 Toniolo defended the importance of religious values in politics and economics despite some Christians shunning politics due to the masonic and anti-clerical elements who had helped for Italian unification in 1860.Toniolo developed theories of social teaching which formed a middle path between the laissez-faire economics (the Adam Smith proposal; one that Camillo Benso advocated as did Vilfredo Pareto) and the state-centered socialism that followers of Karl Marx proposed and advocated.In 1889 he founded the Catholic Union for Social Studies and later founded the International Review of Social Sciences in 1893.