Jan-Werner Muller - From Christian Democracy to Christian Autocracy

A public lecture organized under the project AUTHLIB: Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response (April 1, 2025). Jan-Werner Müller is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He works mainly in democratic theory and the history of modern political thought; he also has research interests in the relationship between architecture and politics, as well as the normative implications of the current structural transformations of the public sphere. The talk revisited three distinct strategies through which political thinkers have attempted to reconcile religion—particularly Catholicism—with modern democracy. It focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while also suggesting that the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of two strands of thought that echo elements of those earlier strategies: Christian identitarian populism and softer versions of integralism. The talk offered several reasons why these contemporary strands in fact betray the core traditions of Christian Democracy. The event took place in the framework of the project “AUTHLIB – Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response” funded by the European Union and the UK Research and Innovation.  Learn more: https://www.ceu.edu/ https://democracyinstitute.ceu.edu/ https://www.authlib.eu/ Central European University is an institution of advanced research and teaching, dedicated to socially and morally responsible intellectual inquiry. More from CEU: Home https://www.ceu.edu/ Facebook   / weareceu   Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/weareceu.bsk... Instagram   / weareceu   LinkedIn   / central-european-university   Threads https://www.threads.net/@weareceu Subscribe for more videos:    / centraleuropeanuniversitychannel