• 1 Based on a transnational perspective and including comparative studies on national cases from the (...)

1Recent historiography on historical corporatism has made it clear that the Portuguese corporatist system created by the Estado Novo (1932-1974) was a “real laboratory”1. A laboratory of ideas and institutions that were intensively disseminated throughout the world in the 1920s, and 1930s and, in some cases, beyond.

• 2 See A. Garrido and F. Rosas, Il Portogallo di Salazar. Politica, Società, Economia, Bologna, Bonon (...)

3As expected, fascist Italy acted as the main centre for the spread of corporatism. However, Portugal, with its authoritarian and corporatist regime that included features of fascism, was not limited to being a mere important and passive recipient of corporatist ideas and institutions2.

• 3 A. C. Pinto, O Estado Novo de Salazar, op. cit.

4In contrast to this schematic centre-periphery view, recent historiography has highlighted some examples of corporatist ideas and practices transferred from the Salazar regime to other centre-periphery dictatorships of Europe, as well as in Latin America. The spread of the Portuguese corporatist system and the influence of Salazarist ideas and political institutions in various countries were facilitated by the search for an “authoritarian third way” that would serve as an alternative to both communist socialism and liberalism3. This spread was particularly intense in contexts of political transition towards authoritarianism, but also in the context of established political regimes, and even in those that emerged from the collaboration with the invaders.

• 4 P. C. Schmitter, “Still the century of corporatism?”, in P. C. Schmitter and G. Lehmbruch ed., Tre (...)

7According to Philippe Schmitter’s classic definition, corporatism refers to a system of interest representation whose institutions are organised into a limited number of functionally distinct and hierarchical, compulsory and non-competitive categories. The state grants these categories a monopoly of representation in return for their cooperation in the exercise of social and political control4.

• 6 A. C. Pinto and F. Palomanes Martinho, Corporativismo e Ditaduras na Europa e na América Latina, L (...)

9Whatever the pattern of transfer of ideas or authoritarian institutional practices, it is clear that the common denominator of the transnational flows was social and political corporatism. One of the main vehicles for its dissemination was the Catholic movement, and that its intellectuals in various countries promoted a synthesis between fascist solutions and social-Catholic ideas. In Latin America, where the question of transnational and transatlantic processes of spreading corporatism have been comparatively studied6, it can be concluded that the spread of Salazar’s authoritarian and corporatist model was mainly ensured by conservative Catholicism and combined with elements of French integralist ideology.

• 7 V. Moreira, Auto-Regulação Profissional e Administração Pública, Porto Alegre, Livraria Almedina 1 (...)

10The concept of economic corporatism is less established and depends on the formulation of the doctrinaires themselves. However, these are analytical categories that may not stand up to historical scrutiny. At this level, the basic distinction should be binary: authoritarian corporatism and democratic corporatism or neo-corporatist systems of representation7.

• 8 Á. Garrido, Queremos uma Economia Nova! Estado Novo e Corporativismo, Porto Alegre, EDIPUCRS, 2018

14In previous work8, we have sought to show the extent to which the corporate institutions of the economy, or the apparatuses of economic intervention created within the framework of corporatist states, shared characteristics with other forms of institutionalisation of economic life during the interwar period. Given the nature of the institutions of regulation and intervention created by the Estado Novo to manage interests and reshape public-private relations, was the corporatist economy so different from the liberal capitalism of the nineteenth century that it promised to “regenerate”? While this rhetoric of the “new” is an important dimension in the study of corporatism, it requires a critique of the sources. When going through the doctrinal and legislative sources, it is not difficult to conclude that the apologia of the “new economy” is a central dimension of corporatist regimes, particularly when it comes to how economic life is organised.

• 9 M. Pasetti, L’Europa corporativa. Una storia transnazionale tra le due guerre mondiali, Bologna, B (...)

16As an idea in motion in a historical context of multiple crises, despite the diminished authenticity of its institutions and the deviations of its practice from the doctrine, corporatism has aroused international enthusiasm, reflected in countless publications, conferences, speeches and institutions9.

• 10 F. Rosas, Salazar e os Fascismos, Lisbon, Tinta da China, 2019, pp. 164-189.

18As an anti-democratic, anti-socialist and anti-liberal social doctrine – anti-liberal in the sense that it criticised the forms of political representation of 19th-century liberalism –, corporatism began as an instrument for eliminating free and autonomous class trade unions and severing its ideological links with revolutionary socialisms. Regardless of national specificities, the authoritarian and corporatist solution to the “social question” was the main priority of the corporatists, their essential common element10.

