----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]