5/1/2012: He’s apparently the first – Giuseppe Toniolo. And, big surprise, the comments in the National Catholic Reporter story out him as a proto-fascist. From an old joke:
In the beginning, when God and the Devil were creating the Universe, God would create something good, and the Devil would retort with something evil. God created light, the Devil created darkness. God created love, the Devil created hatred. God created generosity, the Devil created greed… Toward the end of the day, when they were both getting tired, God created an economist. The Devil looked puzzled for a long moment, then, with a wicked grin, created another economist.
This sounds like the typical anti-Catholic bigotry. Yes, the man is “outed” as a proto-fascist — in the comments to the article, no less! Undoubtedly, the comments are of the same authoritative quality as, say, the comments in UO Matters.
Right, he’s a venerated late nineteenth early twentieth century Italian Catholic, so he must be a fascist.
But read about what the man actually thought and taught. He’s anything but a “fascist.” He sought a way between socialism/communism and laissez-faire corporate capitalism. A crime against humanity, no doubt. Why, he probably believed in labor unions, social security, that stuff. But feared the all-powerful state. We’re still working on it.
From Brittanica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/138442/corporatism
In France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, supporters of Christian syndicalism revived the theory of corporations in order to combat the revolutionary syndicalists on the one hand and the socialist political parties on the other. The most systematic expositions of the theory were by the Austrian economist Othmar Spann and the Italian leader of Christian democracy Giuseppe Toniolo.
The advent of Italian fascism provided an opportunity to implement the theories of the corporate state. In 1919 Mussolini and his associates in Milan needed the support of the syndicalist wing of the Nationalist Party in order to gain power. Their aim in adopting corporatism—which they viewed as a useful form of social organization that could provide the vehicle for a broad-based and socially harmonious class participation in economic production—was to strengthen Mussolini’s claim to nationalism at the expense of the left wing of the centrist parties and the right wing of the syndicalists.
The practical work of creating Italian fascist syndicates and corporations began immediately after Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922. Italian industrial employers initially refused to cooperate in mixed syndicates or in a single confederation of corporations. A compromise was arranged that called for pairs of syndical confederations in each major field of production, one for employers and one for employees; each pair was to determine the collective labour contracts for all workers and employers in its field. The confederations were to be unified under a ministry of corporations that would have final authority. This so-called constitution for the corporate state was promulgated on April 3, 1926.
The formation of mixed syndical organs or corporations, which was the central aim of the corporative reform, had to wait until 1934, when a decree created 22 corporations—each for a particular field of economic activity (categoria) and each responsible not only for the administration of labour contracts but also for the promotion of the interests of its field in general. At the head of each corporation was a council, on which employers and employees had equal representation. To coordinate the work of the corporations, Mussolini’s government created a central corporative committee, which turned out in practice to be indistinguishable from the ministry of corporations. In 1936 the national Council of Corporations met as the successor to the Chamber of Deputies and as Italy’s supreme legislative body. The council was composed of 823 members, 66 of whom represented the Fascist Party; the remainder comprised representatives of the employer and employee confederations, distributed among the 22 corporations. The creation of this body was heralded as the completion of the legal structure of the corporate state.
The honest and learned scholars of Toniolo here might have noted that he DIED in 1918, the year before Mussolini founded the fascist party, and years before he came to power.
It’s also worth noting that Italy had quite a lot of difficulty in the aftermath of World War I, with very unstable governments — but did get through it far less catastrophically than Germany or Russia.
I haven’t found a cite, but Toniolo’s ideas also seem to have had an impact on the design of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration.