What Was Christian Democracy?
This is the—perhaps somewhat provocative—title of this year's Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture, named after the eponymous Czech philosopher, whose work has been integral to the Institute’s mission since its inception. We are honored to welcome political philosopher and Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller as this year's speaker. In his lecture on 11 December 2025, Müller will examine what remains of a family of thought that seems to have almost entirely lost its status as an integrative force in society.
Christian democracy has played a fundamental role in shaping European politics after World War II. In his lecture, Jan-Werner Müller will explore the historical developments leading to the formation of this ideology that reconciles Catholicism and modern democracy, focusing on a number of philosophers and political figures. Müller will pose the question if anything remains of Christian democracy today; he will also ask how two recent strands of thought—on the one hand, populism; on the other, the ideologies usually grouped under the label of “post-liberalism”—relate to Christian democracy, whose legacy is claimed by representatives of both strands.
Jan-Werner Müller is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences at Princeton University, where he also leads the Program in Political Philosophy. From 1996 until 2003, he was a fellow at the University of Oxford’s All Souls College, before moving to St. Antony’s College, where he held a fellowship at the European Studies Centre until 2005. Müller is also co-founder of the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin, for which he served as founding research director. His recent publications include What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019), and Democracy Rules (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2021). 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.
Welcome remarks will be given by IWM Rector Misha Glenny. IWM Permanent Fellow Ludger Hagedorn will moderate the event, which will begin at 18:00 CET in the IWM library.
To register, please click here.
You can watch last year's Patočka Memorial Lecture by Axel Honneth here:
The IWM Jan Patočka Memorial Lecture honors the legacy of Czech thinker Jan Patočka (1907-1977), who was a co-founder and spokesman of the civil rights movement Charter 77 and is widely considered one of the most important modern philosophers in Central Europe. His works have been researched and published at the Institute for Human Sciences since the 1980s. The lecture series was inaugurated by Hans-Georg Gadamer in 1987 and is taking place for the 36th time this year. Previous speakers include esteemed scholars like Nancy Fraser, Lord Dahrendorf, Edward W. Said, Martin Walser, Albert O. Hirschman, François Furet, Jacques Derrida, Leszek Kołakowski, Chantal Mouffe, Aleida Assmann, and Axel Honneth.
Photo of Jan-Werner Müller © Tor Birk Trads/Information
