What is the most important political ideology that has escaped the attention of political philosophers? Christian Democracy would be a strong contender for this distinction. And Carlo Invernizzi Accetti’s What Is Christian Democracy? seeks to fill that scholarly gap by answering three related questions. What ideas tie together the diverse political movements that come under the banner of Christian Democracy? How were these ideas reflected during a period that roughly extends from the end of World War II through the 1980s? What are the prospects for its relevance in the future? As these questions suggest, this book covers varied territory, employing an array of strategies to construct its answers. The second and third questions are important, but the analysis of Christian Democracy’s ideology is the intellectual heart of this sprawling monograph. Providing a fascinating overview of the main ideas of Christian Democracy, this work contends that it has a complex but coherent normative core. As Invernizzi Accetti is at pains to argue, the value of this recapitulation of Christian Democracy’s ideological roots is heightened by the paucity of theoretical analyses of Christian Democracy, relative to, say, socialism (an important exception here is the scholarship of Jan-Werner Müller).
In the first six chapters of the book, Invernizzi Accetti sketches an ideology for Christian Democracy. The chapters are an assemblage of ideas and quotations from a range of authors hailing from different countries, working during different periods, and facing different practical challenges. Some authors, such as the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, are consistent presences across several chapters, whereas other figures duck in and out without returning. Christian Democratic parties currently occupy a position on the right of the political spectrum, even while they have become defenders of the social welfare state and democratic practices. Shedding light on the intellectual foundations of the movement’s distinctive political positions, the topics of these chapters are of substantial interest. I especially appreciated the chapters elaborating the relationship between the movement’s religious and political commitments, the treatments of the movement’s philosophy of history, its limited embrace of popular sovereignty, and its view of religion’s place in political life. Each chapter reveals the complicated work of making orthodox religious ideas consistent with representative democracy. The latter half of the book contains a rapid overview of the movement’s history in Germany, France, and Italy; a sketch of the influence of Christian Democratic ideas on the institutions of the European Union; an analysis of Christian Democracy in the Americas; and, finally, an assessment of how our understanding of Christian Democracy could inform responses to populism. As this brief recapitulation suggests, this is a work of considerable ambition, covering a broad array of topics and providing numerous insights into a shaping element of European political life. And the book surely demonstrates the author’s impressive knowledge of this political movement and its history.
Notwithstanding its considerable value, the work’s ideal audience is unnecessarily constricted. Here are three reasons experts might not be fully engaged by the text. First, except for emphasizing the relative neglect of Christian Democracy, Invernizzi Accetti does not make fully evident the scholarly stakes of his analysis. No single argumentative thread pulls this work together, and it is not specified whose interpretation is wrong, misleading, or incomplete if the reader accepts that Christian Democracy possesses the ideological tendencies that Invernizzi Accetti describes. Second, Invernizzi Accetti refrains from critically evaluating the coherence of the ideas he discusses—perhaps limiting the normative implications that political theorists might draw from his interpretive work. Third, and finally, the second half of the work covers so many topics, employing so many different frames of analysis, that I fear the arguments it advances will not persuade the best-informed readers. For instance, Invernizzi Accetti suggests that his analysis of Christian Democracy’s influence on the creation of the European Union will not describe why European institutions have the shape they do or the actual activities of those who contributed to the establishment of the EU, but is instead intended to serve as a heuristic for interpreting EU institutions. It was not clear to this reader why this “heuristic” approach ought to be preferred to one that explains why those institutions arose and how particular actors put them to work.
Similarly, this book may not serve as an effective, general introduction to Christian Democracy. Principally, this has to do with the methodology used to describe the movement’s ideology. Invernizzi Accetti employs the approach familiar from Michael Freeden’s work on political ideology. Consistent with the goal of pulling together disparate figures and texts into a coherent ideology, specific authors and works are divorced from their context and presented together as if they were self-consciously elaborating a common idea. But there is a trade-off between formulating a coherent ideology in this way and confronting the differences among Christian Democrats. For instance, relatively little attention is paid to describing who the distinct authors were, the quite distinct circumstances in which they were speaking and writing, the distinct political conditions they faced, and the distinct ends they were seeking to achieve. For example, a reader familiar with the history of Christian Democracy may know Chantel Delsol and Nadia Urbinati, but they are not introduced. And the unversed might miss the fact that the former is a Catholic political philosopher and an ostensible voice of Christian Democracy in France, whereas the latter is a prominent democratic theorist at Columbia University in the United States and someone I believe the reader is not intended to treat as an exemplar of Christian Democratic thought. These limitations mean that one might have qualms about recommending this book to a student unfamiliar with the key actors in the intellectual story of Christian Democracy.
Despite these concerns, this book makes a significant contribution, offering a smart reconstruction of a powerful political movement’s ideology. What Is Christian Democracy? will therefore be of interest to anyone seeking to comprehend the parlous state of European party politics.
