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Ah, yes, Manoilescu.  He is the Romanian who was a major source for ideas 
on corporatism.  One can certainly find the underpinnings of where the 
Church got its social corporatist ideas from by going all the way back to 
Aquinas, if not earlier. But the context is certainly very different. The 
fundamental idea 
is of course that there should be some kind of harmony between the classes. 
 
I would note in light of the references to Italian fascism, that the term 
"corporatism" has a very checkered history, indeed there is not agreement 
on what it means.  In the more modern context it has come to be used to 
most seriously mean some kind of societal level mechanism for determing the 
distribution between class incomes, especially between wages and profits, 
with the idea of some kind of society level of wage bargaining being the 
key device, with or without government intervention or control. 
 
At least three kinds of such corporatism can be seen then: 1)  fascist, 2) 
consensus, and 3) conflict, with a declining role for government as one 
moves from 1) to 3).  The first is that of Italy and Germany and France 
under fascism and naziism, with the government essentially setting the 
division and labor and capital organized into "chambers" run by the 
government. 
 
The second involves a system that somewhat resembles the first 
organizationally, but operates within a democratic context. The leading 
example would be Austria since World War II up until very recently.  
Apparently the institutional framework in Austria was simply a direct 
carryover from what was in place during World War II under the Nazis, but 
was placed into a less coercive, parliamentary democratic political 
framework. 
 
The third is what one would have found in much of Scandinavia for many of 
the recent decades, with the Swedish system established at Saltsjobaden in 
1938 being the model. In this form, the government plays only a peripheral 
advisory role. The 1938 agreement was made by the Swedish management group, 
the SAF and their union federation, the LO, on their own with only minimal 
input from the government, which however, did sit in on their annual 
negotiations. 
 
      An observation regarding the second and third types is that union interests were
more fully accounted for in the third type than in the second type.  Some see this as one
of the reasons why women have much better labor market conditions in Sweden (and the rest
of Scandinavia) than in Austria, although other social/cultural factors are certainly
involved as well.
 
A good source on this is 
J. Pekkarinen, M. Pohjola, and B. Rowthorn, eds., _Social Corporatism: A 
Superior Economic System?_, 1992, Clarendon Press. 
 
Barkley Rosser 
 
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