In light of all of this, it should be clear why Del Noce was very interested when, in 1969, Jean-Marie Domenach began talking about the “dead end of the left.” Domenach was responding to the dramatic events of 1968. In the East, the invasion of Czechoslovakia had been a stark reminder that, in the Soviet Union, Marxism had generated an oppressive multinational empire ruled by an oligarchy. In the West, the May student protesters had accused European social democracy of having thoroughly embraced technocratic politics and reconciled itself with capitalism in the name of economic development and mass consumption. Unfortunately, the students’ demands for revolutionary social change were at risk of degenerating into what Domenach called “vulgar anarchism” and never going “beyond the stage of utopian stammering.” To get beyond its current impasse, the left would have to chart a new route between the Scylla of actually existing socialism (in both its Eastern and Western forms) and the Charybdis of the “great refusal” of 1968. Clearly this predicament confirmed Del Noce’s diagnosis and raised deeper questions. What was “the left” to begin with? What were its cultural foundations and what was its relationship with Marxism? Was its “dead end” just a contingent political circumstance, or did it reveal a deeper cultural crisis?

Surprisingly—and despite the polemical punches they threw at each other in their exchange—Molnar and Domenach agreed that the left faced a philosophical crisis. Molnar put it quite bluntly: the left is doomed to oscillate between utopian anarchism and extreme political realism because of a philosophical mistake. He quoted Jacques Maritain in The Peasant of the Garonne: “The pure man of the left detests being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is.” But while Maritain viewed this as a mere temperamental inclination, Molnar believed that in the modern age “ontological restlessness” had evolved into a systematic and militant attitude, a habit of denying reality and “chasing the imaginary.” Molnar probably had in mind the counter-culture of the late ’60s, such as radical pacifism, absolute sexual freedom, the hippie movement, etc. However, he also cites some famous French left-wing intellectuals of his time, whose work is still very influential in American academia: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault. The latter, in particular, theorized the “death of man,” arguing that “human nature” is just a cultural construction, and “man” must be recognized as the product of its social and cultural circumstances, a “thing among things.” It is not hard to draw a line from Foucault’s ideas to today’s theories about gender and sexuality. Molnar was probably referring to him when he wrote that “becoming” took priority over “being” and “above all there is no solid substratum behind events and phenomena!... The enterprise of dissolving human nature is central, although it disguises itself as a recognition of the malleability of man.”

For his part, Domenach was willing to concede that the left had become unmoored from “Being”—that is, from the recognition of the ontological and moral realities, including human nature itself, that necessarily constrain any realistic political action. “The characteristic disease of the left is its passion for the limitless,” he wrote.

Freedom, identified with a vague notion of nature, unfolds in a vacuum, and toward what ends? Rest, happiness, friendship. These are the first fruits of Being, but they are utopian and ineffectual because they are not ordered to any hierarchy of values. In truth, Being is not a hidden treasure that will free itself…by exploding the crust of a repressive society. Being is an ascending totality within which human relationships are articulated: among humans, with nature, and with the supernatural. If Being is not affirmed as an order of values, it is pushed into the realm of dreams; being formless, it is confused with the impossible delights of a lost world or an imaginary world.

It was therefore time for the left to ask metaphysical questions, even at the cost of evoking laughter from “ideologues and tacticians.” In particular, it was time to have some “idea of man and of his life in community.” Lacking that, the left had “allowed itself to be locked up in a society that has no other shared goal but unlimited production and consumption, in a culture that has broken away from human totality.”

Domenach’s response to Molnar struck Del Noce as very significant. First of all, in the statement that “Being” will not “free itself...by exploding the crust of a repressive society,” Del Noce recognized his own criticism of the “new” left. Intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich had theorized that there is a link between social oppression and sexual inhibition, and that the left should join the “fight against repression” because economic and sexual liberation go hand in hand. Now, Domenach agreed that this was a misunderstanding and that affirming a purely instinctual idea of freedom (“a vague notion of nature,” another stab at Marcuse) was “utopian and ineffectual.” On his part, Del Noce viewed the sexual revolution as part of the post-Marxist bourgeois culture, because under the cover of “freedom” it actually affirmed an individualistic and fundamentally irreligious view of man as producer and consumer, in which the human body lost its symbolic dimension to become an instrument of “well-being” and an object of trade. The left’s failure to grasp this development had created a paradoxical situation, which Del Noce describes as follows:

If by “right” we mean faithfulness to the spirit of tradition, meaning the tradition that talks about an uncreated order of values, which are grasped though intellectual intuition and are independent of any arbitrary will, not even the divine one; and if by “left” we mean, on the contrary, the rejection not merely of certain historical superstructures but of those very values, which are “unmasked” to show their true nature as oppressive ideologies, imposed by the dominant classes in order to protect themselves, well, then it seems that in no other historical period has the left advanced so dramatically as during the last quarter of a century…. And yet, one has to say that Domenach is right: if by “right” we mean “management technique at the service of the strongest,” regardless of what ideologies are used to justify this management, we have to say that its victory has never been so complete, because it has been able to turn completely the culture of the left into its own tool.

Moreover, Del Noce viewed Domenach’s statement that Being “must be affirmed as an order of values” as a welcome change from a long-standing attitude of progressive Catholicism. Since the 1950s, left-wing Catholics had argued that what is needed to dialogue with the secular world is “a philosophically neutral left, guided only by the ethical presupposition of the equal dignity of every human person” and therefore “politics, metaphysics, and religion must be kept rigorously distinguished.” Now, by admitting the need for some “idea of man and of his life in community,” Domenach was recognizing that in human societies ethics always reflects an “ontology,” a vision of humanity and its place in the universe, usually based on a mythical historical narrative, or on explicit philosophical and religious foundations. Conversely, if ethics is affirmed in an ontological vacuum, without simultaneously affirming a clear and explicit “idea of man,” it loses traction. This has been, arguably, the experience of politically engaged Catholics, both in Europe and in the United States, during the past fifty years: a long series of rear-guard battles on ethical issues (divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, etc.) in a cultural context in which the philosophical and religious images (of human life, of marriage, of love) that underpinned those ethical values has faded. As a consequence, little can be gained by producing more comprehensive ethical lists, such as a “consistent ethics of life.” Ethical appeals not backed by “Being” are destined either to fall on deaf ears, as expressions of personal religious preferences, or to develop into moralistic ideologies (think of “political correctness”) backed by the will to power.