Instituting Catholic Modernity

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses the momentous turn in Italian politics signaled by the writing of the Constitution (which came into effect in 1948). It foregrounds one specific aspect of the Constitution: the way in which the Italian citizen became symbolically coded as a “person” and not as an individual, inspired by Catholic principles. The focus is therefore not so much on the legal dimension of citizenship, or the social consequences of the formulations adopted; it is instead on the underlying semantics and the wider symbolic universe that came to underpin the legal dimensions, trying to give Italy not only an institutional skeleton but also a “spiritual” underpinning, sustained by personalist, Catholic philosophy.