In recent years, corporatism – once a prominent ideology and socioeconomic policy of the Fascist era – has undergone significant analytical renewal in the social sciences. Historian Melissa Teixeira’s book stands out as an exemplary contribution to this new wave of scholarship. Recent studies on corporatism have highlighted three dimensions that were often overlooked in earlier literature, especially that of the 1980s and 1990s: first, corporatism as a global phenomenon of the 1930s, emerging as a variety of capitalism during the interwar period; second, its strong association with a particular form of authoritarianism – namely, the dictatorships of the Fascist era; and third, its role as a concrete political, social and economic practice rather than a vague or unrealised project.
Teixeira’s work, grounded in a rich bibliography spanning Portuguese, French, Italian and English sources, makes a significant contribution both conceptually and empirically. Her transnational study focuses on Getúlio Vargas’s Brazil and Salazar’s Portugal – two of the most developed examples of this authoritarian-corporatist ‘Third Way’ within capitalist modernity. She demonstrates that corporatist ideas, shaped by anti-liberal intellectuals such as Italian fascist jurists Alfredo Rocco and Giuseppe Bottai, Romanian political economist Mihail Manoilescu, Brazilian thinker Oliveira Vianna and Portuguese jurist and politician Marcelo Caetano, played a central role in the institutional design of these regimes. More importantly, these ideas shaped state intervention in the economy, as well as the structure of interest groups and state–society relations in both countries.
The choice of Brazil and Portugal is particularly fruitful: along with Italian Fascism and Spanish Francoism, they represented some of the longest-lasting ‘laboratories’ of authoritarian corporatist practice in the Western world. In Portugal, corporatist policies and forms of authoritarian political representation persisted into the 1970s – already well documented by scholars such as Philippe Schmitter and Howard Wiarda in the early 1970s. In Brazil, the legacies of Vargas’s ‘Estado Novo’ remained influential in shaping economic and social development well into the late twentieth century.
In this reviewer’s opinion, the book’s central contribution to the study of global corporatism lies in its detailed, ‘thick description’ of the corporatist modus operandi under both regimes. Teixeira emphasises the international context, the circulation of ideas and – most significantly – the link between theory and practice. As she writes, the corporatist system ‘asserted the state – rather than the market – as the necessary agent for disciplining economic interests and regulating production and commerce’ (p. 12). In this framework, the state becomes the central actor in corporatist theory and practice. Teixeira offers a deep analysis of constitutions and constitutional drafts, labour legislation and the implementation of state intervention in the economy – demonstrating their impact on the daily lives of citizens under authoritarian rule in Brazil and Portugal. Most importantly, the book examines the dynamic relationship between political and socio-economic corporatism which was at the heart of its global diffusion during the 1930s. The key institutional innovation of corporatism was its introduction of ‘organic’ political representation on the one hand, and statist control over the economy and organized interests on the other – an authoritarian alternative to both liberal democracy and communism. All corporatist regimes were marked by this dual innovation.
As Teixeira aptly notes, constitutions are ‘aspirational documents’, and she carefully studies the processes of constitution-making in both countries. She also explores how these regimes ‘fashioned corporatism into a technocratic mode of governance to replace popularly-elected representatives with “experts”’ (p. 62), while also introducing social rights under the close supervision of an omnipresent state. As Teixeira shows, corporatist social rights were not conceived as guaranteed individual entitlements, but as tools of authoritarian state–society organisation – a model replicated by many other interwar dictatorships as an alternative to liberal capitalism.
Melissa Teixeira is a sophisticated historian with a strong interdisciplinary background, and her book is a major contribution to the renewed study of global corporatism, authoritarian politics and varieties of capitalism. Furthermore, this excellent comparative research on two authoritarian experiences associated with corporatism reminds us, as she stresses in the conclusion, that ‘there is no singular development model, nor singular variety of capitalism’ (p. 263). This is especially relevant today.
