ABSTRACT
The United States has evolved gradually toward corporatism and without calling it by that name, rather than legislating a manifest corporative set of institutions as many European and Latin American nations did in the 1930s. John C. Calhoun were early corporatists, but in the history of American thought their ideas are usually viewed as curiosities, outside the mainstreams, without relevance in the dominant American liberal tradition. The nations of Iberia and Latin America have always been based upon a tradition that is authoritarian-bureaucratic, hierarchical, elitist, patrimonialist, and corporatist to its core. The Iberic-Latin nations required special treatment as a “4th world of development” which was ill-served by interpretation through the prisms of the great systems theories most commonly used in the social sciences. Labor relations have in large measure passed out of the arena of direct bargaining between employees and employers to encompass a vast array of labor courts, government-appointed arbitrators, and compulsory negotiations and collective bargaining laws.
