An inconvenient legacy: corporatism and Catholic culture from Fascism to the Republic

Abstract

In the Italian Republic of the late 1940s, the corporatist experience was something of an antimodel. However, some political and legal currents in Italy reflected on the corporatist legacy and on the possibility to make it democratic. Certain Catholic exponents were especially sensitive to the new version of corporatism. Our analysis of the legacy of corporatist thinking in Catholic culture during the early Republican age will be fourfold: reflection on the Constituent Assembly as a potential development away from corporatism; analysis of the main social-economic documents of contemporary political Catholicism; the evolution of some leading Christian Democrats’ theoretical ideas; the debate on “democratic corporatism” in Italian Catholic circles spanning the late 1940s and early 1950s.