegration into the bourgeois society Marx sought to transform. Shorn of its emancipatory-revolutionary ‘metaphysics,’ Marx’s critique turns wholly destructive, now being turned against the traditional enemies of the bourgeois – remnants of the old order as well as the working class. That destruction paves the way not for socialism but for the rule of what Del Noce calls ‘great economic organisms’ – the corporations. Del Noce died a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and saw the fall as symbolic of Marxism’s fall and as portending modernity’s fall in the West.
Simone Weil also identified inversion as lying at the source of the confusions and conflicts of the age. She refers to the transcendent as the supernaturale, pertaining to the ‘other reality.’ Her concern is with attending to the reality of this world in light of the standards of the supernaturale. Her book The Need for Roots examines the causes and consequences of the great uprooting that has taken place in the modern world, weakening societies from within by dissolving ties and loyalties built up over centuries. She proceeds to identify what is required to root human beings in place and in community with others, and what it involved in feeding those roots to encourage their growth. The ‘fundamental life,’ she argues, depends on roots: ‘whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others.’ That rooting is social, political, and, ultimately, spiritual.
The study closes with a close critical examination of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, paying particular attention to his practical philosophy in order to discern how an alternative society and polity, embodying genuine public community, could come to be achieved.
I argue that MacIntyre is so concerned with exposing the hypocrisy of liberalism - socially embodying its particular conceptions on a large scale in flagrant violation of its claims to neutrality - that he misses the real lesson taught by the dominance of liberalism – conceptions of the good can be socially embodied on a large-scale, and that embodiment is a condition of their effectiveness, as it is of all political philosophies.
The solution is to end the competition between virtuous communities and the state by creating the one unified political body, properly ordered to right ends, power properly arranged to their levels of competence and responsibility. Such a structure would enable the virtues generated within local communities of the common good to remoralise the whole structure from within.
- Editora : Independently published
- Data da publicação : 10 março 2025
- Idioma : Inglês
- Número de páginas : 401 páginas
- ISBN-13 : 979-8313636252
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