• 11 J. M. B. Brandão de Brito, A Industrialização Portuguesa no pós-guerra, 1948-1965. O Condicionamen (...)
• 12 C. Bastien and J. L. Cardoso, “From homo economicus to homo corporativus: A neglected critique of (...)

20Following the warnings of authors such as José Maria Brandão de Brito11 and Carlos Bastien and José Luis Cardoso12, we should first distinguish between “corporatist economy”, a very common concept in corporatist doctrinal sources, and “economics of corporatism”, a theoretical concept that comes from political economy and the history of economic ideas.

• 13 Ibid.

21The formulations of the doctrinaires themselves and contemporary corporatist theory still strongly influence the definition of the concept of economic corporatism. Its common feature with previous theoretical categories is organicism and the opposition between the homo corporativus, driven by national interest and supposedly common values, and the homo economicus, the prototype of liberal capitalism13. The idea of an ontological break with the ethical foundations of liberal capitalism, often put forward by corporatists, has its roots precisely in this theme of doctrinal rhetoric. According to this tautology, rehabilitating corporatism would be a necessary and imperative stage in the historical process. This “civilisational achievement” required a new ethic of economic activity based on state regulation of competition, economic interventionism and the authoritarian institutionalisation of interests. In the corporatist doctrine arguments, overcoming laisser-faire implied the construction of an authoritarian state and a “new social order”.

• 14 J. M. B. Brandão de Brito, op. cit., pp. 33-66.

24From a doctrinal point of view, the adaptation of some Italian authors of “corporatist economy”, especially Ugo Spirito, by far the best known in Portugal, served to express a critique of neoclassical economics, associated with liberalism and the abstract notion of homo economicus, in order to legitimise state interventionism14. A “new economy”, based on state criteria and corporatist organisation as an institutional form of directed economy, was to oppose the neoclassical principles of spontaneous market equilibrium and free competition.

• 15 C. Bastien, “A importação de ideias económicas numa sociedade semiperiférica: uma refelexão sobre (...)

25As C. Bastien highlighted, after 1933, once the corporatist Constitution of the Estado Novo was approved, the theoretical model of the corporatist economy became dominant in Portugal15. Both in state institutions and in universities, especially in Law and Economics schools, corporatist economics became an indisputable doctrinal reference.

• 16 Ibid., pp. 118-119.
• 17 The work of Italian economist Ugo Spirito (I fondamenti dell’economia corporativa, Milan, Treves, (...)

30As a rule, moments of distinction and greater publicity for Italian corporatist authors and those from other countries were ceremonial occasions, namely honorary doctorates awarded by ISCEF (Instituto Superior de Ciências Económicas e Financeiras, the only Portuguese school of Economics until 1953) or by the University of Coimbra16. Another form of circulation of ideas was the editions of books by corporatist authors, although translations were rare17.

• 18 A. Almodovar and J. L. Cardoso, “Corporatism and the Economic Role of Government”, in S. G. Medema (...)

31Leading economists such as Rodolfo Benini, Alberto De Stefani and Luigi Amoroso sought to combine the abandonment of the Walrasian “perfect competition” model and the methodological individualism of the neoclassicals, paving the way for a theory of discipline and state intervention in economic activity, wage relations and prices. The main target of corporatist economists was the liberal principle of perfect competition and free market pricing18.

• 19 U. Spirito, Princípios Fundamentais de Economia Corporativa, A. Perez Durao trans., Lisbon, Livrar (...)

32With dogmatic arguments, often more doctrinal than theoretical, several corporatists, such as the Italians Ugo Spirito, Gino Arias, Alfredo Rocco, Giuseppe Bottai and Gianni De Michelis, as well as the Romanian Mihail Manoilesco, who sought to develop a general theory of corporatism, criticised the lack of connection between the liberal state and the social life of nations and the “inorganic” essence of liberal institutions. Armed with this critique, the corporatists affirmed the impossibility of reorganising the economic system in such a way as to restore the balance between international trade and the discipline of “capital” and “labour”. They did so according to a corporatist concept of economic and social equilibrium. It was a theory with a moral background, which implied the coordinating action of an authoritarian state, and which sought to legitimise the Italian formula of “corporatist fascism”19.

• 20 Ibid., p. 59.

33Within this framework of thought, the theorists most committed to the political alliance between the “corporatist economy” and fascism went so far as to claim that all economic phenomena are “state phenomena”. Ugo Spirito argued that the “corporatist state” and the “economics of corporatism” (the promised “new economy”) were inseparable historical realities, “indispensable fruits of the modern spirit”. According to the professor of law and philosophy at the University of Rome, whose main book has been translated to Portuguese, the “corporatist economy” solved the social and political problem of the antinomy between the state and the individual, because it was a means of “[…] ever greater organic concretisation of the state life of the nation”20. Spirito strongly criticised the neoclassical principle of “utilitarian individualism”, replacing it with the notion of “maximum social well-being”.

