The National Council of Corporations was instituted with the Royal Decree No. 1131 of 1926, only to be dissolved 17 years later with Royal Decree No. 721. Corporatism, or rather the institution that was to guarantee its implementation, was a product of the fascist regime, and perished with the latter. But there is no easy answer to the question about the exact nature of corporatism, and of the theories supporting it. Significantly enough, historians have referred to it as “indecipherable corporatism” (Faucci 2014) or the “myth of corporatism” (Santomassimo 2006). As is the case with so many aspects of the “founding” theories of fascism, it is hard—if not impossible—to disentangle the elements of pure propaganda from theoretical assumption. Economically, corporatism was presented as the basis for the construction of the so-called “third way”, alternative to capitalism and socialism, i.e. to the anarchy of laissez-faire and homo œconomicus on the one hand, and to rigid planning on the other. The results were far from brilliant. Giuseppe Bruguier Pacini, an economist who was certainly not unfriendly to the regime, made his view clear in 1937, in the Archivio di studi corporativi, one of the crucial journals in the debate on these issues:
In order to achieve the unified and systematic reconstruction of economic science that befits scientific logical procedure, the need was in the first place to define an “economic principle” to place at the foundation of the theory, a principle that, like the hedonistic principle of minimum means and the postulate of homo oeconomicus, was to be so general as to apply to the entire sphere of economic science. But it was also, unlike them, not merely formal and abstract. It was concrete, implying as well the national goals which we have seen at the basis of the Labour Charter and corporative legislation […]. As a result of failing to address this problem with due awareness, the above-mentioned corporatist economists have not succeeded in giving us a satisfactory economic theory. (Bruguier Pacini 1937, 76–77)
The Labour Charter mentioned by Bruguier Pacini represented the legal document introduced by fascism to regulate labour relations, proclaiming that the corporations constituted “the united organisation of the forces of production” (article VI). In practice, the Charter prohibited freely organised unions and entrusted settlement of differences between employers and workers to the corporations themselves, adding that “the corporative state considers private enterprise in the field of production as the most efficient and useful means in the interest of the Nation” (article VII).
Guido Melis recalls the various stages that corporatism went through without ever settling the fundamental contradiction of the “‘theoretical paradox’ – prior to the practical paradox – of a state that took it upon itself to safeguard private property but at the same time intended to take on the role of programmatic reformer of the economy” (Melis 2018, 425). In practice, thanks precisely to the participation of the corporative bodies in many aspects of the country’s economic life,1 corporatism became the ideal cover for the creation of a social block forged from “convergence between big business and state bureaucracy” (Castronovo 1975, 331).
However, despite its evident theoretical limits—perhaps, paradoxically, precisely because of them—Italian corporatism enjoyed a certain fame abroad (Guidi 2000; Faucci 2014), in the context of a “corporatist” Europe (Maier 1975). The aim of this essay is to analyse a number of conferences, seen as crucial points in the process of forging and consolidating Italian corporatism.
Equal room will be devoted to the last stage of fascism, when the regime addressed the issue of the “new economic order” that would come about when the war was over. Here corporatism—when not openly contested—was relegated to a secondary position, and debate revolved around economic planning, seen as a possible development of the economic system in post-war Italian society, and as an inevitable postponement of the corporative “third way”.
1 The Conferences on Corporatism: A Short and Contradictory Season
The main conferences organised during the fascist Ventennio (see Table 1), in their approach and in the aims pursued, are conditioned by the political dynamics within the regime, by the close confrontation between “moderate corporatists” and “integral corporatists”, as well as by the political and economic questions (crisis of 1929, autarky, war economy) with which the regime had to deal. An indicator that we can use to decipher the weight they had in orienting the public debate on corporatism is the room given to strictly economic issues and to the actors who discussed them. Undoubtedly, the first and most significant conferences took place from 1930 to 1935, in the five years in which the debate on the foundation of the new science of corporative economics was more lively and effective (Fusco 2007; Cerasi 2019). There is no doubt that the two conferences held in Rome and Ferrara, organised in these years by the Ministry of Corporations under the careful direction of Giuseppe Bottai,2 represented the moment of the most intense theoretical debate on corporatism.
Table 1
Conferences on corporatism and planning
I Convegno di studi sindacali e corporativi | [1st Conference of union and corporative studies] | Rome, 2–3 May 1930 |
II Convegno di studi sindacali e corporativi | [2nd Conference of union and corporative studies] | Ferrara, 5–8 May 1932 |
Convegno italo-francese di studi corporativi | [Italian and French Conference of corporative studies] | Rome, 20–23 May 1935 |
I Convegno nazionale di studi autarchici | [1st National Conference of autarkic studies] | Milan, 25–27 April 1939 |
II Convegno nazionale di studi autarchici | [2nd National Conference of autarkic studies] | Milan, 25–27 April 1940 |
Convegno nazionale di studi economici e sociali su “Orientamenti dell’Economia nell’Europa Fascista” | [National Conference of economic and social studies on “Orientations of the Economy in Fascist Europe”] | Turin, 13–14 January 1941 |
Convegno per lo studio dei problemi economici dell’ordine nuovo | [Conference for the study of the economic problems of the new order] | Pisa, 18–23 May 1942 |
XLI Riunione della Società Italiana per il progresso delle Scienze | [41st Meeting of the Italian Society for the Advancement of Science] | Rome, 27 September–1 October 1942 |
Convegno nazionale dei Gruppi scientifici dell’Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista su “Il Piano economico” | [National Conference of the Scientific Groups of the National Institute of Fascist Culture on “The Economic Plan”] | Rome, 24–26 November 1942 and 5–6 April 1943 |
Equally emblematic is the Italo-French conference of 1935, which can be considered a juncture between the first season of reflection on corporatism and a second stage in which corporatist themes underwent a decisive downsizing, reflecting the sudden process of crystallisation of corporative structures triggered by the Ethiopian war and the international sanctions that struck Italy. In the second half of the decade, the organisation of conferences no longer came from official institutions, which were replaced by some student associations, the Fascist University Groups (GUFs). Nevertheless, the issue of corporatism, as we shall see later, underwent a rapid eclipse, leaving room for discussions on the autarkic economy and the place of Italy in a rapidly changing international economic order.
The first Conference of union and corporative studies was held in Rome on 2 and 3 May 1930, under the chairmanship of Bottai. Two hundred and thirty nine delegates attended. The prevailing topics were in the ar...