ABSTRACT
Corporatism took shape in Italy in the period immediately preceding and following First World War. As an intellectual movement, it was severely critical of economic liberalism, whose individualistic and hedonistic premises it rejected as much as the trust in free market mechanisms (see Zagari 2004). In positive terms, corporatism outlined a national economy as a system shaped by a unitary social spirit, which also implied the implementation of authoritarian and protectionist measures (see Cavalieri 1994). However, it must be borne in mind that the first real expressions of corporatism saw the light only as from the second half of the Twenties, and it would only be between the late Twenties and the early Thirties that Italian economists started a theoretical debate on the matter anew. At the cost of slightly simplifying the issue, three currents of thought can be outlined to illustrate what the Italian economists took corporatism to be.
