Il suicidio della rivoluzione [The Suicide of the Revolution] [Association Copy with Inscription to A. James Gregor]

Milano: Rusconi, 1978. First edition (in Italian). Octavo. Original red cloth boards and dust jacket (not price-clipped). Minor scuffing to dust jacket; spotting to top page block; very neat underlining to nine pages (possibly that of A. James Gregor). Inscribed and signed by August Del Noce on front free endpaper to A. James Gregor.. First edition of Augusto Del Noce's (1910-1989) Il suicidio della rivoluzione with inscription to University of California at Berkely political scientist A. James Gregor. A leading light among Italian post-war political and philosophical thinkers, Del Noce spent much of his academic career elucidating the connection between philosophical ideas and socio-political history. Del Noce viewed the growth and expansion of atheism as the fundamental question of modernity, and he asserted that Marxism-and, particularly, the dissolution of Marxism into neo-bourgeois nihilism-was a driving force behind the secularization of the modern West. Il suicidio della rivoluzione was among Del Noce's more controversial works, and in it he argues that such dissolution of Marxism was already present in the works and thought of Antonio Gramsci. This first edition was inscribed by Del Noce to A. James Gregor (1929-2019), a political scientist renowned for his research on Marxism, fascism, and international relations. Gregor was among a group of scholars in the 1960s who rejected the traditional interpretation of fascism as ideologically empty, reactionary, and antimodern. Rather, he believed that fascism represents a coherent and serious theory of state and society, and that fascism has played a revolutionary and modernizing role in European history. Gregor's work on fascism continues to be studied today, generating several recent critical surveys and monographs on his works and scholarship. An uncommon inscription from one of Italy's greatest modern philosophers.