Corporativism

The Notion

In its most basic meaning, corporativism refers to a political power structure and practice of consensus formation based on the functional representation of professional groups. Associations of farmers, craft workers, industrialists, laborers, lawyers, doctors, or the clergy (churches) act as self-governing bodies on their own behalf and as intermediaries between the government and their members. Political status and rights are attached to occupation and group membership and, thus, differ from those of modern citizenship and equal representation of individuals in parliaments related to a certain territory. The concept of corporativism dates back to the medieval estates and guild system. It found renewed attention among romanticist philosophers in the Germanic world during the 19th century as a remedy against social uprooting in the wake of industrialization and class conflict. The Catholic social teaching has drawn inspiration from corporativist ideas, as have a number of authoritarian regimes in Europe and South America. As a political ideology, corporativism has been fiercely rejected by liberals as a movement that would elevate collectivist corporate bodies to the cornerstones of politics and the economy while denying individual representation, civil liberties, free competition, and democracy. Socialists and Communists fought the idea as a particularly oppressive variant of capitalist class rule that would eliminate the Left and control the working-class masses with a carrot-and-stick [Page 459]approach. Not the least, it was the modern state itself and its ideal of universal citizenship, territorial instead of occupational representation, and indivisible sovereignty that ran counter to the establishment of corporate power holders acting as intermediaries between governments and segments of the society. Nevertheless, modern welfare states bear some features of corporativism and neo-corporatist policy making that have become manifest in networks and negotiations between state administrations and powerful corporate actors such as business associations or labor unions in fields such as industrial and social policy. In contrast to such current patterns of corporatist policy making, the term corporativism (corporatism, corporativismo, corportativisme, and Korporativismus) denotes a specific political philosophy and controversial ideology as well as a political regime type.

The Model and Idea of Corporativism

For centuries, debates on corporativism referred—directly or indirectly—to the medieval guild system. Being collective bodies (Latin corpora), medieval guilds served manifold economic, social, cultural, religious, and not the least political functions for their professional membership. Among them one finds the setting of standards for quality, prices and wages, education and work, caring for widows and orphans, representation on town councils, serving in courts and town militia, and maintaining charitable institutions such as hospitals, orphanages, poorhouses, and more. With the rise of the modern state and capitalist economies, those tasks became subject to royal law, state administrations, or markets. The decline of medieval corporativism began at the turn of the 14th century. It was driven not by absolutist claims to sovereignty at first but by recurrent pestilence, severe famine, and extreme weather as well as the spread of Renaissance humanism and Reformationist ideas about religion, science, and society that began to shake the old corporate order of the High Middle Ages and paved the way for a growing emphasis on individualism, centralized territorial rule, and secular supremacy.

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