Corporatism and syndicalism have a certain family resemblance as political philosophies and political projects committed to functional representation, but they also differ in other, more fundamental respects. Viewed as forms of economic and political interest intermediation, their crucial common feature is explicit organization in terms of the functions performed in the division of labour by those represented through such organizational forms. Such representation can be organized in various ways, however, which enables one to distinguish syndicalism from corporatism and (...) their variant forms. Both historically and comparatively, syndicalism is simpler and so easier to define. Essentially it comprises an economic and political movement of the working class that is avowedly both anti‐capitalist and anti‐statist; and its ultimate goal is to abolish capitalism and the state in favour of a loose decentralized federation of worker‐owned and worker‐managed production units. Corporatism is harder to encapsulate in a sentence or two. But there is broad agreement that most corporatist projects accept the legitimacy (or, at least, medium‐term inevitability) of both market forces and state institutions but also seek to limit, modify and guide their operation by linking them formally and substantively to functional representation. (shrink)

This essay argues that corporatism in not only inadequate as a social and political philosophy but anti-egalitarian and hierarchical by nature.

Twenty-five years ago the ethical position briefly sketched inToward Reunion in Philosophy seemed novel and exciting. For some reason White's ideas about ethics were not taken up and developed by others. (Even a recent extension of Quine's system to ethics seems either to ignore or to be unaware of White's early suggestions. This task was left for White himself over two decades later. Whether his latest development of his ethical position will become as widely discussed and influential as Quine's epistemological (...) view on which it is based is uncertain. But until many of the problems raised above are answered “corporatism” is not perhaps a metaethical position that deserves to become popular. The promise ofToward Reunion of a viable Quinean metaethics has not been fulfilled. (shrink)

A frayed theoretical discussion has been taking place in most Common Market countries since the mid-1970s, and it has been followed by large-scale empirical research. These studies demonstrate the unforeseen importance of socio-political formations which cannot be comprehended by frameworks based on constitutional law and its understanding of a sound political order. On the contrary, standard constitutional accounts often treat these formations as relics of pre-modern regimes. In fact, however, corporatist arrangements envision socio-political controls not anticipated by the constitutional state. (...) There is an unofficial interaction between associations and interest groups on the one hand, and the government and parties on the other. This has important ramifications for political theory and especially for the conceptualization of democracy. (shrink)

The plethora of tripartite bodies in postcommunist countries seems to suggest the emergence of an East European corporatism. Analysis of arrangements in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland indicates instead the prevalence of illusory corporatism. Token negotiations, nonbinding agreements, and exclusion of the private sector demonstrate that tripartite procedures are deployed to introduce neoliberal, not social democratic, outcomes. A path-dependent argument stressing labor's weak class identity best explains these outcomes. East European labor, unlike historic Western counterparts, is (...) marked by a weak sense of class interests, disinclination to organize the private sector, and declining support from the workforce, making it unable to emerge as a strong force. It is not labor but the new elites that seek tripartism, hoping thereby to share burdens, conform to European norms, and demonstrate responsiveness to society. Formal tripartism also follows from the legacy of state socialism, giving symbolic voice to the formerly included now headed for exclusion. In the end, tripartism helps secure labor's acceptance of its own marginalization. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse à l’histoire et au contenu de la pensée corporatiste française pendant la période de l’Occupation. Dans ce cadre, son objet se limite cependant à l’étude de la contribution intellectuelle des seuls économistes français, et parmi eux uniquement aux universitaires. La référence à la pensée corporatiste concerne ici à la fois leurs analyses et leurs choix méthodologiques, ainsi que leurs réflexions en matière de politique économique. Notre article ne s’intéressera donc que très brièvement à l’origine strictement historique du (...) corporatisme à moins qu’elle ne recoupe certains des débats de fond qui ont eu lieu sous l’Occupation. La première partie de notre contribution porte sur le contexte de l’émergence de la pensée économique corporatiste pendant la période de l’Occupation allemande. La deuxième partie s’intéresse aux recherches universitaires qui ont tenté de mener un travail à dominante économique sur le corporatisme. Six auteurs voient leurs contributions mises en avant : Maurice Bouvier-Ajam, Louis Salleron, Louis Baudin, Gaëtan Pirou, François Perroux et Henri Denis. La troisième partie de notre contribution présente enfin nos conclusions. (shrink)

