Introduction
Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, European societies have experienced a fundamental change in their structures. One transformation of particular importance relates to the emergence and growth of new powerful collective socio-economic organisms, such as trade unions, agricultural leagues and employers’ federations. At the turn of the century, mass unionism and the so-called social question vigorously surfaced throughout Western Europe, questioning and fighting the traditional bourgeois liberal order, with relevant consequences both for the general political reconfiguration of the coming decades and for the theoretical analysis of society, economics and politics. In this regard, the emerging mass society was rendering the idea of society as a collection of individuals untenable, the image of a direct relationship between the state and the individual unrealistic, and the picture of a state unaffected by socio-economic dynamics obsolete. What the turbulent reality of the first decades of the twentieth century was revealing was an overcrowded middle space existing between the individual and the state: a space populated by associations based on shared economic interests. Consequently, not only the political authority, but also the epistemological legitimacy of the liberal culture started to be contested. The old liberal bourgeois narratives of state, society and economy no longer worked: the socio-economic terrain was changing, but the maps were not properly re-drawn. If the period 1873–1929 was tearing the liberal society apart, preparing the ground for the end of ‘the era of the triumphant bourgeois’,Footnote 1 what strategies could be elaborated for re-inventing the post-liberal order?
Within this framework corporatism, conceived as a new form to imagine and reshape the existing troubled scenario, assumed a great role and importance, putting ‘an indelible mark on the first decades of the twentieth century’Footnote 2 as a tentative answer to the critical instability of the liberal state. According to the consolidated tradition of historiographical and political studies inaugurated by Schmitter in the 1970s, corporatism is a form of enacting an institutional relationship between the system of decision-making and economic interest representation, in which the constituent units were organised into a limited number of functionally differentiated categories performing legislative functions, autonomously or alongside the traditional parliament.Footnote 3 Historiography has only very recently started to reflect on the spreading of corporatism in different societies. Overall, these investigations have focused on fascist and authoritarian regimes – for the obvious reason that corporatist systems were institutionalised only in such political contextsFootnote 4 – or have been defined by the problematic search for the intellectual origins of fascism.Footnote 5 As for Britain, thus far corporatism has mainly been studied in relation to fascist groups of the 1920s and the 1930s, such as the British Fascisti, the Imperial Fascist League and the British Union of Fascists, or in connection with specific fascist theorists, such as Alexander Raven Thomson and Oswald Mosley.Footnote 6
On the other hand, several authors have been challenging the use of fascism as a rigid framing tool for corporatism, inviting the exploration of the wider and long-term interplay between socio-economic reform, institutional change and the corporatist format in the twentieth century.Footnote 7 In relation to Britain, however, whilst Samuel Beer, Keith Middlemas and Keith Burgess have already noted a corporatist bias in British politics,Footnote 8 detailed historical analyses remain scarce. To date, valuable insights into the issue can be found in L.P. Carpenter's pioneering survey of conservative corporatism, in Daniel Ritschel's account of the British debate on planning in the 1930s and in E.H. Green's discussion of conservative ideologies in the twentieth century.Footnote 9 At the same time, in their analyses of the heterodox intellectual circles of the Edwardian era, Tom Villis and Paul Jackson only marginally discuss the topic, as does Tom Rogan in his examination of the ‘moral economists’.Footnote 10 Similarly, histories of early employers’ federations in Britain consider the issue mainly as a precocious form of coordination in industrial relations.Footnote 11 These studies certainly provide important insight into the emerging corporatist option in Britain. Overall, however, such expositions fail to acknowledge the complex trans-national and cross-political nature of corporatism. Both Carpenter and Green limit their study to a specific political block, i.e. conservatism, whilst Ritschel seems to relegate corporatism to the background of his analysis, considering it as an appendix to post-1929 economic planning culture. Moreover, the existing accounts adopt an essentially Britain-centric and short-term historical perspective, thus failing to bring corporatism to the fore of the analysis as an autonomous historical object – with its own origins and specificities, its spatial and historical developments.
In the following pages I shall seek to examine the circulation of non-fascist corporatist ideas in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. This article claims the need to fully overcome the overly stringent equivalences between fascism and corporatism, situating British corporatist theories in an extended space-time perspective composed of trans-national, cross-political and long-term processes of adaptation and hybridisation of practices and ideas. The argument here is to prove how British authors participated – with their specific cultural, political, juridical and economic perspectives – in the broader global corporatist movement.
In order to appreciate the complex unfolding of different corporatist schemes in Britain, I shall focus on three non-fascist corporatist alternatives – socialist, technocratic and conservative – elaborated in the country between 1914 and the 1930s. As a consequence, this article is organised into three parts and a final remark. The first section examines the socialist alternative of guild socialism, focusing on the democratic variant elaborated by the Oxford-based economist and political scientist G.D.H. Cole between 1914 and the early 1920s. In this regard, Tom Villis and Marc Stears are correct in identifying the existence of ‘not one guild socialism but many guild socialisms’,Footnote 12 as well as in underlining ‘the heterogeneity of ideas about labour organization’Footnote 13 expressed by the guild movement and the National Guilds League (NGL). Nonetheless, including in this account the quasi-authoritarian guild alternatives of Ramiro de Maeztu and A.E. Randall would have led us back to an examination of proto-fascist forms of corporatism. For this reason, in this article I shall confine myself to Cole's socialist/libertarian version of guild socialism. The second part deals with the technocratic plan of the British businessman Dudley Docker and his Federation of British Industries (FBI), developed during the last years of the war. The third section discusses the ideas expounded by a group of conservative MPs led by Harold Macmillan in the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s.
This survey can make no pretence of comprehensiveness. Other British non-fascist corporatist projects – i.e. the post-war Whitley Councils, Oswald Mosley's New Party of 1931 or the Mond-Turner Talks of 1929–33Footnote 14 – could have been included in the analysis. Nonetheless, the three case studies discussed below have been chosen for a threefold reason: first, they present well-structured and sufficiently coherent political plans, contrary to other more episodic or fragmented projects; second, they allow us to observe how corporatism was adopted and shaped by three different political cultures of the time; third, they properly convey the idea of similarity-within-difference in the corporatist movement. In this regard, in the conclusion I will argue that all the proposals analysed can be considered as non-fascist varieties of the polycentric family of interwar corporatism, albeit suggesting that this common theoretical attribute does not necessarily imply a unity of political beliefs or principles.
