From corporatism to the “foundation of labour”: notes on political cultures across Fascist and Republican Italy

Abstract

Until the mid-1930s, corporatism represented the main vehicle of self-representation that fascism gave to its own resolution of the crisis of the modern state; the investment in corporatism involved not only the attempt to build a new institutional architecture that regulated the relations between the State, the individual and society, but also the legal, economic and political debate. However, while the importance of corporatism decreased in the last years of the regime, the labour issue to which it was genetically linked found new impetus. After Liberation Day, the labour issue was not abandoned along with corporatism, but it was laid down in Article 1 of the Constitution. The aim of this paper is to acknowledge the political cultures that in interwar years faced the above-mentioned processes, with particular reference to the fascist “left”, the reformist socialists and, above all, Catholics of different orientations, in order to examine some features of the relationship between the labour issue and statehood across the 20th century.