Based on field research at both the national and local levels, this article reconstructs the emergence of negotiated policy making in Italy in the 1990s. It argues that standard corporatist theory is totally incapable of accounting for the particular organizational mechanisms through which, at critical moments, that is, the moments in which policy change had to be introduced, consensus was mobilized among both middle-level union structures and rank-and-file workers in Italy. In fact, absent centralized organizational capacities, the Italian unions relied (...) heavily on democratic decision-making procedures. These procedures strengthened the unions' capacity to hold to their side of the bargaining in national negotiations through essentially two types of mechanisms, aggregative and deliberative. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There are, at present, at least two basic forms of market economy: one that tends to be open to innovative ideas; the other that tends to be more oriented to social services. The normative significance of these two “models” of market society—roughly speaking, the American and the Continental models—can best be appreciated by noticing that in the first model, entrepreneurship, and participation in the economy more generally, can be a major source of satisfaction for the entrepreneurs and employees, independently (...) of their financial compensation. In the second model, the economy is primarily a means to the end of the goods it produces. Although the second type may be as suited to producing goods as the first type, it has fallen short—for reasons that economists now understand—in generating employee engagement and the satisfactions of exploration and self‐realization. (shrink)

Communism, in Marx' mind, did not mean simple liberation, but the economics of liberation. The realm of necessity (technē) was to become the primary field for emancipation (praxis), the latter taking form in new institutions, responsive to real socio-economic needs. In this sense, the problem of technocracy and the corporatist ethos in Marx are part of a broader discursive structure, which links the experiences of workers through the industrial revolution with the philosophies ofpraxis as they reach from Hegel through Marković.

Communism, in Marx' mind, did not mean simple liberation, but the economics of liberation. The realm of necessity was to become the primary field for emancipation, the latter taking form in new institutions, responsive to real socio-economic needs. In this sense, the problem of technocracy and the corporatist ethos in Marx are part of a broader discursive structure, which links the experiences of workers through the industrial revolution with the philosophies of praxis as they reach from Hegel through Marković.

This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin—namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin was summarizing. Finally, it demonstrates the lasting impact of (...) corporatist law in eighteenth-century France, highlighting Rousseau’s direct borrowings from the corporatist language and logic of contemporary commercial societies. In this regard, the article revisits and updates Otto von Gierke’s classic argument about the origins of the state in corporatist thought. (shrink)

Abstracts of each chapter may be found by typing in your browser search bar, "Jeremy Horne, Managing Complexity Through Social Intelligence: Foundations of the Modern Organic Corporatist State", going to the Springer Publishing website and reading the abstracts for each chapter.

In what way do the corporatist and authoritarian legacies that modelled some Latin American labor institutions influence the opportunities for and restrictions on organizing workers in a new context? To what extent did institutional designs, together with other economic and political factors, influence the characteristics that currently distinguish the union organizations in the countries of the region? Taking into consideration the existence of a broader debate about the consequences of globalization and political democratization for unions, the contribution of historical institutionalism (...) and previous research, in this Article I compare the institutional and organizational dynamics of unions in four countries with authoritarian legacies and corporatist traditions. The Article argues that in spite of these shared traditions, the differences in the institutional designs — which have scarcely been considered in the specialized literature — have historically imposed distinctive features on the associational power of workers and unions. These features not only persist to the present day, but also translate into dissimilar trajectories of the labor movement and opportunities for organizing workers in the last decade. (shrink)

This article discusses one early manifestation of a recurring theme in social theory and sociology: the relationship between general (‘universal’ or ‘grand’) theory and empirical research. For the early critical theorists, empiricism and positivism were associated with technocratic domination. However, there was one place where the opposite view prevailed: science and empiricism were viewed as forces of social and political progress and speculative social theory as a force of reaction. That place was Red Vienna of the 1920s and early 1930s. (...) We examine how this view came to be widespread among Austro-Marxists, empirical researchers and some members of the Vienna Circle. It focuses on the arguments and institutional power of their opponents: reactionary, universalistic and corporatist social theorists. The debate between Catholic corporatist theory and its empiricist critics is located not merely in Vienna but also within wider debates in the German-speaking world. Finally, we seek to link these lesser-known positions to more familiar strands of social thought, namely, those associated with Weber and, more briefly, Durkheim and Elias. (shrink)