The Socialist Alternative: The Guilds and the State
Guild socialism entered into British political culture in 1914, when the disillusioned Independent Labour Party activist Samuel G. Hobson published National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out.Footnote 15 The new movement appeared and developed initially within the so-called New Age circle, a London-based informal network composed of an eclectic mix of thinkers with different political backgrounds led by Alfred R. Orage, the director of the review The New Age, and Arthur J. Penty.Footnote 16
On the whole, the guild movement drew more than one idea from early twentieth-century British pluralist thinking, and specifically from Frederic W. Maitland and John N. Figgis, who in turn principally shaped their beliefs reading the work of the German jurist Otto Von Gierke.Footnote 17 As recognised by recent historiographical literature,Footnote 18 ‘pluralism refers to a belief in or sensitivity to diversity in society and government’.Footnote 19 It is characterised by a common suspicion towards the idea of a homogeneous nation ruled by a centralised state, and it looked back to the Middle Ages to examine the legal status of associations and groups within society.Footnote 20 Overall, following pluralist prescriptions and dismayed by the excessive state intervention of the early twentieth century and the war period, guildist writers were revitalising the political activity of associations, contending that the only real juridical person upon which the national political community was built was the group, socially and economically determined.
Several forces were at work within the guild movement. Those include the quasi-authoritarian authors de Maeztu and Randall,Footnote 21 the medievalist nostalgic Penty, the Nietzsche enthusiast Orage, and the libertarian socialist Cole,Footnote 22 as well as the Catholic writers gathered around Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.Footnote 23 The multiplicity of ideologies within the guild movement was mirrored by the diverse political affiliations of its members. If Cole always remained on socialist positions, Orage became very close to Clifford Douglas's social credit movement,Footnote 24 whilst Belloc and Chesterton progressively detailed their Catholic social thinking in the distributist movement.Footnote 25 In contrast, after the war de Maeztu became an admirer of Primo de Rivera, in 1931 he established the right-wing movement Accion Española, and in 1936 supported Franco's military coup. Likewise, Penty developed a strong admiration for fascist Italy, supporting in 1932 the British Union of Fascists formed by Mosley,Footnote 26 who in turn was previously influenced by the guild movement.Footnote 27
Within this multifaceted network, in the first decade of the twentieth century Orage and Penty picked up pluralist intuitions and started to develop a brand new interpretation of socialism. In his 1906 book The Restoration of the Guild System Footnote 28 Penty explicitly described his political proposal as grounded in the concept of the medieval guild, deriving his ideas from the thought of William Morris, John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, but also from the European Catholic corporatist movement.Footnote 29 Penty attacked socialist collectivism, proposing a different method to achieve socialist objectives. In his opinion, the fundamental flaw of collectivist socialism was identifying the main cause of the impoverishment of the working class as capitalist economic competition, which, according to Penty, was not bad in itself, but only in the socially disintegrating version of an unregulated market. In his view, a properly regulated economic market – such as the medieval one – could rather be a positive instrument of socio-economic growth. Thus the institutions best suited to realise a transformation in policy-making were the guilds that, in Penty's words, ‘being social, religious, and political as well as industrial institutions . . . postulated in their organization the essential unity of life’,Footnote 30 and could thereby rebuild the wrecked social bonds.
In the same period, Orage's interpretation of socialism was also drifting away from its positivist roots, falling into an ambiguous cultural dimension which could find a home in several different political movements.Footnote 31 Focusing principally on the moral question, Orage soon started to diverge from a Marxist analysis based on class relations and social conflict, replacing it with a strong nationalist and non-classist framework. In September 1909, he made clear that, in his view, ‘a socialist party is not the party of a class but of the nation’,Footnote 32 envisaging a process of ‘reconstructing both the theory and the practice of socialism’.Footnote 33 The aim was to create an institutional system where the government was not monopolised by a single class but rather shared among ‘all classes, each according to its political capacity and merits’.Footnote 34
Against this background, from 1914 onwards Cole started to elaborate a complex institutional architecture built upon a delicate equilibrium between guild institutional architecture (economic and corporatist) and non-guild representation form (political and territorial). Between 1917 and 1921, at the end of a tortuous and sometimes ambiguous path, Cole reached a theoretical stability perfecting what can be labelled as a democratic corporatist theory of double sovereignty. In relation to this theoretical development, it is impossible to underestimate the importance of the massive pre-war wave of strikes, as well as of the First World War. As a matter of fact, the British industrial turmoil of 1911–14 exposed the progressives of all shades to the working-class dissatisfaction with Labour complacency about the inevitability of gradualness and parliamentary strategies: it was, as Cole put it, ‘an urgent demand for life’ posed by a new romantic movement.Footnote 35 On top of that, as the conflict broke out in 1914, state authority grew exponentially, expanding its sphere of action and mutating government into what Cole termed ‘a tyrannical master’.Footnote 36 As Laborde noted, in reaction to these events ‘a critical exploration of traditional theories of the state was in order’:Footnote 37 ‘we must at least re-examine our theory’Footnote 38 – commented Cole in 1912.
Contrary to the power-accumulating trend of the wartime government, Cole started to interpret modern social reality as structurally divided into two separate but interconnected spheres of activities. Arguing against the over-simplified understanding of an indivisible nation ruled by a strong central government, he emphasised the manifold rather than singular networks of connections and allegiances running throughout the social body and its individuals.Footnote 39 The full implication of this set of observations was the identification of two different prevalent domains in human activities – the economic and the political – that then corresponded to ‘two forms of social power, economic and political’.Footnote 40 Consequently, two separate forms of representation were needed, one economic and industrial, the other political and geographical.
