What Is Christian Democracy? Politics, Religion and Ideology. By Accetti, Carlo Invernizzi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 396 p. $120.00 cloth.

What Is Christian Democracy? Politics, Religion and Ideology. By Accetti Carlo Invernizzi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 396 p. $120.00 cloth.

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...