This paper explores the connection of offshoring and outsourcing to nonconsensual global pharmaceutical trials in low-income countries. After discussing reasons why the topic of nonconsensual offshored clinical trials may be overlooked in bioethics literature, I suggest that when pharmaceutical corporations offshore clinical trials today, nonconsensual experiments are often foreseeable and not simply the result of aberrant ethical conduct by a few individuals. Offshoring of clinical trials is structured so that experiments can be presented as health care in a unique form (...) of outsourcing from the host country to pharmaceutical corporations. Bioethicists’ assessments of the risks and potential benefits of offshore corporate pharmaceutical trials should therefore systematically include not only the hoped for benefits and the risks of the experimental drug but also the risk that subjects will not have consented, as well as the broader international consequences of nonconsensual experimentation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Forms of Property‐Owning Democracy What Is Stability? Why Does It Matter? The Sense of Justice Participation in Public Life Three Distinctive Features of Rawls's View Democratic Corporatism and Participation Objections Conclusion References.

In order to shed light on the issue of crony corruption in the context of economic transition, I focus on the puzzle of China's unique experience of economic transition characterized by the duality forms and effects of crony corruption underlying local corporatism in a dual-track (i.e., market and political tracks) transition. I argue that the duality of local corporatism derives from the duality of crony corruption. First, the early form of local corporatism as state-business public alliance is (...) embedded in informal crony corruption as positive for the purpose of wealth growth in the initial phase of economic transition with public and private interests aligned as compatible. Second, the later form of local corporatism as official-manager private collusion is embedded in quasi-formal crony corruption as negative for the purpose of wealth transfer in the later phase with public and private interests in conflict as incompatible. The duality of crony corruption in the two phases of economic transition is caused by the interplay between formal and informal factors and between economic and political factors. My contribution is twofold. First, I explain China's transition in terms of crony corruption underlying local corporatism. Second, I develop an integrated framework of crony corruption concerning its content, process, antecedent and consequence. (shrink)

The ‘managed care’ idea: implications for health service systems in Australia The growth of corporatism in health‐care in the US, and the consequences arising from US models of health‐care delivery systems provide an enormously valuable point of comparison with health systems of other developed economies, such as Australia. If lessons are to be learnt from the US, then an analysis of the structure and performance of the US health‐care system provides important background for understanding and assessing contemporary policy changes (...) to administrative and organizational designs and techniques for patient care in Australia. (shrink)

This essay discusses some of the ways in which De iure praedae may be understood to constitute a republican text. It is my argument that the 'Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty' should be firmly located within the over-arching republican discourse of the juvenilia, although the text's republican content is not immediately apparent. On close examination, a republican sub-text is detectible through the author's treatment of the discursive object of the text, the Dutch East India Company , a (...) corporate body. By attempting to legitimate the VOC's natural right to wage just war, Grotius invests a private entity with a public mark of sovereignty. This investiture of a non-state actor with public international legal personality forces a careful reappraisal of two central characteristics of seventeenth-century republican thought: the divisibility of sovereignty, and the fluid demarcation between the 'public' and the 'private' spheres. I conclude that the VOC may be accurately denoted a 'corporate sovereign', an entity whose legal personality is derived from the corporatist principles that underlined early republican and federalist theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Hegel gave the bureaucracy a distinctively corporatist and collegiate structure and insulated it from legislative control. The close match between these features of the Philosophy or Right and the structure of the Prussian bureaucracy, which had been used by reformers to insulate progressive decisions from Junker resistance, suggests that Hegel, too, wanted the bureaucracy to spearhead reform within a hostile environment.

We asked a series of questions to Monica Cioli and David Rifkind, authors of two important books which focus on the process that enabled art and architecture to acquire a specific political meaning under fascism. The outcome is a dialogue that shows how the relationship between fascism and art is not characterized by a mere appropriation or a mutually functional exploitation between the artist or the architect and the fascist regime. Art prepares a specific appropriation of technology and serves to (...) introduce the political anthropology of the fascist man. Similarly, architecture establishes an organization of urban spaces coherent and necessary to the hierarchical order of the corporatist society. (shrink)