In this regard, Cole was not alone in working on a double geographical/economic representative channel. Following the idea of ‘the death’Footnote 41 or ‘the crisis’Footnote 42 of the liberal state, many European thinkers and politicians were reconsidering the boundaries between state and society in order to enhance class collaboration through the incorporation of occupational groups into the machinery of the state. That was the case, for instance, of Léon Duguit, who came to regard socio-economic associations as integrative instruments to parliamentary rule;Footnote 43 of the Portuguese constitutional reform designed by Sidónio Pais in 1918, which foresaw the inclusion of delegates of professional categories into the Senate;Footnote 44 of the tripartite constituency of the International Labour Organization, set up in 1919;Footnote 45 and, finally, of the constitutional plan drafted by the republican syndicalist Alceste de Ambris for d'Annunzio's occupied city of Fiume in 1920 – the Charter of Carnaro – which envisaged the creation of an economic chamber, elected among industrial corporations and specifically responsible for enacting economic legislation.Footnote 46
In a similar vein, Cole wrote at the beginning of the war that ‘the state, national and local, should be the expression of those common purposes which affect all the citizens . . . In those spheres of action in which a man's interest is determined by the fact that he lives . . . in a particular country or district’.Footnote 47 In this domain, a geographical constituency could best express the desires shared by its residents: the state, local and national, was therefore sovereign. At the same time, though, the economic sphere possessed its own interests and necessities, different from the territorial ones. As put by Cole:
each industry has its special interest, and industry as a whole has an interest . . . of its own, which no geographical group can adequately represent. A broad functional difference is manifest which justifies the constitution of special associations . . . no doubt in relation to, but not under the domination of, the geographical group.Footnote 48
The corporatist principle underpinning Cole's scheme led him to revitalise the medieval guild institutional system to overcome an oversimplified interpretation of the social environment. Overall, Cole desired to substitute the traditional liberal democracy, merely political and based only on the individual, with a functional and corporatist democracy. In so doing it aimed, on the one hand, at valorising all the socio-economic associations existing within society; and, on the other hand, to view central government as just one of the various forms of expression that society was equipped with, i.e. a (political) function among other (socio-economic) functions. Hence, in order to arrange the ‘substitution, for an omnipotent political democracy, of a functional democracy’,Footnote 49 the strategy was ‘not to generalise associations, but to particularise the state’.Footnote 50
Guild socialism was guided by an original analysis of the representation mechanism, which remains one of Cole's greatest contributions to political and social theory. He alleged that the democratic idea had gotten lost over time in a false theory of representation, which claimed that one man could represent another. Denouncing the flaws entailed in this idea, Cole affirmed that all that could really be represented were only particular functions and purposes common to a specific group of men. State sovereignty, therefore, was a false and misleading concept. The state, in fact, had to be regarded as a corporatist association like any other, formed for a particular and specific purpose, i.e. representing the consumers or coordinating other economic interest groups. Thus in 1920–21, Cole saw the state as not universally dominant, and national sovereignty and political power as diffused throughout the entire community, dispersed into a system of coordinated corporatist/geographical organisms. The ultimate objective was giving a political voice to all the citizens in their multiple loyalties, needs and interests. As put by Cole in 1921, in fact, ‘true representation . . . is always specific and functional, and never general and inclusive’.Footnote 51
Overcoming an interpretation of Cole's theory exclusively as a product of the socialist universe or as a radical variant of the anti-collectivist syndicalist pre-war British movement,Footnote 52 recent studies have recognised the inner multiplicity of the guildist movement;Footnote 53 its theoretical and personal relationships with the British Catholic world;Footnote 54 and its analogies with the widespread planning culture of interwar Britain.Footnote 55 Nevertheless, the inner variety paradigm does not exhaust the question of guild socialism's place within the broader British and European intellectual landscape. On this point, focusing on Cole's functional democratic project allows us to fathom further nuances and insights on both guild socialism and corporatism. In fact, notwithstanding the different ideologies existing within both movements, if one looks to the representation mechanisms suggested, a deeper cohesion emerged. This is not, as Stears rightly recalled, a cohesion superficially derived by the set of institutions or the policy agenda put forward;Footnote 56 rather, it is a uniformity resulting from a shared understanding of the structural transformations of the capitalist society, its socio-economic conditions and its institutional shortcomings.
The Technocratic Alternative: A Business Parliament
Dudley Docker was one of the leading entrepreneurs of early twentieth-century Britain. As reported by his most important biographer, Docker was many things – captain of Midlands industry, leading exponent of the British merger movement, political intriguer, newspaper proprietor, banker, founding president of the FBI – but he was principally ‘a man of influence’.Footnote 57 A strong imperialist, he saw the First World War as an occasion, on the one hand, to dismantle the German challenge to British world supremacy and, on the other hand, to undertake the social, economic and political reconstruction necessary to preserve Britain's leadership. Although Docker was involved in numerous conservative-imperialist political circles in the Birmingham area from the 1910s, he frequently manifested his hostility to what he called the amateurism of professional politicians in addressing economic matters. As it was correctly recalled, in that period Birmingham was becoming ‘the centre of British corporatism’,Footnote 58 characterised by the action of other individuals, such as the conservative politicians Arthur Steel-Maitland and Leo Amery.
Docker's harsh opinion on politicians led him to launch several extra-parliamentary pressure groups and to promote a reform process with the final objective of creating a government with the participation of entrepreneurs in crucial ministerial positions, such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Board of Trade. The basic conviction was that only industrialists had the proper expertise to rule an industrial society. In this sense, one of Docker's first efforts was the creation in February 1910 of the Business League, which was a practical expression of the aforementioned technocratic idea. This notion was coupled with a ‘decline of Britain’ rhetoric that had been swelling since the disastrous Boer War of 1899–1902, seen as a symptom of British industrial inefficiency.
