Abstract
Corporatism put an indelible mark on the first decades of the 20th century, both as a set of institutions created by the forced integration of organized interests (mainly independent unions) in the state, and as an organic-statist alternative to liberal democracy.1 Variants of corporatism inspired conservative, radical-right and fascist parties, not to mention the Roman Catholic Church and the third-way options of segments of the technocratic elites. It also inspired dictatorships — stretching from António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portuguese New State through Benito Mussolini’s Italy and the Austria of Engelbert Dolfuss, right across to the new Baltic states — to create institutions to legitimate their regimes. The European variants spread throughout Latin America and Asia, particularly in Brazil, Argentina and Turkey.2
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Notes
Like Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, we use this expression to refer to the ‘vision of political community in which the component parts of society harmoniously combine … and also because of the assumption that such harmony requires power and the unity of civil society by “the architectonic action of public authorities” — hence “organic-statism”’. See A. Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978;
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Pinto, A.C. (2014). Fascism, Corporatism and the Crafting of Authoritarian Institutions in Inter-War European Dictatorships. In: Pinto, A.C., Kallis, A. (eds) Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384416_5
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