Corporatism as a political ideology, closely associated with fascism, is a widely discussed phenomenon. It is often treated as a relic from the past, especially in relation to Italy in the 1920s, although it also fits the political-economic order of the Third Reich exceptionally well. In the introductory textbooks to political ideologies, Corporatism is often contrasted with Liberalism. This is because textbooks are vehicles of the inculcation that free markets exist and that they function. The idea that free markets are also foundational to democracy might be an obvious anachronism, but that does not prevent text books and school curricula from expressing this view without opposition.
In short, the opposition between liberalism as supporting free markets, and corporatism as supporting authoritarianism is a false one. Whereas it is true that corporatism tends to slide into authoritarian role, liberalism is not its opposite but its “wing man” in a good cop / bad cop playbook. Liberalism itself requires corporatism to manage the excesses of its own contradictions. It requires strict property laws, the repression of collective resistance by workers, it demands control over biological and ideological reproduction, it also requires military force to protect its imperialist projects. All these functions are not provided by free markets, but by states. As soon as a state works on behalf of the interests of corporations, it becomes corporatist.
This becomes clear when we understand why corporatist ideology has also permeated the social teachings of the Catholic Church (e.g. Rerum Novarum under Pope Leo XIII, 1891) and one could argue that – for example through the involvement of trade unions in collective bargaining – certain forms of corporatism have also been deployed as ag means to curb rampant exploitation and the exacerbation of class war. The Catholic Church so the social question of the late 19th century as an issue of social order. There was a real threat of class war that would not be contained by nation states. There were basically two answers to this: (a) strengthening the ties between the working class and the nation state through expanding imperialism and sexualizing patriarchy and reproductive health as national interests, and (b) securing a redistribution of wealth that increases the existential security of working class families (the birth of the welfare state). By emphasizing concepts such as human dignity, social justice and solidarity, the Catholic Church clearly favoured option (b). In exchange for more existential security, working class men and women would then have to pledge loyalty and servitude to their capitalist masters.
Corporatism resists clear placement on the conventional political spectrum. This in itself is instructive, since the very idea of such a spectrum tends to obscure the multiplicity of social forces and interests by reducing them to abstract binaries such as “progressive versus conservative” or “inclusive versus exclusive.” Rather than forcing corporatism into the frame of a distinctive political ideology, it is more productive to approach it as a particular mode of social ordering. From this perspective, corporatism is not defined by programmatic content but by the institutional logic through which abstractions such as state, economic, and social movements are created and organized into functional units.
The first consequence of analysing corporatism as a sociological concept is that it directs attention to the very constitution of the opposition between “state” and “society.” This opposition, so often taken as self-evident, is itself a historically and materially produced distinction. Once established, it is replicated in a range of derivative dichotomies—“state” versus “market,” “political” versus “social” interests, “law” versus “normativity”—each of which carries the same reifying effect. By foregrounding corporatism not as an ideology but as a mode of ordering, we are able to see how these oppositions do not simply describe a natural division of spheres but actively organize social relations, channel conflicts, and legitimize particular institutional arrangements.
By focusing on corporatism as a mode of abstraction, we can then also understand why, when facing contradictions, corporatism amplifies the interests of those that wield the most power. It is never neutral, but always engaged in translations of risks and opportunities. This is why the association between corporatism and fascism is historically more prevalent. Class war is not a balanced account of equal opportunities.
For sociology, however, the more decisive point is that the very logic of corporatism is often absorbed into sociological conceptions of society and social order. Classical sociology has thrived on the assumption that the political, the social, and the cultural are autonomous from the economic. This epistemological separation allowed sociological analysis to merge seamlessly with idealist traditions, as if there could be domains of social reality that are not rooted in the materialization of interests; as if there could be forms of power not dependent on the capacity to mobilize violence; as if there could be forms of persuasion unmoored from libidinal desire. In this sense, corporatism persists not only as a mode of governance but as a latent ordering principle within sociology itself, shaping its capacity to distinguish, partition, and hierarchize the spheres of social life.
Disaffected Sociology 
Leave a comment