Therefore, even pre-war, some industrial circles had started to identify the economic sphere as the privileged locus for a more efficient decision-making process. Actually, sporadic corporatist plans were already being debated and proposed by the British industrial community at the very beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 59 Synthesising the ideas matured within this cultural milieu, in March 1911 Docker justified his proposals for an economic parliament by affirming that ‘politics often come between masters and men. Business – a common interest – can only bring us closer together’.Footnote 60 In his opinion, the defining element of liberal politics was an unavoidable fecklessness that had to be overcome to return Britain to her former glory.
The great labour unrest of 1911–14, and later the outbreak of the First World War, drastically curbed the progress of the Business League. However, the conflict provided Docker with new unexpected possibilities for rethinking the institutional geometries of British politics in the light of the industrial cooperation established by the post-1916 Lloyd George cabinet. As for Macmillan's conservative group during the 1920s, which I shall discuss below, and many other European movements, experience of the trenches became a powerful symbol of a renewed national alliance between all the productive forces of the nation. Simultaneously, since industrial prosperity was perceived in terms of international economic competition, Docker wanted government, capital, labour and finance to institutionally cooperate to rationalise production and increase exports.
Given this interpretation of the conflict, Docker and the FBI – founded in 1916 – were trying to imagine a continuity between the political strategies of the war period and the post-war era. If ‘capital and labour have found it possible to live, to work and to die together in the trenches’,Footnote 61 Docker stated, such cooperation would be easier to achieve and more profitable after the end of the war, when the various socio-economic associations would have called ‘to live and work together with mutual toleration and comprehension’.Footnote 62
This call for a closer cooperation, however, was conceived to engender an asymmetrical relationship between industry and politics, as well as between capital and labour. On 23 February 1916, at a meeting of the British Electrical and Allied Manufacturers Association in Birmingham, Docker made a long speech on the need for businessmen to self-govern, launching the formation of the FBI as the embryo of a future business parliament expressing the political positions of the industrial community.Footnote 63 The liberal state model had to be definitely overcome. Specifically, what Docker was denouncing was a serious deficiency in the traditional decision-making process: ‘a genuine hand of business has been lacking’,Footnote 64 Docker pointed out, although ‘in the commercial community of this country we have a vast store of brains and organising ability’.Footnote 65 The only means the business community had to provide the country with its managing skills and technical knowledge was to politically foster a world of industrialists: ‘it is the duty of manufacturers . . . to insist absolutely that in future their voices must be heard, and . . . have a representation in the Government’.Footnote 66
The FBI was then formally founded with the explicit goal to acquire an institutional role, becoming ‘a sort of industrial parliament’.Footnote 67 In this way, Docker was clothing his anti-parliamentary attitude with a technocratic approach, based on the assumption that the industrial age required decision-makers to be selected on the basis of their industrial expertise and success: ‘in matters we do know something about, our industries, our financial institutions, and so forth, we keep politicians at a respectful distance’.Footnote 68 Closely observed, the entire project reveals itself as an oligarchic plan carried out by a declining industrial aristocracy frantically trying to conserve its political weight. The strategy was to discredit the old, allegedly inefficient politician class – ‘do not put your trust in Parliament, in parties and in politicians’,Footnote 69 affirmed Docker in June 1916 – claiming that only industrialists and businessmen had the right knowledge to properly rule a complex modern state, whose international power was based on its economic performance. The chief institutional instrument to realise this legislative shift was thus a renewed ‘House of Commons composed by businessmen’.Footnote 70 Overall, Docker and the FBI constructed a political reform plan with the aim of substituting the traditional parliamentary system of the liberal state with a ‘large association of business men, to be called the business parliament – a body which must be strong enough to give effective expression to its views’.Footnote 71
Two documents written between 1917 and 1919 illustrate the general lines of this project. The first one, the Labour Report,Footnote 72 appeared in November 1917 and was prepared by the labour committee of the FBI, established during the conflict to study the post-war political and economic reorganisation. The second, a text titled The Control of Industry,Footnote 73 was published in July 1919. Both documents open up describing the epochal changes brought about by the war economy, especially with respect to the new capital-labour industrial cooperation. At the same time, attention was also directed to understanding the reasons behind pre-war workers’ grievances, which were addressed as the principal factor in destabilising the social and political order of the liberal state. More in detail, the lower standards of living of the working class and the loss of purchasing power constituted the main levers at the disposal of socialist propaganda to overthrow the natural capitalist order. Therefore, as the 1917 document stated, the FBI considered ‘essential in the interest of industry that this dissatisfaction should be removed’.Footnote 74
It was precisely on the issue of internal security that the liberal state showed all its lack of efficiency, proving absolutely unfit to understand, and consequently resolve, the specific problems of the country and of its working class. State intervention in the economy was regarded as equally detrimental to productive efficiency and the well-being of the entire national community: ‘centralised management by a government department is fatal to commercial efficiency and enterprise’,Footnote 75 read the text of 1919. On this matter, if on the one hand the FBI recognised the validity of the guild socialist intention of marginalising the state,Footnote 76 on the other hand they did not deviate substantially from the laissez-faire orthodoxy. The sole and irreplaceable driving force behind the economic success of the nation had to be individual initiative, because no industrial enterprise could aspire to profit ‘unless the producer is subject at the same time to the spur of possible profit and the curb of possible personal loss’.Footnote 77
However close they might have been with the liberal ideology, these principles were interpreted through a rigid anti-statist posture. Lacking technical competence, the political world had to remain completely extraneous to the economic sphere. In this regard, the text of 1917 stated that ‘the committee are convinced that no state action can have satisfactory results [or] can materially improve the relations between capital and labour’.Footnote 78 Therefore, if the political and the economic were two different and non-communicating spheres of national life, the corporatist idea of the FBI professed a complete devolution of legislative powers from the traditional elected parliament to representatives of industry: ‘the principal aim of the state must always be political; governments are organised for political and not for commercial purposes’.Footnote 79 In other words, capitalism must be left free to fix its own problems, organising itself along corporatist lines. To a considerable extent, Docker's positions were very similar to Walther Rathenau's contemporary search for an ‘advanced social organization’Footnote 80 as an expression of a new political order aimed at incorporating its material economic structures.Footnote 81 In his well-known post-war trilogy, Rathenau also envisaged the realisation of a new rational economic-political system based on a capitalist/corporatist parliament composed by the representatives of industrial Korporationen.Footnote 82
Perhaps with a lesser philosophical tone, also Docker and the FBI elaborated a strategy to rethink the British institutional structure, discrediting the traditional liberal democracy and substituting it with an aristocratic and oligarchic industrial democracy. This system reflected Docker's vision of ‘a completely integrated society and economy’,Footnote 83 where the power was delegated not to a restricted class of professional politicians, as in nineteenth-century Britain, but to a similarly restricted class of professional industrialists. It was argued that having industrialists take the reins of power and lead the legislative process on economic issues would ultimately benefit the entire nation, working class included. Not unlike what was being proposed by other prominent industrialists in continental Europe – e.g. Walter Rathenau and Wichard Möllendorff in Germany, Ettore Conti in Italy, Etienne Clémentel in France or Marcus Wallenberg in SwedenFootnote 84 – the industrialist class presented itself as the only class qualified to rule with the right expertise and knowledge in what, in their opinion, mattered the most in the modern world – industry.
