/lit/ - Literature

Has anyone read Augusto Del Noce? Gottfried cited him in one of his books and his thought seems interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Del_Noce

>In some of his best known works [11] he advanced the thesis that Marxism suffers what he called an "heterogenesis of ends," meaning that it is destined to triumph and self-destruct at the same time, due to its internal contradictions. To triumph, because Marx’s radical atheism and materialism are the most consistent outcomes of European rationalism. To self-destruct because, as soon as the revolutionary dream fades away, Marxian historical materialism must degenerate into absolute relativism and open the way to a “perfectly bourgeois” society, a de-humanized world that does not recognize any permanent order of values and in which alienation becomes complete.

>Del Noce wrote extensively[15] about Freudo-Marxism and on the relationship between political progressivism and the sexual revolution. He argued that both of them are rooted in the denial a priori that human reason is capable of reaching meta-empirical truths, and so they are tightly linked with scientism, the dogmatic belief that the empirical sciences are the only form of rationality. The reduction of reason to science goes hand in hand with the reduction of freedom to the satisfaction of instincts, which in turn is expressed politically as fight against “repression” and leads to a radical rejection of all traditional values. He further argued that the scientistic postulate is intrinsically totalitarian, inasmuch it de-legitimates all other forms of knowledge.

>Del Noce also studied in depth the relationship between freedom and authority. In a long essay[16] from 1975 he pointed out that, whereas in the classic and humanistic tradition authority was associated with liberation (e.g. from the power of sub-human instincts and from social manipulation), contemporary culture associates authority with repression. As a result, the modern world confuses authority and power with disastrous effects. In particular, the progressive culture since World War II has associated the defense of freedom with the rejection of metaphysical knowledge and the embrace of relativism. However, any form of liberalism that does not acknowledge the nature of authority must conclude to an even greater oppression, by making the individual completely dependent on society.