ABSTRACT
Of all the great "isms" of the modern world - socialism, capitalism, liberalism, fascism, totalitarianism - the one that is least well known is corporatism. Corporatism maybe defined as a system of social and political organization in which the state controls, limits, sometimes monopolizes, even creates the interest-group life or "civil society" that swirls about it. Like civil society, corporatism has its origins in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. The French Revolution of 1789 abolished the system of estates associated with the ancien regime, and also the system of corporate or group rights and obligations, in favor of the emerging idea, more or less established, of individual rights. In the decades leading up to World War I, the Church sponsored the growth of quite a number of Catholic workers' movements. Political commentators and as social activists have simply assumed that such democratization would automatically result in free associability or uncontrolled interest-group pluralism as well.