In regard to the diffusion of business-sponsored corporatist plans in Britain in the interwar years, works such as Dintenfass's examination of the limits of the FBI-NCEO-TUC talks in 1929–33, or Stitt's discussion of the post-war unsuccess of the joint industrial council project, clearly confirm that no corporatist system actually took place in this period.Footnote 85 Nonetheless, Docker's proposal proves, first, that the British corporatist bias detected by Middlemas did exist, at least on a theoretical level;Footnote 86 and second, that the FBI scheme for a business parliament represents an early episode of this enduring corporatist tendency. In this regard, in 1973 Blank noted that on a long-term basis the FBI was instrumental in changing the relationship between state and industry in Britain, contributing to move the system towards a neo-corporatist method of shared responsibilities of economic governance – fully realised only after the Second World War.Footnote 87 However, the post-1945 system resulted in a compromise that lessened the original FBI ambitions. In fact, if the main objective of Docker's early positions was the functional devolution of political powers to an industrial parliament composed of business persons,Footnote 88 after the Second World War economic organised interests came to fulfil a non-legislative consultative function.
The Conservative Alternative: Industry and the State
After fighting the war on the French front, Harold Macmillan entered the House of Commons in the general elections of 1924, representing the depressed northeast constituency of Stockton-on-Tees. He soon became close to a group of young conservative members of Parliament, including Robert Boothby, Anthony Eden, Oliver Stanley and John Loder, who together formed a relentless minority conservative group. Operating in the uneasy British post-war scenario, one of Macmillan's goals was to find a new conservative economic policy able to tackle social disintegration, poverty, unemployment, class struggle and social revolution. The call for viable remedies against economic depression resulted in a corporatist industrial reorganisation plan that had been in the works from the second half of the 1920s and was presented to Parliament between 1934 and 1935.Footnote 89
The new agenda was first put forward in a 1927 collective volume titled Industry and the State.Footnote 90 With the objective of tackling the primary cause of social disorder, namely mass unemployment – ‘this cruel problem of the depressed areas’Footnote 91 – the text envisaged an industrial reorganisation system based on a different mechanism of representation presented as a third way between socialism and liberalism.Footnote 92 As stated in the book, ‘somewhere between the two extremes, between Marxist socialism and complete “laissez-faire”, must lie the land in which exploration is not only profitable but essential’.Footnote 93 Within this grey area, the young Tories called upon the state to act, but only to permit and ensure industrial reorganisation. They were basically looking for new theoretical justifications for a capitalistic society that was called upon to correct its manifest social shortcomings, especially in terms of national cohesion and working-class impoverishment.
Overall, a different concept of labour underpinned Macmillan's group's opinions. Working, they affirmed, is the distinctive feature of humanity, the means through which every individual best expresses his spiritual inclinations. However, even though it is the product of individual effort, human labour is always expressed within a community, in a collective effort implicit in the act of working. This co-operation is both synchronic, because every productive act is the result of collaboration between various individuals, and diachronic, because every productive act exists in connection with other similar acts conducted in the past. Thus, in the end,
no one . . . lives or produces in solitude, but in relation with the family, the nation, the world, and the universe. Every mental and material productive act is influenced by the similar past acts of others, and will influence future acts. All productivity is the result of co-operative effort.Footnote 94
Since a single economic act has ‘both an individual and a collective aspect’,Footnote 95 Macmillan and his colleagues refused the idea of horizontal class division, judging it as artificial and incoherent with reality, and instead proposed an alternative sociological explanation more suitable to the concept of productive co-operation. They opted for a vertical social division, which assumed the existence of industrial sector solidarity so that economic and social harmony could rise anew:
instead of the old horizontal division – the so-called class division – . . . we find the growth of a new and much healthier vertical division. The growth of this new spirit of industrial solidarity, industry by industry, is necessary preliminary to the creation of a real sense of national solidarity.Footnote 96
It was this reasoning that came to reinforce the criticism Macmillan raised against both liberalism and socialism. Whilst liberalism, by stressing the role of the individual, ignored the communal dimension of labour, socialism, by destroying private property, eliminated the most important agent of production and progress. Instead, in Macmillan's words, ‘the rights of the individual and of the community exist side by side’Footnote 97 and, far from being mutually exclusive, they constituted two sides of the same coin. As it is expressed in the book, ‘individualism and collectivism are indeed but two ways of looking at the same thing – both necessary and each the complement of the other’.Footnote 98
Hence, the new institutional system envisaged by Macmillan in 1927 sought to guarantee the expression of the needs and wishes of those directly engaged in the productive system. It was an economic corporatist democracy, in which the industrial world was invested with the right to autonomous decision-making. The central institutional actors of the new machinery had to be economic agencies with the power to debate and enact legislation for their own industrial sector: ‘the object of conservative policy . . . should rather be to create a system under which industry should be as far as possible self-governing’.Footnote 99
Between 1927 and 1934, Macmillan strengthened his commitment to this corporatist alternative, which received a further impulse in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929. The implosion of the world economy represented to many observers the complete failure of orthodox economic policies, marking the decline of the old capitalist system. Within the vast political and intellectual area aiming at elaborating an anti-socialist strategy to reform capitalism, the Political and Economic Planning group (PEP) was established in London in March 1931.Footnote 100 The PEP gathered together individuals interested in planning and self-government, e.g. Basil Blackett, Arthur Salter, Noel Hall, Michael Zvegintzov and Kenneth Lindsay. Furthermore, among the personalities unofficially involved in the PEP discussions were Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, Henry Mond and Leo Amery, a former associate of Dudley Docker; Eustace Percy, fascinated by the Italian corporatist model; and Alfred Zimmern, a former advocate of guild socialism.Footnote 101
The sources these authors reviewed were as multiple and different as American Taylorism, Soviet planning and the fascist corporatist state. What is interesting to notice is that all those models were observed in order to find useful insights for a viable alternative of capitalist self-government. In this sense, fascist corporatism constituted a benchmark reference point, but its anti-liberal features were systematically condemned as the attention was focused exclusively on its technical lessons of economic order. It was this approach that allowed Percy to affirm that fascist corporatism was ‘undoubtedly the most original and significant effort of political invention of modern times’,Footnote 102 and Amery to comment that
