Taming a regressive utopia, shaping its dystopian history? Corporatist theory and practice across the 1945 divide
Taming a regressive utopia, shaping its dystopian history? Corporatist theory and practice across the 1945 divide

Summary/Abstract: The article surveys segments of the scholarship devoted to the evolution of the corporatist devices of interest representation, pointing to the difficulty of bridging the gap between the treatments of the postwar neocorporatist practices associated with the growth of the welfare state institutions in stable democracies and those targeted at the understanding of (primarily pre- 1945) authoritarian corporatist experiments with a right-wing orientation. The danger of entrenching an idealized history of corporatism over the long run derived from the post-1945 domestication of the notion as a heuristic instrument suited for the understanding of democratic politics is underscored, and the Romanian case is indicated—on the basis of previous researches—as a testing ground for the interpretations in the field.

• Details
• Contents