Born in Ferrara on 25 June 1898, he attended the Ariosto High School. Between 1916 and 1920 he frequented the cultural environment that revolved around the figure of Count Luigi Tibertelli, namely Filippo De Pisis, among others: Alberto Savinio and Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carrà, Giuseppe Ungaretti. In July 1920 he graduated in law. Thanks to the common master Alessandro Levi, full professor of philosophy of law who had influenced him so much in Ferrara, he met Carlo and Nello Rosselli who introduced him to the Circolo di Cultura di Firenze headed by Gaetano Salvemini.

In April 1923 he made his debut as a journalist in "La rivoluzione liberale", the Turin weekly by Piero Gobetti, with an article entitled "The Blind Giant", on the factors that allowed the rise of Fascism: the title is, according to Ascoli, the affirmation of Fascism is due to the lack of capacity of traditional political formations, and above all of Socialism, to translate and make young people understand the meaning of democracy and freedom. He also collaborated with "Non mollare", the first clandestine anti-fascist leaflet in Italy born in the Rosselli house in January 1925, and with "Il quarto Stato", a weekly founded in 1926 in Milan by Carlo Rosselli and Pietro Nenni.

In 1924 he moved to Rome also to evade the attention of the police who monitored him as an anti-fascist and socialist.

In the second half of the 1920s, Ascoli resumed contacts with the academic environment, obtained free teaching and in 1928 covered the teaching of philosophy of law and civil law institutions at the Free University of Camerino. In the same year he was arrested for activities against the regime. He was supposed to join the PNF (National Fascist Party), but refused and was therefore judged by the Special Court, which sentenced him to two years of forced domicile with the consequent loss of his position in Camerino. It was the end of his academic career in Italy.

Already in the early months of 1931 Ascoli made contact with Luigi Einaudi, head of Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation, and in October he accepted a scholarship at the New School of Social Research in New York, where two years later he became a professor of political philosophy; thus began his American exile. Ascoli pursued his academic career with a growing commitment to the protection of exiles from fascism and other totalitarian regimes, working through the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship program specifically for the rescue of European exiles, the American Law School Association, the Emergency Rescue Committee, the Emergency Committee for the aid of displaced scholars. He was also active in the Mazzini Society, created in 1939 by Italian exiles with the aim of enhancing and spreading the values of the liberal tradition of the Risorgimento: during his presidency – until 1943 – the organisation's programme became countering the fifth column of fascism among Italians who emigrated to America. Hence his collaboration, starting in 1941, with Nelson Rockefeller in the creation and activities of the Bureau of Latin American Research with the aim of countering the penetration of totalitarian ideologies in Latin American communities.

The years from 1940 to 1949 were the preparation ground for his last project: the foundation of the magazine "The Reporter". Having among its collaborators and readers authoritative intellectuals, important representatives of the government and the main media, in the 50s and 60s "The Reporter" managed to exercise a certain power in determining the US domestic and foreign political agenda and represents an authoritative voice in defence of civil rights, without forgetting the immediate and significant opposition to McCarthyism. The magazine also played an important role in the tradition of American investigative journalism. Since 1963, however, the increasingly clear support for the Johnson administration and the war in Vietnam had alienated the sympathies of the most influential American liberal circles. The end of this editorial adventure can be traced in a complex interweaving of external and internal factors: financial difficulties, shift of the magazine to the right, loss of vitality of the editorial line, not to mention the age of Max Ascoli who cannot find a suitable successor to the position of editor. The last issue of "The Reporter" was published on 13 June 1968.

In recent years Ascoli has dedicated himself to the drafting of some texts: the most important is the book provisionally entitled "The revolt against freedom", a denunciation against the new left, the anti-war movement, the Free speech movement and Black power. He died on 1 January 1978 in New York at the age of 79.

As evidenced by his visits and frequent post-war returns, Max Ascoli remained deeply attached to his homeland. One of the most tangible proofs of this link with Ferrara was in 1947 the donation of the Ophthalmology Pavilion to the Sant'Anna Arcispedale in memory of his mother Adriana: a 72-seater facility fully equipped with state-of-the-art instruments, with clinics, laboratories and operating rooms. The new clinic was inaugurated in May 1950.