our dislike of those aspects of the fascist system which are a denial of the principles of freedom to which we are attached, should not make us overlook the underlying importance of its intellectual and moral challenge to the whole of nineteenth-century political thought, or disdain to consider how our ancient institutions can gain new life and strength from the organic conception which will increasingly dominate the new era.Footnote 103
The industrial reorganisation experiences of other countries mostly impressed these British observers with their view of rationalisation through the integration of experts in the decision-making process. Commenting on the Soviet and fascist institutional systems, for instance, a member of the PEP group positively highlighted their common technocratic and economic interest representation ground, specifying that ‘government should be the function of the people expert in the art of government, or rather, in the art of political and economic coordination – instead of expert in the art of getting elected’.Footnote 104
Against this background, in the first half of the 1930s Macmillan worked intensively to construct his distinctive third way, writing several essaysFootnote 105 and founding in 1933 with Henry Mond a pressure group called the Industrial Reorganisation League (IRL). Again in the direction of reforming the decision-making process and the capitalist system, in an unpublished document written in March 1932, Macmillan affirmed that he believed the proper substitute for the individual was not the state but corporatist economic groups, thus replacing individual political initiative with a whole industry initiative.Footnote 106 The final aim, he specified, was the establishment of an industrial sub-parliament, composed of representatives of self-governing industries.Footnote 107 Within the IRL, Henry Mond, like Macmillan, championed a corporatist reorganisation of society, as he affirmed in his book Modern Money, published in 1932. He was explicitly fascinated by the Italian corporatist state, which he considered to be a new guild system. With that system in mind, Mond proposed a bicameral political structure, in which a geographically elected parliament had to be matched by an industrial parliament formed by representatives of the economic world with a duty to enact economic legislation.Footnote 108
The PEP and the IRL eventually drafted two extremely similar bills, called the Industrial Reorganisation Bill and the Self-Government for Industry Bill, respectively. Both proposals were based on the idea of eliminating governmental interference in the economic world by resorting to a form of industrial self-government.Footnote 109 Each industry had to be reorganised into a single common agency – a National Industrial Council (NIC) – addressing its needs in continuous consultation with other industrial agencies and with the government. Subsequently a new National Economic Council, formed by representatives of the various NICs and the government, would control the economic policy of the country, which was to be determined by an ongoing process of inter-industrial cooperation.
Contrary to the Italian fascist corporatist system, where the institutionalisation of corporatism meant the abolition of free elections and political liberty, the parliament did not disappear from the political machinery proposed by the PEP and the IRL. Nevertheless, on economic matters Macmillan's plan relegated the traditional parliament to a minor role. Westminster was seen as representative of the consumers and had the power only to accept or refuse legislation elaborated elsewhere without the possibility of modification or improvement. Thus Macmillan's system differed profoundly from the traditional liberal one, mainly because it was founded not on individual political choice but rather on the concept of economic function. In this new kind of institutional organisation, individuals and their opinions were no longer central to the representative system. In their stead were the ideas and necessities of productive sectors, economic interests and corporatist groups. In this regard, since these projects focused more on the institutional transformation of the machinery of government than on actual political economic long-term prescriptions, we can read them to a lesser degree as alternative versions of planning than Ritschel has suggested.Footnote 110 Altering the decision-making system by coupling the traditional parliament with an industrial assembly possessing legislative powers, in fact, is not a measure of economic planning per se and does not necessarily lead to a planned society – even a capitalist one.
After being approved by the Conservative Party conference, the IRL proposal was debated in parliament between October 1933 and April 1934. The private diffusion of the bill and the parliamentary debates allow us to comment, to some extent, on the general reception of the ideas for a self-governing industrial society. Macmillan had formed a transversal front, but his bill was eventually supported only by a minority of the Conservative Party and by Macdonald's National Labour group. Criticism came from the Labour Party, especially from Stafford Cripps who, noticing the similarities with Mussolini's corporatist system, affirmed that Macmillan's proposal was the embryo ‘of the industrial and economic side of fascism’.Footnote 111 The bill was also criticised by the majority of the Conservative Party, which eventually came to refuse the proposal. Thus, Macmillan's attempt to enact corporatist legislation in Britain failed. The IRL bill was never published and the association was soon disbanded, leaving the bill for industrial self-government ‘one single instance of an attempt to legislate a corporatist economy in Britain’.Footnote 112
In the light of what has been discussed, Macmillan's interwar positions cannot be measured entirely as a call for a non-socialist planned societyFootnote 113 or as an appeal for industrial rationalisation and amalgamation.Footnote 114 Rather, they revealed, as Carpenter first observed, Macmillan's early conception of the state and his plea for a conservative/corporatist transformation of the decision-making system.Footnote 115 Equally, although Macmillan's viewpoints concerning rationalisation of industry and monetary issues remained substantially unchanged during the 1930s and beyond,Footnote 116 from a state-building and institutional perspective the years 1934–6 marked a profound discontinuity in his thought. This was the result of a political choice, triggered by both domestic and international causes. At home, the lingering economic decline was still exacerbating the living conditions of the masses, thereby threatening the stability of the socio-economic capitalist order. Abroad, the worsening of the international situation in 1936 – with Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, Hitler's march into the Rhineland, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – brought once again the spectre of a European conflict to the forefront. Consequently, the formation of a new progressive unity in British politics became an emergency issue and in 1936 Macmillan joined forces with G.D.H. Cole in founding the Popular Front. In this regard, Ritschel rightly acknowledged that it was their parallel, although partial, convergence on Keynes's economic principles – as expressed in The General Theory of 1936 – which provided a common political platform for the agreement.Footnote 117 As a consequence of his Keynesian turn, and once his 1935 attempt to enact a corporatist legislation failed, Macmillan stopped trying to reshape the institutional structure of power configuration and started to work on a political compromise based on the more flexible Keynesian principles of full employment, state management and the mixed economy. In the process, any association with corporatist institutional reforms of the decision-making mechanism was abandoned.
