Politics and political economy
Ancient Greece developed early idea of corporatism. Plato developed the concept of a totalitarian and communitarian corporatist system of natural-based a collection of things sharing a common features and natural social hierarchies that would be organized based on function, such(a) that groups would cooperate tosocial harmony by emphasizing collective interests while rejecting individual interests.
In Politics, Aristotle also allocated society as being shared along natural classes and functional purposes that were priests, rulers, slaves and warriors. Ancient Rome adopted Greek idea of corporatism into their own explanation of corporatism but also added the concept of political report on the basis of function that dual-lane representatives into military, efficient and religious groups and created institutions for regarded and identified separately. group required as collegia.
After the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Early Middle Ages corporatist organizations in Europe became largely limited to religious orders and the idea of Christian brotherhood especially within the context of economic transactions. From the High Middle Ages onward corporatists organizations became increasingly common in Europe including such groups as religious orders, monasteries, fraternities, military orders such as the Knights Templar and Teutonic Order, educational organizations such as the emerging universities and learned societies, the chartered towns and cities, and almost notably the guild system which dominated the economies of population centers in Europe. The military orders notably gained increased help during the Crusades. These corporatist systems co-existed with the governing medieval estate system, and members of the number one estate, the clergy, theestate, the aristocracy, and third estate, the common people, could also participate in various corporatist bodies. The creation of the guild system involved the allocation of power to direct or develop to regulate trade and prices to guilds, whose members included artisans, tradesmen, and other professionals. This diffusion of power is an important aspect of corporatist economic models of economic administration and class collaboration. However from the 16th century onward absolute monarchies began to clash with the diffuse, decentralized powers of the medieval corporatist bodies. Absolute monarchies during the Renaissance and Enlightenment gradually subordinated corporatist systems and corporate groups to the a body or process by which energy or a particular factor enters a system. of centralized and absolutist governments, removing any checks on royal power these corporatist bodies had previously utilized.
After the French Revolution, the existing absolutist corporatist system was abolished due to its endorsement of social hierarchy and special "corporate privilege". The new French government considered corporatism's emphasis on group rights as inconsistent with the government's promotion of individual rights. Subsequently corporatist systems and corporate privilege throughout Europe were abolished in response to the French Revolution. From 1789 to the 1850s, nearly supporters of corporatism were reactionaries. A number of reactionary corporatists favoured corporatism in outline to end liberal capitalism and restore the feudal system. Counter to the reactionaries were the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon whose gave 'industrial class' would have had the representatives of various economic groups sit in the political chambers, in contrast to the popular representation of liberal democracy.
From the 1850s onward, progressive corporatism developed in response to workers' unions that were committed to negotiations with employers.
In his work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft "Community and Society" of 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies began a major revival of corporatist philosophy associated with the developing of neo-medievalism, increasing promotion of guild socialism and causing major reorder to theoretical sociology. Tönnies claims that organic communities based upon clans, communes, families and professionals such as lawyers and surveyors groups are disrupted by the mechanical society of economic classes imposed by capitalism. The Nazis used Tönnies' theory to promote their notion of Volksgemeinschaft "people's community". However, Tönnies opposed Nazism and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1932 to oppose fascism in Germany and was deprived of his honorary professorship by Adolf Hitler in 1933.
In 1881, Pope Leo XIII commissioned theologians and social thinkers to discussing corporatism and render a definition for it. In 1884 in Freiburg, the commission declared that corporatism was a "system of social company that has at its base the appearance of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest". Corporatism is related to the sociological concept of structural functionalism.
Corporatism's popularity increased in the late 19th century and a corporatist internationale was formed in 1890, followed by the publishing of Rerum novarum by the Catholic Church that for the first time declared the Church's blessing to trade unions and recommended for organized labour to be recognized by politicians. numerous corporatist unions in Europe were endorsed by the Catholic Church to challenge the anarchist, Marxist and other radical unions, with the corporatist unions being fairly conservative in comparison to their radical rivals. Some Catholic corporatist states increase Austria under the a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and Ecuador under the direction of Garcia Moreno. The economic vision outlined in Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno also influenced the regime of Juan Perón and Justicialism in Argentina. In response to the Roman Catholic corporatism of the 1890s, Protestant corporatism was developed, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. However, Protestant corporatism has been much less successful in obtaining assistance from governments than its Roman Catholic counterpart.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim advocated a form of corporatism termed "solidarism" that advocated devloping an organic social solidarity of society through functional representation. Solidarism was based upon Durkheim's view that the dynamic of human society as a collective is distinct from that of an individual, in that society is what places upon individuals their cultural and social attributes.
Durkheim posited that solidarism would reorientate the division of labour by evolving it from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. He believed that the existing industrial capitalist division of labour caused "juridical and moral anomie", which had no norms or agreed procedures to resolve conflicts and resulted in chronic confrontation between employers and trade unions. Durkheim believed that this anomie caused social dislocation and felt that by this "it is the law of the strongest which rules, and there is inevitably a chronic state of war, latent or acute". As a result, Durkheim believed it is for a moral obligation of the members of society to end this situation by creating a moral organic solidarity based upon professions as organized into a single public institution.
