Educare alla democrazia. Luigi Giussani e la democrazia (1950-1970)

The political and social thought of Luigi Giussani – founder of the international Catholic movement of Communion and Liberation – was often described, in the 1980s, as antithetical to a democratic conception and identified, on the contrary, with a form of neo-theocracy directly descended from what would have been the «religious intransigentism» of the experience of Gioventù Studentesca (GS) first, and of Communion and Liberation later. This essay reconstructs the development of the reflections of Luigi Giussani and the students of Gioventù Studentesca on democracy between the 1950s and 1960s, returning a novel picture compared to the one outlined so far by a part of historiography.