Conclusions
Contributing to recent historiographical debates concerning the global diffusion of corporatism – which has seen several authors engaged in the study of its nationalFootnote 118 and regional diffusion,Footnote 119 as well as in the analysis of its transnational and long-term circulationFootnote 120 – the present article was designed to determine to what extent, and with what theoretical outlooks, non-fascist corporatist schemes were produced and circulated in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Taken together, the results of this study have been to confirm and expand Carpenter, Ritschel and Green's past intuitions in relation to the spread of corporatism in Britain,Footnote 121 relating it to a broader historical development – as I shall clarify below – and correcting the idea of British exceptionalism on the matter.Footnote 122 At the same time, the essay corroborates recent suggestions from Pasetti and others as regards the need for exploring corporatism from a transnational, cross-political and long-term perspective.Footnote 123 As a matter of fact, the article indicates that British culture was part and parcel of the global polycentric family of corporatism, proving that early twentieth-century Britain witnessed the unfolding of what Leo Panitch labelled the ‘implicit tendencies towards corporatist structures developed both before and concurrently with the emergence of fascism’.Footnote 124 Moreover, this article presents further historical examples of the polymorphic origins and diverse political development of corporatist theory. Determining the form and place of corporatist ideas in Britain also serves to locate them within the long-term British and European ideological transformations at work between the middle of the nineteenth century and the Second World War.
The above discussion is consistent with a historiography that argues for the ‘cultural hegemony of idealism’Footnote 125 in the new wave of social and political reform literature at the turn of the century. In fact, many of the corporatist thinkers in Britain were indebted to idealist authors such as Thomas H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, Francis Bradley, David Ritchie and Alexander D. Lindsey.Footnote 126 Additional influences on the corporatist British world also include other thinkers coming from an ambiguous anti-individualist, collectivist and social conservative tradition, such as Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey – ‘the prophetic precursor of modern collectivism’;Footnote 127 John Ruskin and William Morris – the major source of Cole's socialist conversion;Footnote 128 Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Disraeli – Macmillan's political hero;Footnote 129 Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Mond – one of the main proponents of the Mond-Turner Talks of 1929–33 and father of Henry Mond, Macmillan's associate in the IRL; and Arthur Steel-Maitland – an early supporter of national efficiency and technocratic corporatist plans.Footnote 130 A major attraction common to all of them was their emphasis on society as community, their vision of the ethical nature of citizenship, their criticism of the idea of freedom merely as the absence of external interferences and the value of fellowships and social relations. Such perceptions chimed not only with traditional conservative thought but also with new liberal-progressive stances on socio-political reform and with anti-statist and romanticist socialists.
Furthermore, if Cole, Docker and Macmillan championed the need for incorporating interest groups into the state structure, their corporatist sensibility was shared by a multiplicity of authors and projects between 1848 and 1945. These range from the Catholic social corporatist ideas of Emmanuel von Ketteler, René de La Tour du Pin, Giuseppe Toniolo and Pope Leo XIII, to Emile Durkheim's sociology and León Duguit's reflections on public law; from the Portuguese constitutional reform enacted by Sidónio Pais in 1917, to Alceste De Ambris's constitution of the Regency of Fiume in 1920; from Walter Rathenau's post-war trilogy on state reorganisation, to Othmar Spann and the Dolfuss regime in Austria; from the French Action française of Charles Maurras, to the revolutionary syndicalism of Georges Sorel, Hubert Lagardelle, Edmondo Rossoni and Sergio Panunzio; from Salazar and Franco's authoritarian regimes, to the corporatist debate in fascist Italy, which involved thinkers such as Alfredo Rocco, Giuseppe Bottai and Ugo Spirito; from Vichy France to the interwar Latin American regimes of Vargas in Brazil and Ibáñez in Chile.Footnote 131
Although envisaging different structures of power and institutional balances, these projects converged upon the eventual necessity of integrating economic interests into the political decision-making mechanism. Ultimately, that was the significant and distinctive feature of corporatism. Therefore, whilst divergent with respect to cultural references, political backgrounds and future aspirations, Cole, Docker and Macmillan's schemes display a strong corporatist footprint, similar to – and yet different from – other political groups and authors around the world. Reinterpreting society as a system of organisations, the corporatist front was pursuing an overhaul of the traditional private/public dichotomy crediting the collective dimension, i.e. the corporate group, with a fundamental role in modelling a new post-liberal order. Despite their dissimilarities, the corporatist projects were all heirs to a longstanding European tradition that advocated the replacement of the individual-based institutional model of parliamentary legitimacy with a system where economic interest organisations became primary, or complementary, legislative bodies.Footnote 132
Even though the authors analysed converged on both the target – the central state – and the instrument – the corporate group – of their theoretical attacks, they did not fit the same ideological box. It is ultimately important to assess the theoretical outcomes of the proposals analysed in relation to a set of issues characteristic of the industrial mass society, i.e. democracy, the role and functions of the state, parliamentary procedures and the capitalist economic system. This appears to be necessary because, even if all the corporatist projects of the period were cut from the same cloth, they did not share identical political macro-objectives. In other words, the existence of a broad family of corporatist movements did not lead to a political corporatist monolith and corporatism as a common language did not make political divergences disappear.
