Corporatism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain: Three Alternatives for a Post-Liberal Order

Abstract

This article engages with the most recent literature on the global circulation of corporatist projects, discussing three reform schemes elaborated in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century – G.D.H. Cole's guild socialism, Dudley Docker's technocratic business parliament and Harold Macmillan's conservative industrial self-government. Overcoming the often too rigid equivalences between corporatism and fascism, this article seeks to ascertain to what extent and with what nuances corporatist ideas circulated among non-fascist political circles in Britain. It is argued that the schemes analysed shared a similar corporatist matrix, which nonetheless served as the core idea of different political strategies. In the conclusions, it is claimed that these dissimilarities are consequential to the degree of adherence to the principles of capitalism, i.e. the profit-earning motive and the private ownership of the means of production, as well as to the democratic level of the institutions proposed.