The recording of the public lecture titled “From Christian Democracy to Christian Autocracy” organized on April 1, 2025, at the CEU Democracy Institute is now available on AUTHLIB’s YouTube channel.
The talk by Professor Jan-Werner Müller (Princeton University) revisits three distinct strategies through which political thinkers tried to reconcile religion, in particular Catholicism, and modern democracy. It covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it also suggests that the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of two strands of thought that might resemble elements of those older strategies: Christian identitarian populism and soft versions of integralism. The talk offers a number of reasons as to why these new strands of thought in fact betray the proper traditions of Christian Democracy.
Jan-Werner Müller is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the Founding Director of the Project in the History of Political Thought. He works mainly in democratic theory and the history of modern political thought; he also has a research interest in the relationship between architecture and politics, as well as the normative implications of the current structural transformations of the public sphere. Publications include Constitutional Patriotism (2007) and What is Populism? (2016), which has been translated into more than twenty languages. 2019 saw the publication of Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus, which won the Bavarian Book Prize. 2021 saw the publication of Democracy Rules by FSG in the US and Penguin in the UK. His public affairs commentary and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, the New York Times, and Project Syndicate.