This second half of a two-part essay examines how Proudhon’s ideas about monarchy changed during his 1858–62 Belgian exile and further evolved upon his return to France around the time of the 1863 legislative elections. If Proudhon justified monarchy’s role in state formation in the French pre-revolutionary past, he did not want the political liberalization of the Second Empire to lead to a return to a regime ressembling the July Monarchy. He attempted in the final years of his life to (...) develop a theory of constitutional evolution which could explain France’s internal political evolution since 1789 and Europe’s geopolitical evolution since the Vienna Settlement. This theory was designed to indicate why the teleological logic at work in both national and international developments since the French Revolution spelled the death knell for Napoleon III’s regime and pre-empted any regression to those political constitutions which came before the February 1848 Revolution in France. While developing these reflections, Proudhon continued to imagine alternative forms of political and social representation anticipating and influencing the way in which later theories of federalism and corporatism were discussed during the French Third Republic in a context of general dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Corporatist opposition against the introduction of a system of proportional representation in Belgium can essentially be reduced to the opposition by Joris Helleputte. The main reason for this anti-proportionalism way that proportional representation would seriously endanger the growth of a catholic corporatist party and - in the long run - of a catholic corporatist state. In 1894 though, political corporatism isalready on its way back, and so is socio-economie corporatism from 1899 on.In the "Belgische Volksbond" a large majority (...) has come to accept proportional representation. This is one of the main reasons which lead Joris Helleputte on the 21th of July 1895 to definitely resign as a president of this association. Hid 1894 Helleputte had already founded the antiproportionalist newspaper "L'Union" but this disappeared within that same year. Another newspaper venture of his, "Le XXm Siècle" wilt prove more successful, and wilt become an eminent propaganda-tool against proportional representation.On the 4th of July 1899 Helleputte - together with Woeste - presents a proposal in parliament to introduce the uninominal system.A judicious gerrymandering would then ensure a huge catholic majority.Helleputte took it for granted that within the catholic party each "stand" would get a fair share of the seats. But the Helleputte-Woeste proposal dit not receive sufficient support. And eventually proportional representation for the legislative elections was introduced by law on the 29th of December 1899. (shrink)

This article challenges what is now the orthodoxy concerning the heritage of Bourdieu (1930–2002): namely, the judgement that his distinctive sociological innovation has been his theory of social reproduction, and that he has failed to provide a necessary theory of social change. Yet Bourdieu consistently claimed to offer a theory of social transformation as well as accounting for continuities of power. Indeed, he provides two substantive keys for an understanding of historical transformation—first, a theory of prophets (religious or secular) as (...) the authors of heresies or “symbolic revolutions” that dispel current doxa; second, a theory of the “corporatism of the universal”: the role of intellectuals or other educated professionals in pursuit of social justice and other universalistic goals. Moreover, Bourdieu fuses his theories of “symbolic revolutions” with a materialist analysis of their social preconditions, including a fresh account of social crises. Crises—war, famine, recession, and especially the intensified precarity of the educated—have, for him, a profound impact, both within differentiated fields and across fields. Conflicts that become effectivelysynchronizedacross fields acquire great resonance within the wider field of power, particularly due to hysteresis or “maladjusted habitus.” Indeed, the appearance of crises, together with new prophetic heresies, leads the subordinate classes to question the taken-for-granted order of things and to orchestrate their resistance. Alongside his corpus of published writings, this article draws widely on Bourdieu’s posthumously published lectures. These cast a distinctive new light on how his well-known conceptual instruments can aid us in the study of historical change. They also expand on how social science itself might be used to facilitate progressive social movements. (shrink)

A common opinion is that power has shifted from states to companies. This article discusses quantitative and qualitative aspects of power possessed by companies and by states. A more adequate comparison than that between company sales and gross national product is the one between company value added and GNP. Also more adequate is the comparison between the public sector and company net profit. These rival measures take down company power to about a tenth of the sales measure. Also in qualitative (...) terms the "exit power" of the company gives a low impact compared to governmental action and the article concludes that company power by common measures is overestimated. However, the aggregated long-term effect of the market economy on the development of society is most significant. But it is a mistake to use that judgment as an argument for the opinion that business executives are the major power holders in modern societies. Perceptions of power also have an impact on which expectations and commitments that can be judged as realistic and therefore the issue of power is central for the normative discussion about corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

In Political Theology the "Modern Way": The Case of Jacques Almain (d. 1515), Shaun Retallick provides the first monograph on this late medieval philosopher-theologian and conciliarist, and his thought. He demonstrates that Almain's political theology, of which ecclesiology is a sub-discipline, is strongly impacted by the Via moderna. At the heart of his political theology is the individual and his or her will. Yet, the individual is rarely viewed in isolation from others; there is a strong emphasis on community and (...) on the religious and secular bodies through which it is realized. But these bodies, including the Church, are understood in collectivist rather than corporatist terms, which tends to a quite radical form of conciliarism. (shrink)