The International Political Thought of Luigi Sturzo in the United States

The Italian priest, politician and sociologist Luigi Sturzo developed a distinctive form of Catholic internationalism during his exile in the United States (1940–6). Sturzo, a major political figure in European social Catholicism, founded in 1919 the Partito Popolare Italiano . During the war, he argued that Catholicism provided the moral and theoretical toolkit for constructing a vision of a democratic post-war world in which persons and communities could live in peace and prosperity. Focusing on two books that Sturzo published in English, this study argues that his vision of democracy beyond the nation-state was based on pluralism, federalism and popular participation. As a religiously grounded alternative to liberal and socialist visions, Sturzo’s internationalism highlights how moral and political arguments were intertwined in imagining democracy on a global scale.