The so-called “Sixty-eight” period is generally remembered as the broad era during which the courage to rebel - especially through student mobilizations - initiated processes of change in behaviours and mentalities of the time, destined to have a positive influence on the future. The line of thought inspiring the insurgents was mostly akin to the philosophy of the Frankfurt School, specifically the ideas of Herbert Marcuse: in those years, the fight against what the author called a “one-dimensional culture” and a “false freedom” - both products of consumerism and technological industrial development -was supported by all means. Amid these youth protests, a thinker emerged whose complex intellectual trajectory embodied the era's frictions. This was Armando Plebe, initially a Marxist author who later moved to the opposite side, completely distancing himself from the revolutionary vision and describing tumults as “the obligatory refuge of all the cowardly and the lazy.”
The author was born in Alessandria in 1927, graduated in Philosophy from the University of Turin, and later obtained another degree in Philosophy from the University of Innsbruck. His academic career was far from straightforward: after teaching at the University of Perugia from 1957, in 1962 he settled in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Palermo as a tenured professor of the same subject, eventually becoming director of the Institute of the Faculty of Arts. Known even beyond national borders, he collaborated with various international cultural journals, including the “Wiener Zeitschrift für Philosophie” and “Voprosy Filosofii” of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The most ambiguous, yet intriguing, aspect of his biography undoubtedly concerns his controversial political journey, an orientation he described in his own words: “I follow Horace’s verse ‘I hate the crowd and keep away from it.’ Only in this am I a man of the right.” The “roaring years” of student mobilizations had led the “furious” left to commit, in his eyes, an unforgivable mistake: to mislead Marxist thought itself. His distancing from those currents already appeared with the publication, in 1967, of the work “What Marx Really Said,” in which Plebe observed, “All the communists pretended to know Capital, but in reality, very few had, not to say read, but even leafed through it [...].” Only after the clashes of ’68 did the author realize the only way to separate from those visions, unconscious of the true communist themes: from the PCI, Plebe found himself joining Giorgio Almirante’s Italian Social Movement, where he continued his political journey, being elected senator of the Republic in the 1972 and 1976 elections. He clarified that his joining the far-right party did not represent an ideological conversion; rather, it was driven by a desire to fight against “anti-culture,” present both in its “Sixty-eight” forms and in collectivist variants. Even though in “Memoirs of the Left and Memoirs of the Right” he referred to illustrious figures like Galvano della Volpe or Theodor Adorno in a derogatory manner, his thought can still be described as that of an “Enlightenment materialist,” whose only declared goal was to become “the one who would bring culture to the right.” Abandoning political activity in 1979, he continued his academic career until he died in Rome in 2017.
The review by Piero Violante, distinguished political scientist and journalist from the University of Palermo, published in “La Repubblica” regarding Armando Plebe’s famous 1971 essay “Philosophy of Reaction,” is particularly harsh: “His cult book [...] is only [...] a skillful counterfeiting of Frankfurt themes advocating a third way beyond capitalism and socialism, awkwardly adapted to reaction.” Despite these harsh words, the book fits into the intellectual landscape of those times as a scandalous provocation against what the author himself would describe as a “new dictatorship,” the will to insurrection, as well as against a leftist culture, then the majority, proposing an alternative solution that is absolutely not a middle ground between conservatism and revolution, which not only finds its own theoretical justification but also proves easily applicable in practice.
How can the term “reaction” actually be defined? In the syllables of the word, Plebe reads a redefinition as “recovery of meanings”: an action equally intended to distance oneself from the useless practice animating the angry minds of the “Sixty-eighters,” to instead orient oneself towards a knowledge and analysis that would undo rhetoric and conformism. “In reality, ‘reaction’ only means ‘to act in response to something’; and in this sense, natural history teaches that reaction usually not only does not follow but precedes and prepares action.” Plebe shows that being “reactionary” is a “maison intolérable,” an infamous accusation to the point that, according to the author’s own definition, it becomes the “most feared, most unspeakable, and most secretly operative taboo of humanity.” This conclusion reveals how the concept of “re-action” has undergone a profound evolution over the course of history. Its power to scandalize stems from the intellectual maturity of those who embrace it, ultimately making it a central subject of philosophical inquiry. In the preface of the essay, the concept is referred to as “the struggle against the death instinct,” specifying “that the death instinct is conjugated to the future perfect”: the problem of the student mentality of the 1960s-70s remains that “perversion of time” for which the present should be a mere preparation for an imagined future, without truly living the historical moment, but surviving to ensure a more congenial ‘after.’
“Reaction” thus becomes the philosophy of those who wish to guide themselves on a solitary path against the obsession with the past (History with a capital H, where all conservatives want to take refuge) and the future (the enchanted kingdom of revolutionaries), to instead enjoy the present, the “today.” Plebe does not intend to propose the “third way” advocated by right-wing ideals, but rather to be the spokesman for the difference between the rational analysis characterizing the reactionary concept and the absurdity of every other direction taken by the two opposing currents. This describes a position that can equally be interpreted as extreme, but not illusory: on the one hand for its closeness to “Aristotelian” ideology, in which practice is understood as φρόνησις (“prudence” or “practical wisdom”); on the other, for the caution and reflection behind practical activity, remaining in the vein of the Hellenic philosopher, from whom the author generally drew inspiration.
The conceptual trajectory outlined in “Philosophy of Reaction” is not exhausted by the mere chronicle of twentieth-century ideological debate but offers flexible analytical stimuli applicable to the dynamics of the contemporary landscape. In a current context dominated by technocratic and progressive narratives often lacking solid empirical verification, Plebe’s concept of “re-action” emancipates itself from its original political classification to present itself as a paradigm based on critical realism and the demystification of intellectual conformism. Plebe’s position thus becomes a methodological warning: the need for rational grounding in the present, which, rejecting both the sterile nostalgia of conservatism and the teleological illusion of revolutionism, claims prudence and theoretical understanding as primary tools for interpretation and guidance in practice.
Mondo Internazionale APS - Riproduzione Riservata ® 2026