Autorità

The eclipse of the idea of authority is one of the emblematic features of the contemporary Western world. Closely connected with the crisis of tradition and the assertion of the primacy of wealth and freedom, it can be analysed in particular in three specific areas: family, school and Church. Through the reflections of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers - Weber, Guénon, Arendt, Weil, Adorno, Horkheimer with the Frankfurt School, Gentile - Augusto Del Noce follows this parabola, set in the most important historical phenomena of recent centuries: revolutions, world wars, totalitarianisms. The focus is on the need to distinguish authority, understood as 'guidance', from power: for Del Noce, the rejection of the former, typical of the revolutionary period, led to the establishment of the latter; totalitarianism would in this sense represent the maximum extension of power and the negation of authority.