An american reading of Portuguese corporativism

Abstract

The author presents this text as a review of the important work Corporativism and development: The Portuguese Experience (The University of Massachusets Press, Amherst, 1977) by Howard G. Wiarda. It is a work that - though placing the Salazarist corporativism in the large framework of a tradition, many centuries old, pluricontinental and mainly existing in Iberian and Latin-American states having an organicist tradition of bureaucracy, clientèle and mercantilism - tries to «follow» the overthrown regime from its advent in the thirties till its fall in 1974. In order to call attention to the interest of Wiarda's work, the author gives us,
in the present review, a kind of an «organic résumé» of it, trying to discover the intimate articulations in it and underlining mainly those that connect the analysis of the Estado Novo (New State) with the general theory of corporativism, those that make possible the understanding of the passage from Salazarism to Marcelism (conceiving the latter as a renewal in continuity) and also those that enable us to think the destiny of corporativist organization after the 25^th April 1974.