Christianity and Political Thought: Augusto Del Noce and the Ideology of Christian Democracy in Post-War Italy

This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the twentieth century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic ‘modernity,’ bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy, and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is embedded within a larger aim to recognize attempts within Catholic philosophy to articulate an Italian political trajectory that does not simply accept the tale of a singular path to modernity based on the Enlightenment model, but instead tries to articulate an alternative vision of the modern, grounded within a transcendental perspective.