Competing Voices of the Drive to Planning? The Cooperatist Engagement with Corporatism in Romania

Abstract

The article inquiries into the interplay between the discourses of cooperatism and corporatism in pre-communist Romania, by locating both trends within the fold of the drive to economic planning prevalent in the 1930’s and relating them to the development of syndicalism and social policies over the long run. The sophisticated engagement of the cooperatist theorist Gromolsav Mladenatz with the spread of corporatist ideas and practice in Europe is placed at the center of the account and contextualized in the national ideological and political setting, with an emphasis on his efforts to explore the validity of the claims advanced by the contemporary economic theory with a right-wing orientation to strike a revolutionary path away from liberal capitalism, as well as on his largely negative assessment of the same claims. Mladenatz’s own searches for a way out of the economic predicament of the time is shown to have led him, at the end of the period covered, towards a departure from the tenets of dirigisme (otherwise shared, on all accounts, by the cooperatist and corporatist camps). The corresponding contextualization of Mihail Manoilescu’s view of corporatism, by relating it to the various strands of the Romanian politics of professional representation and to all the ideological attitudes of relevance, is the larger objective targeted all throughout.