ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
organization were now needed. The powerful intellectual and political presence of
corporatism in the political culture of Catholic elites ensured it became one of the most
important elements in its spread.
Corporatism became a powerful ideological and institutional device against liberal democracy
during the first half of the 20th century, but the neo-corporatist practices of some
democracies during its second half – not to speak of the use of the word within the social
sciences in the 1970s and 1980s – demands a definition of the phenomenon being studied,
and for the sake of conceptual clarity, to disentangle social from political corporatism:
Social corporatism ‘can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the
constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, non-
competitive, hierarchically-ordered and functionally-differentiated categories,
recognized or licenced (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate
representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for
observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands
and support’.
Political corporatism can be defined as a system of political representation based on
an ‘organic-statist’ view of society in which its organic units (families, local powers,
professional associations and interest organizations and institutions) replace the
individual-centred electoral model of representation and parliamentary legitimacy,
becoming the primary and/or complementary legislative or advisory body of the
ruler’s executive.
A central ideal of corporatist thinkers was the organic nature of society in the political and
economic sphere. This was based on a critique of what Ugo Spirito called the egotistical and
individualist homo economicus of liberal capitalism, which was to be replaced by a homo
corporativus, who would be motivated by the national interest and common values and
objectives
During the inter-war period corporatism permeated the main political families of the
conservative and authoritarian political right: from the Catholic parties and Social Catholicism
to radical right royalists and fascists, not to speak of Durkheimian solidarists and supporters
of technocratic governments associated with state-led modernization policies. Royalists,
republicans, technocrats, fascists and social-Catholics shared ‘a notable degree of common
ground on views about democracy and representation’ and on the project of a functional
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