ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the history of corporatist thought and ideology, presents an ideal-typical model of the modern corporatist political society, and offers some comments on the taxonomy and praxis of corporatism. Corporatist theorists trace the origins of their ideas to ancient Greece, even to the origins of civil society in the family, clan, tribe, and organic local community. Greek philosophy and social organization generally form their base points, however: the earliest professional associations, the notions of order and hierarchy, concepts of organic unity in state and society, society as a reflection of its “natural” corporate bodies. The corporatists recognized the alienation of modern mass man, but they argued it was social and cultural as well as economic. The Iberian and Latin American economies came increasingly, under the influence of corporatism, to take on an etatist form, with a strong role accorded the state to manage the economy in the public interest.
