Del Noce was born in Tuscany but he grew up and studied in Turin, which between the two World Wars was one of the main centers of secular and anti-Fascist culture in Italy.

Between 1934 and 1943 he published a series of essays on early modern philosophy [2][3][4][5][6][7] that established his reputation as a specialist in the field, not only in Italy but also in France where his work was praised by well-known scholars such as Étienne Gilson and Henri Gouhier.

After having been one of the first Italian readers of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, and a thoughtful anti-Fascist, Del Noce turned after the war to the question of the relationship between Christianity and Communism.

In his final years Del Noce became very much a “public intellectual,” writing numerous articles in newspapers and weekly magazines, and becoming involved in the Italian political debate to the point of serving a term as a senator.

Del Noce died suddenly on December 30, 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin wall had marked symbolically the final disintegration of the Marxist revolution, which he had predicted many years earlier on philosophical grounds.

In fact, one of his core ideas was that modern history, if correctly interpreted, provides the best vindication of classical metaphysics by showing that rationalism leads to contradictory outcomes, as exemplified by the trajectory of Marxism.

In some of his best known works [12] 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 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.

Contemporary history provides the best proof that the trajectory of rationalism has a nihilistic endpoint: atheism has achieved complete success not in the historical implementation of Marxism, but rather in the affluent society, which pushes to the extreme the de-humanization of the relationship with the other.

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.

Thus, Del Noce said, the theme of authority brings us back to the Socratic origins of classical metaphysics, which have to be rediscovered in order to overcome the present crisis of our civilization.