From the 1930s through the postwar period, various national governments experimented with economic and social policies that rejected both capitalism and communism. Corporatism represented one such project. Corporatists in Brazil and Portugal put forth an essentially Catholic, organicist vision of society that sought to increase productivity while reducing social conflict. They also advocated for intensive state-led economic organization and regulation. Rather than conflate corporatism with fascism, an ideology that shared some of corporatism’s features, Melissa Teixeira’s book treats corporatist doctrine on its own terms. Through close archival research and impressive historiographical synthesis, A Third Path contributes to new transnational histories of the political right. It also brings the South Atlantic to bear on global economic history and offers a sometimes surprising pre-history of developmentalism.

As Teixeira herself admits, corporatism is “difficult to pin down” and represented “more a framework, logic, and worldview concerning state-society relations” than a particular set of laws, institutions, or policy (5). Spanning the period from the 1930s through the 1960s, the book first teases out what corporatism meant in Brazil and Portugal in terms of ideas and ideology (Chapter 1). In subsequent chapters, Teixeira examines corporatism’s political–constitutional organization (Chapter 2), the economic policies associated with it (Chapters 3 and 4), and its more far-reaching consequences for daily life, whether in terms of price controls, the wartime control economy, or planning (Chapters 5–7). The author’s goal is not simply to explain how corporatism looked in these archetypal corporatist countries but instead to use Brazil and Portugal to better understand third-way politics in general. Teixeira’s argument centers on the way that these two countries responded to the Great Depression and the economic challenges of World War II. It also considers how Brazil and Portugal related to one another during what Eric Hobsbawm called “The Age of Extremes.” The implications of the book, however, are broader. A Third Path traces the choices that confronted policymakers in largely agrarian, late-to-industrialize economies, and it considers the long-term consequences of those decisions well after corporatism, as a term, disappeared from common usage.

In Chapter 1, Teixeira provides an intellectual history of corporatism in the wake of the Great Depression. Through the work of Portugal’s António Ferro and Brazil’s Oliveira Vianna, among others, readers encounter the idea of economic “corporations” not as big business but instead as neo-traditionalist pillars of the social order that harkened back to medieval guilds. Chapter 2 examines how corporatism was enshrined in constitutional law. Of particular importance is how the Catholic, organicist vision of society took root institutionally in Brazil’s constitutions of 1934 and 1937 and Portugal’s constitution of 1933. The latter even provided for a Câmara Corporativa, literally a new corporatist branch of government separate from the legislature and judiciary. Teixeira’s research into draft constitutions and her analysis of António Salazar and Marcello Caetano using a transnational frame are particularly noteworthy.

After providing this political constitutional background, Teixeira launches into the crux of the book, which she calls an “intellectual history of economic policymaking” (131). This is an intellectual history of not only canonical corporatists such as Oliveira Vianna but also lesser-known figures, such as Arthur Eugênio Torres Filho, who made corporatism work in Brazil at a practical level. Readers will appreciate both the macroscopic view of Teixeira’s third chapter, “Corporatist Economics and the Third Path,” and the more technical aspects of price ceilings and controls, which are examined in Chapter 4. Ensuring affordable and just prices for basic foodstuffs such as wheat, bread, and butter—and for the Portuguese, cod and olive oil—was essential to political stability and the corporatist worldview.

Whereas the early chapters are largely top-down in nature, Chapters 5 and 6 will be of greatest interest to social historians. In these chapters, readers see not just policymakers but also price inspectors, grocery clerks, and consumers. What is more, Teixeira analyzes important laws such as Brazil’s Decree Law No. 869, which was designed to combat “speculation, injurious competition, usury, price gouging, and other economic crimes” (165), as well as the legal cases that were brought to the Nationality Security Tribunal that provided for the law’s enforcement. Finally, Teixeira shows how the conditions of World War II and the immediate postwar period undermined the corporatist project. But rather than simply historicize corporatism, Teixeira’s book magisterially considers how its “ideas and institutions endured” (235) in the developmentalist states that followed.