What Is Christian Democracy?: Politics, Religion and Ideology

Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.


About the Author
Invernizzi Accetti, Carlo: - Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City College, City University of New York and Associate Researcher at the Center for European Studies of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). He is the author of Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes (2015) and Techno-populism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (co-authored with Christopher Bickerton, forthcoming).