Corporatist Theory and Ideology: A Latin American Development Paradigm
![handle is hein.journals/jchs20 and id is 37 raw text is: Corporatist Theory and Ideology:
A Latin American Development Paradigm
HowiMI J. WVMA
What is not in the [North] American tradition but is very
deeply embedded in the Portuguese and South American tradition
is the corporate organization of society. So wrote Marie R.
Madden in 1941.
Corporatism, until recently, had been widely dismissed as both
anachronistic and irrelevant. Corporatism was viewed as a
product of the period between the two world wars of this century
whose time had passed. Discredited by the outcome of World
War II, by the Nuremberg trials, and by its supposed affinities
with fascism, corporatism as an ideology and form of socio-
political organization seemed, for a time, to have been erased
and forgotten as one of the major alternative isms of the
twentieth century. Based largely on the Italian and German
experiences, corporatism was seen either as a post hoc rationali-
zation that had little to do with the real locus of power or as
a confidence trick. Because the manifestly corporatist experi-
ments in Iberia and Latin America were never fully implemented
HOWARD J. WIARDA (BA, University of Michigan; M.A., Ph.D., University
of Florida) is Professor of Political Science and Chairman, Program in Latin Ameri-
can Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Wiarda
is the author of Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Control in Trujillo's
Dominican Republic (1968), The Dominican Republic: Nation in Transition (1969),
The Brazilian Catholic Labor Movement: The Dilemmas of National Development
(1969), Dictatorship, Development and Disintegration: Politics and Social Change in
the Dominican Republic (1975), and Corporatisin and Development: The Portuguese
Experience (1977) and the editor of Politics and Social Change in Latin America:
The Distinct Tradition (1974). JCS has published his The Changing Political Orien-
tation of the Catholic Church in the Dominican Republic (Spring 1965) and The
Churches and Rapid Social Change: Observations on the Differences and Similarities
between Protestants and Catholics in Brazil (Winter 1970) by IHda Siqueira Wiarda
and Howard J. Wiarda. The author's scholarly interests include Latin America,
Iberia, and comparative theories of social change.
The research on which this article is based was undertaken in Latin America and
Iberia in 1972-1973 with the assistance of a grant from the Foreign Area Fellowship
Program, Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of
Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. The present article is
part of a larger research undertaking aimed at developing a general framework for
the analysis of sociopolitical change in the Iberic-Latin tradition. Useful comments
on an earlier draft were offered by IHda Siqueira Wiarda and Edward J. Williams;
however, the views expressed are solely those of the author.
1. Letter to New York Times, 7 August 1941, written in response to a series of
articles in the New York Times on Latin American corporatism. Madden is the
author of Political Theory and Law in Medieval Spain (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 1930).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jchs20&div=11&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Corporatist Theory and Ideology: A Latin American Development Paradigm
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