Until relatively recently, it was customary to begin academic studies of Christian Democracy by lamenting the fact that this topic had not yet been adequately examined, despite its undeniable historical importance. Over the course of the past decade or so, this gap in the literature has begun to be more satisfactorily filled. A number of valuable studies have explored the trajectory of this political force, from historical, politological, philosophical and anthropological perspectives.
An even more recent development is that academic studies of Christian Democracy have begun to become more internally diversified, focusing on specific historical and/or geographical contexts. The two books reviewed here demonstrate that research on the Italian variant of Christian Democracy has now reached maturity too. These are both excellent, landmark books.
Their writers are prominent scholars who have already published extensively on this topic. They therefore bring authority, but also a deep knowledge of their subjects, to these works. Guido Formigoni, Paolo Pombeni and Giorgio Vecchio are among the most illustrious historians of modern and contemporary Italy, having curated some of the reference books in this domain. Their more recent, joint feat can therefore be seen as a sort of ‘summa’ of the accumulated historical knowledge on the Christian Democratic party in Italy, even though their work also relies on important new archival research that has become accessible to historians only recently.
Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen belong to a younger generation of scholars of Christian Democracy, a generation that is both more international and more interdisciplinary. It therefore deserves much credit for the recent efflorescence of academic work on Christian Democracy, not just as a niche topic within specific national or disciplinary sectors, but as a stand-alone field of research, with important ramifications for other fields of research and academic disciplines.
The comparison between the two books is particularly interesting because it offers a cross-section of the differences – but also the fruitful complementarities – between the traditional (I am tempted to say ‘old school’) Italian approach to historiography and the types of work that are now being produced out of the encounter between local histories and international academic debates, primarily in English.
Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio's book is over 700 pages long and focuses almost exclusively on the 50 years of the Italian Christian Democratic party's lifespan: from 1943 to 1993. Based on painstaking archival research, it is characterised by a capillary attention to detail on a year-to-year, sometimes even day-to-day, basis. Just the footnotes section at the end covers over 100 pages and is a real treasure trove of primary sources and secondary bibliography, even though virtually all of the works cited are restricted to what is available in the Italian language.
Forlenza and Thomassen's book is around 250 pages long and covers a much more ample historical period: from the French Revolution to the present day. It is also not focused exclusively on the experience of the Italian Christian Democratic party, but on the broader social and cultural phenomenon, which the authors refer to – borrowing a term from Michel Foucault – as a ‘political spirituality’. Without sacrificing historical rigour, its historical and conceptual lenses are therefore much larger, putting the book in more explicit dialogue with other classical and contemporary works on the nature of modernity, the role of religion within it, and normative discussions on the future of democratic politics in Italy and beyond.
On the substance of the historical reconstructions offered, there are not many disagreements between the two books. Despite the difference in the periods considered, both tell a story of discontinuous evolution within broadly established parameters, thereby reconciling the conceptual unity of their object of study with its significant internal diversification. In the period prior to the current bloom of academic works on Christian Democracy, it was common to dismiss this political tradition as a merely residual ‘phenomenon of the centre’, without any properly distinctive political identity. These two books convincingly demonstrate that this is not the case: throughout most of the twentieth century (and arguably even before), there has been an evolving political tradition in Italy, characterised by a common set of theoretical and political values, but also by a continuity of actors and institutions. It is therefore a legitimate object of study in its own right, despite important internal raptures and conflicts.
The main conceptual tool used by both books to perform this reconciliation between unity and internal differentiation of their object of study is drawn from the self-characterisation of many of the actors considered themselves: that is, the idea that the trajectory of Italian Christian Democracy can be broadly periodised in terms of three ‘generations’ of both actors and political projects. The first generation of Italian Christian Democrats was forged in the wake of the traumatic rupture between the Catholic Church and the formation of the unitary Italian state during the second half of the nineteenth century, specifically around a project of reintroducing religiously observant citizens within the framework of national politics after the Vatican effectively lifted its ban on any such engagement in the lead-up to the Great War. Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959) and Alcide De Gasperi (1881–1954) are two of the most well-known exponents of this first generation of Italian Christian Democrats.
The second generation was instead forged by the experience of the Fascist regime and especially its catastrophic collapse following its rapprochement with German National Socialism and their joint defeat in the Second World War. After having initially nurtured hopes of taking advantage of the Fascist experiment to pursue a project of ‘re-Christianisation of society’, several politically active Catholics born in the first two decades of the twentieth century – such as Giuseppe Dossetti (1913–96), Aldo Moro (1916–78) and Amintore Fanfani (1908–99) – grew progressively disillusioned with totalitarianism and rediscovered democracy as a more adequate means to further Christian values within the framework of modernity.
