Abstract
The article seeks to analyze how the legal thought represented the idea of corporative and neo-corporative order in the framework of the 20th-century in Italian history. The first part is dedicated to highlight the evolutions of historical studies on fascist corporatism through a brief review of the main interpretations over the last decades. Then, the paper describes three different lectures of fascist corporative order brought by the jurists between the twenties and the forties: the vision of those who saw in corporatism the ideological and institutional answer for outlining the identity of the new totalitarian state; the interpretation, typical of jurists with a liberal background, who attempted to fit the corporatist phenomenon (and the 20th century in general) into traditional interpretative categories; and finally, the minority view embraced by jurists having different backgrounds and ideological sensibilities, but nonetheless convinced that the corporatist system should represent an opportunity to imagine types of relationships between private and public, political and economic spheres that were remote both from 19th century individualism and the new frontiers of totalitarianism. The second part tries to stress the so-called neo-corporatism, that is the season of “social consultation” spanning the 1980s and 1990s to see whether and in which sense it is possible to connect this experience both with the interwar corporatism and the democratic constitutional context.
Keywords:
corporatism; neo-corporatism; fascism; democracy; legal history