ABSTRACT
Traditionally corporatism has been a means of providing social solidarity, avoiding class conflict, and discouraging individualism among the masses, while at the same time providing opportunities for participation by the masses in local, regional, and functional groups. Corporatism as originally conceived had been posited on the coequal representation of capital and labor; the corporatist solution had been proffered as a “third way,” which repudiated both capitalism and socialism. Space constraints rule out a detailed treatment of the emergence and gradual institutionalization of the particular Portuguese variant of the “corporative tradition.” The original corporatist scheme was a close reflection of the kind of society Portugal was still in the 1930s: predominantly rural and small-town, Catholic, traditionalist, hierarchically structured, governed by a nationwide system of patron-client relations, largely static. Corporatism in the earlier 1930s form was an idea and mode of organization whose epoch had been superseded.