In this sense, the most relevant cut-off line that can be traced is the degree of adherence to a capitalist economic system. I define capitalism in the fashion of Marx and Weber, as a system where most production is carried out with privately owned means of production, capital hires legally free labour and decisions about production and distribution are decentralised; and socialism as a system where the means of production, distribution and exchange are owned or regulated by the community as a whole. As I consider corporatism to be a system where organised economic interest groups are institutionally involved in the decision-making process, it follows that there are no theoretical obstacles precluding the formation of anti-capitalist or capitalist-oriented corporatist theories. As a matter of fact, in the whole early twentieth-century Europe many observers – whether guild socialists or authoritarian conservatives, functionalist liberals or right-wing nationalists, revolutionary syndicalists or sound fascists – announced the irredeemable obsolescence of liberal individualism. Since modern industrial society was naturally leaning towards corporatist organisation, the trend had to be encouraged and sustained. In this sense, as Maier noted, corporatist representation could serve both as a scheme for establishing social democracy and as a device to control and undermine labour gains.Footnote 133
Under this lens, it appears evident how Cole favoured a scheme characterised by a substantial rejection of the capitalist mode of production that would lead to a profound transformation of the entire society, a transformation scarcely defined in its details but precisely outlined in its general form. This radical change invested specifically in the economic and political apparatus, strongly downsizing the role of private ownership of the means of production. Politically, at the basis of the new post-liberal and post-capitalist guild socialist system lay an industrial and corporatist democracy, in which the producers took control of production and distribution through the interaction of democratically elected industrial guilds.
On the other hand, the corporatist schemes proposed by the FBI and Macmillan were always anxious to clarify how individual initiative and private property were two irreplaceable driving forces behind the economic progress of the nation, whose fruits would then benefit the entire community of citizens-producers. Capitalism, therefore, was never questioned in its fundamental axioms, but only in the socially disruptive form assumed during the late nineteenth century, blamed for generating an atomised and suffering population, thereby nourishing social revolution.Footnote 134 Both projects were designed to resolve social conflict, following Gladstone's old – but surprisingly modern – adage of backing (and organising) the masses against the classes.
However, further nuances and distinctions can be uncovered. In fact, Docker's proposals expressed a paternalistic conservatism aiming at substituting the liberal democracy based on an enlarged franchise with an aristocratic and elitist entrepreneurial oligarchy organised into productive corporatist bodies. On the other hand, Macmillan articulated a more modern idea of conservative corporatism, leading to a substantial delegation of legislative power to industrial self-governing units, even though his plan remained vague on the crucial issue of labour representation. Subsuming the transformations in the industrial system since the late nineteenth century, Macmillan sought a mechanism of dampening the distributive conflicts inherent to the new mass society without altering its basic socio-economic structure based on property rights and salaried labour. In this way, although in a completely different context, he was somehow anticipating the embedded capitalism and neo-corporatism largely practised by western democracies in the post-Second World War era.
Despite that, whether in anti-capitalist fashion or with the desire to correct and ameliorate the capitalist system; whether within democratic, semi-democratic or oligarchic contexts – and the differences could not be emphasised enough – all the plans analysed were proposing a system where geography was no longer the sole criterion of electoral constituencies. The corporate organised group representing an entire industrial sector was identified as the main source of power and authority in the coming societies. In seeking to remedy the growing disparity between the de facto relevance and the de jure irrelevance of socio-economic interest groups in a modern industrial society, Cole, Docker and Macmillan were fully rejecting Walter Bagehot's nineteenth-century teaching of a parliament representing no special interests.Footnote 135 What they were espousing was the necessity of creating a functional, corporatist representation system capable of moulding new relationships between state, society and economy where economic groups had a key role to play.
It is noteworthy to observe that the common corporatist mark underpinning the variety of corporatist proposals analysed in this article seems to be the logical outcome of a shared British and European understanding of the transformations of the socio-economic conditions of modern industrial societies – the preconditions for corporatism, in Maier's wordsFootnote 136 – and in particular of the limits identified in the traditional parliamentary mechanism. Therefore, if one moves away from a purely political analytical perspective – which nonetheless remains of clear relevance – it can be seen how the corporatist movement originated by the common exposure to profound causes related to the permanent transformations of the socio-economic capitalist order in the early twentieth century; perhaps, it is for this reason that corporatism seems to us such a complex and unfathomable phenomenon. It was the change in production processes and labour patterns that originally dictated the desire to overhaul the institutional relationship between economy and politics. Specifically, the wide disillusionment with ineffective parliamentary regimes and strategies, considered unable to cope with rising social pressure and to rationally organise competing economic interests, engendered theoretical explorations into new forms of relations between state systems and organised interests, assigning to the latter a pivotal legislative function.
Therefore, whilst in 1934 Stafford Cripps was substantially wrong in accusing Macmillan of paving the way to a fascist institutional system,Footnote 137 his misunderstanding has nevertheless the advantage of helping us dispel the fog surrounding corporatism. In fact, the judgment of the Labour politician was impaired by a theory intrinsically capable of intercepting, infiltrating and adapting to the ideological variety of the early twentieth century. Therefore, assigning a neutral political value to the concept of corporatism, i.e. stripping its aprioristic and unproven causal links with fascist ideology, converts it to an extremely powerful heuristic instrument for historical social sciences: an analytical entry point for dealing with the wider debate on representation mechanisms, the rise of interest groups, and the form of the state between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Such an approach will result in opening up the exploration of other theoretical and ideological interlocks, expanding our space-time framework and leading us to a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the chameleonic nature of corporatism and its specific historical metamorphoses, which have materialised in capitalist, socialist, democratic and authoritarian forms.
