The aim of this project is to write a book that will provide new arguments showing the relevance of the interwar corporatist experiments, not only for a better understanding of the development and spread of economic ideas, analyses and policies during that period, but also to explain how different political regimes may accommodate and make use of notions and concepts with a much broader meaning and scope.

The book will reconstruct the historical origins and roots of the corporatist movement and survey both the triumphant and the unsuccessful experiments that took place in several European countries. It will also provide a lengthy discussion of the critical dialogues and mutual appraisal occurring between corporatism and other schools of economic thought, such as neoclassical and Keynesian economics.

Special emphasis will be given to the presentation of the different arguments presented about the State's place in the economic order and the various forms of its intervention. In fact, the corporatist debate serves as an excellent pretext for a broader discussion of economic policy issues, such as: the way in which political structures adapt themselves and provide institutional conditions for the promotion of sustainable economic growth and social change; the social and political limits preventing the adoption of full employment commitments, labour regulations and income redistribution policies; the shortcomings arising from training, educational, health and other social policies left to the contingencies of the market or assigned to the responsibility of State bureaucracies; the role of social partnership in building up social cohesion at both the national and international level.