What is Christian Democracy?


Book Description

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.




Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States


Book Description

This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socio-economic interests (e.g. religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class-coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, on the other hand, allowed only for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the US or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs.




Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain


Book Description

This book is the first scholarly exploration of how Christian Democracy kept Cold War Europe’s eastern and western halves connected after the creation of the Iron Curtain in the late 1940s. Christian Democrats led the transnational effort to rebuild the continent’s western half after World War II, but this is only one small part of the story of how the Christian Democratic political family transformed Europe and defied the nascent Cold War’s bipolar division of the world. The first section uses case studies from the origins of European integration to reimagine Christian Democracy’s long-term significance for a united Europe. The second shifts the focus to East-Central Europeans, some exiled to Western Europe, some to the USA, others remaining in the Soviet Bloc as dissidents. The transnational activism they pursued helped to ensure that, Iron Curtain or no, the boundary between Europe’s west and east remained permeable, that the Cold War would not last and that Soviet attempts to divide the continent permanently would fail. The book’s final section features the testimony of three key protagonists. This book appeals to a wide range of audiences: undergraduate and graduate students, established scholars, policymakers (in Europe and the Americas) and potentially also general readerships interested in the Cold War or in the future of Europe.




Interest Groups in Italian Politics


Book Description

The author examines both structurally and functionally the General Confederation of Italian Industry, Italian Catholic Action, the Christian Democrats, the Italian Liberal Party, the monarchist Italian Republican Party, the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement, and many more interest groups. The book is based on several years of field research in Italy, including interviews with scores of political figures, bureaucrats, and interest group leaders. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.







The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Italian Politics provides a comprehensive look at the political life of one of Europe's most exciting and turbulent democracies. Under the hegemonic influence of Christian Democracy in the early post-World War II decades, Italy went through a period of rapid growth and political transformation. In part this resulted in tumult and a crisis of governability; however, it also gave rise to innovation in the form of Eurocommunism and new forms of political accommodation. The great strength of Italy lay in its constitution; its great weakness lay in certain legacies of the past. Organized crime--popularly but not exclusively associated with the mafia--is one example. A self-contained and well entrenched 'caste' of political and economic elites is another. These weaknesses became apparent in the breakdown of political order in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This ushered in a combination of populist political mobilization and experimentation with electoral systems design, and the result has been more evolutionary than transformative. Italian politics today is different from what it was during the immediate post-World War II period, but it still shows many of the influences of the past.




Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine


Book Description

Winner of the 2017 Alpha Sigma Nu Award The collapse of communism in eastern Europe has forced traditionally Eastern Orthodox countries to consider the relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy. Contributors examine the influence of Constantinianism in both the post-communist Orthodox world and in Western political theology. Constructive theological essays feature Catholic and Protestant theologians reflecting on the relationship between Christianity and democracy, as well as Orthodox theologians reflecting on their tradition’s relationship to liberal democracy. The essays explore prospects of a distinctively Christian politics in a post-communist, post-Constantinian age.




Modern Italy's Founding Fathers


Book Description

Modern Italy's Founding Fathers offers a fresh perspective on the genesis of the Italian republic as viewed through the efforts of its three most influential leaders: Christian Democrat Alcide De Gasperi, Socialist Pietro Nenni and Communist Palmiro Togliatti. In concise, accessible prose, this work demonstrates how De Gasperi – the Republic's inaugural prime minister from 1945 to 1953 – and his fellow statesmen's shared experience of Fascist oppression, belief in popular sovereignty, and ability to compromise despite deep ideological differences, enabled the creation of Italy's post-war republic. This path-breaking collective biography traces the genesis of the Italian republic, commencing with the overthrow of Mussolini in 1943 and concluding with the death of De Gasperi in 1954. Drawing on the speeches, writings and personal papers of the three protagonists, on Italian and U.S. archives, on contemporary memoirs and on secondary scholarship, Steven F. White demonstrates how these leaders forged political practices and customs which continue to define Italian parliamentary life to the present day. Examining the interplay of personalities, leadership styles, ideas and political context, this study is a vital text for any student of modern Italy and, more broadly, of Cold War Europe.




Christianity and American Democracy


Book Description

Exploring the tension at the heart of America’s culture wars, this is “a very fine book on a very important subject” (Mark A. Noll, author of The Civil War as a Theological Crisis). Christianity, not religion in general, has been important for American democracy. With this bold thesis, Hugh Heclo offers a panoramic view of how Christianity and democracy have shaped each other. Heclo shows that amid deeply felt religious differences, a Protestant colonial society gradually convinced itself of the truly Christian reasons for, as well as the enlightened political advantages of, religious liberty. By the mid-twentieth century, American democracy and Christianity appeared locked in a mutual embrace. But it was a problematic union vulnerable to fundamental challenge in the Sixties. Despite the subsequent rise of the religious right and glib talk of a conservative Republican theocracy, Heclo sees a longer-term, reciprocal estrangement between Christianity and American democracy. Responding to his challenging argument, Mary Jo Bane, Michael Kazin, and Alan Wolfe criticize, qualify, and amend it. Heclo’s rejoinder suggests why both secularists and Christians should worry about a coming rupture between the Christian and democratic faiths. The result is a lively debate about a momentous tension in American public life.




Schooling in Modernity


Book Description

Between 1948 and the end of the 1950s, Italian and American government agencies and corporations commissioned hundreds of short films for domestic and foreign consumption on topics such as the fight against unemployment, the transformation of rural and urban spaces, and the re-establishment of democratic regimes in Italy and throughout Europe. In Schooling in Modernity, Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which these sponsored films promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people. The author uses extensive archival research and various theoretical approaches to examine the politics of sponsored filmmaking in postwar Italy. Among the many topics explored are target audiences and audience response, sources of funding, censorship, debates on cinematic realism, and the connections and differences between American and Italian strategies and styles of documentary filmmaking. Insightful and richly detailed, Schooling in Modernity shows the importance of these under-appreciated films in the postwar modernization process, the transition from Fascism to democracy, and Italy’s involvement in the Cold War.