The third and last generation of Italian Christian Democrats – whose exponents include Ciriaco De Mita (1928–2022) and Arnaldo Forlani (1925–2023) – came of age after the formation of the Italian Republic in 1945 and therefore lacked the two formative experiences of rupture between Catholicism and democracy of the previous decades: the Vatican's ban on political participation and the Fascist regime. They were instead far more marked by the processes of secularisation and societal modernisation that were set in motion, in no small part, by the Christian Democratic party's own success at reconciling Catholicism and democracy in the aftermath of the Second World War. For this reason, they were less attached to the project of reasserting Christian principles and values within a democratic context, which lay at the heart of the previous two generations of Italian Christian Democrats. This fact is identified by both books as one of the main reasons for the party's progressive loss of distinctiveness beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, up to its ultimate demise at the beginning of the 1990s.
The underlying thesis common to both books is therefore that Italian Christian Democracy was held together by a specific historical problem, which emerged recurrently over the course of the country's troubled history in the past century and a half: that of finding a place for Christianity within the framework of modern democracy. Paradoxically, it was the very success of this endeavour that ultimately led to its demise, because, as Stathis Kalyvas has already pointed out in his seminal work on the emergence of Christian Democratic parties in Europe, the ‘Christianisation of democracy’ decisively contributed to the ‘secularisation of politics’.
The conceptual labels used by the two books to name this unifying historical ‘essence’ of Italian Christian Democracy are slightly different. Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio rely on the notion of the ‘Christian inspiration of politics’, which was also explicitly used by the Italian Christian Democratic party itself to describe its political identity. The core idea here is to trace a ‘middle course’ between the rigorous separation of religion from politics characteristic of liberal secularism and the earlier affirmation of a direct supremacy of religion over politics, which still informed the Catholic doctrine of intransigentism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Religion and politics are thereby conceived as separate domains, but the former is construed as a repository of ‘vivifying principles and values’ that are supposed to inform action in the latter.
Forlenza and Thomassen break from their primary sources and apply the Foucauldian concept of ‘political spirituality’ to the experience of Italian Christian Democracy. In so doing, they aim to place greater emphasis on the re-inscription of a horizon of ‘transcendence’ within the framework of a modern (and distinctively democratic) register of thought and action. The move is interesting because it broadens the historical significance of Italian Christian Democracy's most distinctive intellectual innovation, putting it in dialogue with other theological and philosophical debates on the nature of modernity itself and on the place of transcendence within it. In my opinion, however, it also comes at a cost, which is to dilute the distinctiveness and originality of Foucault's own concept by separating it from the very specific context of origin in relation to which he coined it – that is, the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1979.
I suspect that this is one of the instances in which ‘old school’ historians such as Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio might find Forlenza and Thomassen's greater theoretical daring problematic. Which is not to say that history and theory should – or even can – be kept entirely apart. Description and interpretation exist on a continuum and reciprocally presuppose one another, so the differences between Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio's book, on the one hand, and Forlenza and Thomassen's, on the other, are ultimately more a matter of emphasis than of kind. And it is precisely for this reason that I think it is worth reading them together: what one offers in terms of historical detail and rigour, the other complements in terms of theoretical insight and ambition, with both nonetheless proving to be adequately conversant in the other's areas of strength.
Beyond this interesting contrast there is the more mundane fact that, because of its sheer size and source-driven approach, Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio's book touches on a number of other topics and themes that are not really addressed by Forlenza and Thomassen: for instance, the question of the Italian Christian Democratic party's relationship to the Italian state. The complex dynamics of a ‘partito di governo’ – that is, of a political party that aspired to and in some regards was even compelled to govern by both domestic and international factors throughout virtually all of its existence – were, of course, another key determinant of the Christian Democratic party's political identity. Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio carefully reconstruct how this forced the party to constantly balance demands for social change (and restoration) coming from Italy's extraordinarily conflictual society with an orientation towards national unity and institutional stability, in creative and often precarious ways.
Something similar can also be said of the Italian Christian Democracy's dense network of international relations with other European (and non-European) political parties, actors and organisations of similar persuasion, which, as is well known, played a key role in driving the process of European integration from the very beginning. This set of dynamics is extensively explored by Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio, including from the point of view of its impact on the internal power struggles and ideological realignments within the Italian Christian Democratic party itself. In contrast, this subject falls largely out of the purview of Forlenza and Thomassen's analysis.
The upshot, therefore, is that there is still work to be done on the historical experience of Italian Christian Democracy. Nonetheless, these two important books provide an invaluable starting point, for different reasons. Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio's book will be a cornerstone for all future work on this topic due to the comprehensive mass of historical information and insight it has managed to collect and synthetically order. Forlenza and Thomassen's book is a model for the kind of more theoretically informed interpretation that has not yet been carried out with respect to those aspects of the Italian Christian Democratic historical experience that Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio do not consider.