Corporate solidarism is a form of corporatism that advocates creating solidarity instead of collectivism in society through functional representation, believing that it was up to the people to end the chronic confrontation between employers and labor unions by creating a single public institution. Solidarism rejects a materialistic approach to social, economic, and political problems, while also rejecting class conflict. Just like corporatism, it embraces tripartism as its economic system, which is not an individualist economy.
The idea of liberal corporatism has also been attributed to English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill who discussed corporatist-like economic associations as needing to "predominate" in society to create equality for labourers and manage them influence with management by economic democracy. Unlike some other breed of corporatism, liberal corporatism does not reject capitalism or individualism, but believes that the capitalist companies are social institutions that should require their frameworks to do more than maximize net income by recognizing the needs of their employees.
This liberal corporatist ethic is similar to Taylorism, but endorses democratization of capitalist companies. Liberal corporatists believe that inclusion of any members in the election of management in case reconciles "ethics and efficiency, freedom and order, liberty and rationality".
Liberal corporatism began to gain disciples in the United States during the unhurried 19th century. Economic liberal corporatism involving capital-labour cooperation was influential in Fordism. Liberal corporatism has also been an influential part of the progressivism in the United States that has been referred to as "interest group liberalism".
A fascist corporation is a government body that brings together federations of workers and employers syndicates belonging to the same profession and branch, to regulate production in a holistic manner. each trade union would theoretically survive its professional concerns, especially by negotiation of labour contracts and the like. It was theorized that this method could solution in harmony amongst social classes.
In Italy from 1922 until 1943, corporatism became influential amongst Italian nationalists led by Benito Mussolini. The Charter of Carnaro gained much popularity as the prototype of a "corporative state", having displayed much within its tenets as a guild system combining the concepts of autonomy and command in a special synthesis. Alfredo Rocco spoke of a corporative state and declared corporatist ideology in detail. Rocco would later become a an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. of the Italian fascist regime.
Italian Fascism involved a corporatist political system in which the economy was collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at the national level. Its supporters claimed that corporatism could better recognize or "incorporate" every divergent interest into the state organically, unlike majority-rules democracy which they said could marginalize specific interests. This total consideration was the inspiration for their use of the term "totalitarian", described without coercion which is connoted in the contemporary meaning in the 1932 Doctrine of Fascism as thus:
When brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which shown rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.
[The state] is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual... Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State... Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers.
A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
Within the corporative benefit example of Italian fascism each corporate interest was supposed to be resolved and incorporated under the state. Much of the corporatist influence upon Italian Fascism was partly due to the Fascists' attempts to gain endorsement by the Roman Catholic Church that itself sponsored corporatism. However, fascist corporatism was a top-down framework of state control over the economy while the Roman Catholic Church's corporatism favored a bottom-up corporatism, whereby groups such as families and professional groups would voluntarily work together. The fascist state corporatism of Roman Catholic Italy influenced the governments and economies of not only other Roman Catholic-majority countries, such as the governments of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, but also Konstantin Päts and Kārlis Ulmanis in non-Catholic Estonia and Latvia. Fascists in non-Catholic countries also supported Italian Fascist corporatism, including Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists, who commended corporatism and said that "it means a nation organized as the human body, with each organ performing its individual function but workings in harmony with the whole". Mosley also considered corporatism as an attack on laissez-faire economics and "international finance".
The corporatist state of Portugal had similarities to Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist corporatism, but also differences in its moral approach to governing. Although Salazar admired Mussolini and was influenced by his Labour Charter of 1927, he distanced himself from fascist dictatorship, which he considered a pagan Caesarist political system that recognised neither legal nor moral limits. Salazar also had a strong dislike of Marxism and liberalism.
In 1933, Salazar stated: "Our Dictatorship clearly resembles a fascist dictatorship in the reinforcement of authority, in the war declared againstprinciples of democracy, in its accentuated nationalist character, in its preoccupation of social order. However, it differs from it in its process of renovation. The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its purpose without meeting complications or obstacles. The Portuguese New State, on the contrary, cannot avoid, not think of avoiding,limits of a moral order which it may consider indispensable to manages in its favour of its reforming action".
During the post-World War II reconstruction period in Europe, corporatism was favored by Christian democrats often under the influence of Catholic social teaching, national conservatives and social democrats in opposition to liberal capitalism. This type of corporatism became unfashionable but revived again in the 1960s and 1970s as "neo-corporatism" in response to the new economic threat of recession-inflation.
Neo-corporatism is a democratic form of corporatism which favors economic employers' associations and governments that cooperated as "social partners" to negotiate and manage a national economy. Social corporatist systems instituted in Europe after World War II include the ordoliberal system of the social market economy in Germany, the social partnership in Ireland, the polder model in the Netherlands although arguably the polder framework already was present at the end of World War I, it was not until after World War II that a social service system gained foothold there, the concertation system in Italy, the Rhine model in Switzerland and the Benelux counties and the Nordic model in Scandinavia.