• 21 A. C. Pinto ed., Corporatism and Fascism, op. cit.
• 22 M. Pasetti, L’Europa corporativa. Una storia transnazionale tra le due guerre mondiali, Bologna, B (...)

36In practice, the corporatist idea inspired the creation of institutional apparatuses for economic management, tightly controlled by authoritarian states and beholden to their bureaucratic oligarchies. The corporatist ideology and its institutions were a privileged vehicle for the process of fascistisation that swept through Europe and some South American countries in the first half of the 20^th century21. In becoming an instrument of fascism and as a formal system and practical means of integrating workers into the political space of the “new states”, corporatism resembled authoritarian welfare22.

• 23 F. Rosas, Salazar e os Fascismos, op. cit., pp. 164-196.

39In Salazar’s Portugal, as well in other regimes with features of state corporatism, the economic principles that governed state policy remained fundamentally liberal. Despite the interventionist apparatus and the normative violations of this economic liberalism – particularly evident in the devices for curtailing competition and in the supply and price systems – the capitalist system was neither called into question nor was it replaced by a “corporatist economy”. What really changed was the linking of the economy and the workings of capitalism to a model of political representation with liberal roots, parliamentarism. Another new feature was the institutionalisation of a new model for the representation of organised interests and the authoritarian co-optation of the labour force labour and the sociability of the workers23.

• 24 I. T. Berend, An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe: Economic Regimes from Laissez-Faire (...)

43In order to safeguard the national differences between the fascist regimes, which implemented programmes of self-sufficiency, the state assumed a dirigiste and arbitrating role. This role was historically determined by the crisis situations that shook the peripheral countries and threatened the social and political order of the liberal democracies in the interwar period. As Berend24 has pointed out, the economic policies of fascism were characterised by a strong economic environment. In their response to the crisis of the 1930s, they were not very original compared to the liberal capitalist regimes.

• 25 F. Perroux, Capitalisme et communauté de travail, Paris, Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1937, pp. 14- (...)

45Corporatism gave its institutions powers of economic regulation, but within the framework of the state or through the institutional mediation of corporatist organisations. The French Catholic economist François Perroux argued that by using corporatism as an institutional resource for national utility, fascist economic policy ended up being a form of “state capitalism”. He further argues that by being anchored in the authoritarian power of the state and in a non-representative corporatist organisation, Italian corporatism belied the dogma of the “new dogma” and ended up proposing inadequate solutions to the structural crisis of capitalism25.

• 26 M. Pasetti, op. cit, pp. 113-125.

46In Italy, the forced corporatisation of employers’ and workers’ organisations under the Carta del Lavoro (1927) created an asymmetric trade union structure that lasted until 194526. There was no joint representation of workers and employers either in companies or in professional organisation. In practice, the Charter gave employers the exclusive right to manage economic activity and companies, relegating the trade union bureaucracy to a marginal and administrative role.

• 27 F. Rosas, Salazar e o poder. A arte de saber durar, Lisbon, Tinta da China, 2012.

47In Portugal, the Estado Novo set up a state economic organisation with corporatist proposals that also fell far short of the “corporatist state” it had proclaimed. Strictly speaking, the Portuguese “State of Order”, semi-liberal in economics, anti-liberal in politics, found in corporatist ideas and institutions an expedient to rise and endure27. Eclectic and pragmatic, the “Portuguese corporatist economy” turned out to be a fragile composition of references drawn from different currents of economic thought. Presenting itself as an adversary of laisser-faire, it was a synthesis with little theoretical autonomy from the neoclassical model that had served the liberal economic order. In Portugal, as in other countries, corporatist economic ideology remained tied to a doctrinal discourse built around the dogma of the “national interest”. This moral principle, placed above all others, was the political translation of the notion of “collective social utility”, a central axiom of corporatist economic thought.

• 28 C. Bastien and J. L. Cardoso, “From homo economicus to homo corporativus: A neglected critique of (...)

50As the Portuguese case shows, starting from the emulation of the Italian corporate doctrine, there was an attempt to emphasise the national character of corporatist economic theory. However, this theoretical construction was always fragile, did not find many interpreters outside the field of Law faculties and it was almost limited to an instrumental effort to legitimise the institutions of corporatist regulation of the economy that, however, the authoritarian State had imposed. Although the efforts of some Portuguese economists, the economic corporatist theory never emancipated itself from Corporatist Law. In the 1950s, it came to coexist with some Keynesian elements whether in the teaching of Economics or even in the economic policies of the State28.