I do briefly discuss the Catholic roots of corporatism in the book. For example, I write on 297-298 (emphasis added):
Fascism is the cult of unity, within all spheres and between all spheres. Fascists are desperate to erode the organic, legal, or cultural boundaries between family and state, public and private, business and the “public good.” Unlike communist Jacobinism (or Jacobin Communism, if you prefer), which expropriated property and uprooted institutions in order to remake society from the ground up, Fascism pragmatically sought to preserve what was good and authentic about society while bending it to the common good. Interests or institutions that stood in the way of progress could be nationalized, to be sure. But if they worked with the regime, if they “did their part,” they could keep their little factories, banks, and department stores.
It’s revealing that corporatism has many of its roots in Catholic doctrine. The 1891 papal encyclical Rerum novarum proposed corporatism or syndicalism in response to the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution. In 1931 an updated encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, reaffirmed the principles of Rerum novarum. The two documents formed the backbone of Progressive Catholic social thought. The Church’s interest in corporatism stemmed from its belief that this was the best way to revive medieval social arrangements that gave man a greater sense of meaning in his life. In short, corporatism was in large measure a spiritual project. Both the cold impersonal forces of Marx’s history and the unloving dogma of Adam Smith’s invisible hand would be rejected in favor of a Third Way that let the “forgotten man” feel like he had a place in the grand scheme of things.
Professor Rosser is absolutely right that for many the Church was “on the right” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But we must ask ourselves a few things. First, what does “on the right” mean? That Marxists wanted to destroy religion — the “opiate of the masses” — doesn’t make religion in general or the Catholic Church in particular, rightwing. Indeed, there were countless Christian socialists who sought to marry collectivism and Christianity (and, as I argue in my book, the progressives were at the forefront of that effort).
One of the reasons I make this distinction between rightwing and leftwing socialism in the book is that the center of gravity in Europe had moved so far to the left that even “the right” had embraced socialistic ideas. Buying-into statism was a lot easier for the European right because they already came out of an absolutist/aristocratic tradition.
There’s a very strong tendency among people resisting my thesis to say fascism was rightwing because various elements of the traditional right embraced it. This is a fair descriptive point, as far as it goes. But I don’t think it goes very far. We shouldn’t talk about the political orientation of people in the same way we talk about identity politics.
Let me see if I can explain this point. If you said, “in the 1930s tall (or Chinese, Jewish, Black, blond, gay whatever) people embraced fascism”, you could then talk about tall fascists. But when non-socialists embrace socialism, you can’t still claim they are non-socialists. When, say, Arriana Huffington moved from right to left (assuming it was anything like a sincere ideological transformation), she became a leftwinger. When “elements of the right” embraced socialism or statism, they became socialists or statists. The relevance of this point can’t be overstated. When I write about the “fascist moment” at the beginning of the 20th century, it’s, in an important sense, a bipartisan point. The choice between “Lenin or Mussolini” was the question vexing the best and the brightest of the intellectual classes, with only a handful of classical liberals and traditionalists resisting the rush to one form of collectivism or another.
The Catholic Church was part of this transatlantic conversation. Catholic corporatist doctrines stemmed from an implicit critique of what the Church saw as the alienating and exploitive effects of capitalism. It was largely an attempt to revive the spiritual holism of the Medieval guild system where everyone knew their place in community. In this sense itt was closely related to syndicalism – which I don’t think many people see as a rightwing orientation, fwiw.
Indeed, I do not think my argument is much threatened by Professor Rosser’s placement of the Catholic Church on the political right. Sure, the Church was anti-Communist. But – as I keep saying around here – being anti-Communist doesn’t automatically make you a rightwinger (if it did, Wilson, JFK, Arthur Schlesinger, Scoop Jackson, et al. would all be rightwingers). Even today, while the Catholic Church is often identified as a rightish institution on some social issues – abortion, euthanasia etc – but when it comes to the Church’s economic agenda, its attitude toward, say, immigration, war and peace, and so on, the Church ceases to be identifiably rightwing. At least that’s the impression I’ve gotten over the years from reading the works of both conservative and liberal Catholics.
Moreover, corporatism was of intense interest to the American liberals and was abhorred by American economic conservatives and classical liberals (though not by many big business leaders. More on that in a moment). New Republic liberals, for example, saw in corporatism a model that could and , often, should be adopted to the American landscape. So in the American context where free markets and limited government largely define the right on economic grounds, it seems to me that corporatism was of the left. And in Europe corporatist and neo-corporatist ideas were most popular in center-left parties. Indeed, as Professor Rosser notes, Sweden’s economy has powerful corporatist elements. Last I checked, few American conservatives looked to Sweden as a North Star for their ideal economic policies. But I seem to recall a few kind words for the Swedish model from the left.