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Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network.
I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Melissa Teixeira about her book titled A Third Path, Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal, published by Princeton University Press in 2024, which takes us back in time to quite an interesting period where, after the Great Depression, the world is going, hang on a second, that economic model kind of obviously had some problems.
What alternatives could there be?Obviously Bolshevism, socialism, communism was a whole big thing in that time period.Questions about what the liberal market could look like was a whole big concern.
And as this book details, Brazil and Portugal had an interesting experiment with a potential third path in the middle of these two sort of extremes.And there's actually kind of a lot here.It wasn't just sort of a moment of a thought.
It was a moment of a thought.It was transnational.It had actual implementation in policy spheres that impacted people's everyday lives.And so there's a lot of history here that's very much worth excavating.
So, Melissa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
I am too and I think probably a good place to start is if you could introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book, what questions are you asking in it, kind of how did this project develop?
Of course, well I am a historian of Brazil and Latin America and I'm also very interested in Portugal and the wider Portuguese speaking world, I have always been interested in economics and economic history.
And in this project in particular, I took that interest in economic history and I combined it with intellectual and with legal history.
in order to think about how new economic ideas and programs become politically viable and to explore some of the consequences as much in terms of national economic growth and development as in terms of the everyday experiences of ordinary people.
I would say that with this in mind, there are two questions that tend to drive my research as much in this book as in other projects.
The first is, how do societies, especially in poorer and developing countries, respond to economic crises and experiment with new ideas and programs in order to address their specific economic challenges?And second,
How do dictatorships take advantage of economic crises and legitimize their rule by promising economic development and by making commitments to restore economic justice?In terms of how I came to study corporatism,
More specifically, this book began as my PhD dissertation.I entered graduate school a few years after the 2008 financial crisis.
This was a moment when nations worldwide were debating if and how to implement stimulus packages and financial reforms in order to try to jumpstart recovery and prevent another global crisis.
And many historians in that moment, especially economic historians, were trying to situate the 2008 financial crisis in historical perspective and see what lessons they might be able to offer from the past.
The Great Depression became an obvious point of comparison. But much of these discussions were based on the experiences of the United States and Northern Europe, these wealthy, highly industrialized, or even post-industrialized economies.
And so I decided I wanted to focus on the Great Depression by looking instead to the experiences of Southern Europe and of Latin America, and to think about what kinds of solutions to the 1929 crisis of capitalism emerged from those societies.
And my choice to focus on Brazil and Portugal was not only determined by my interest in these places or my knowledge of Portuguese, but it was also inspired by what I saw at the time as the very different, but I think also very connected experiences of both countries in the drawn out aftermath of the 2008 crisis.
So these very recent events, not always in obvious ways, inspired me to research corporatism in the 1930s and 40s and to understand how the Great Depression generated new economic experiments that went hand in hand with the rise of dictatorships.
As a historian, I'm careful not to be too presentist in my work.And I certainly don't want to draw a direct line of comparison or continuity between current events and the events that I study in the past.
But I do take inspiration from contemporary debates.And in many ways, the debate that unfolded as I was writing this book is a very basic one.What is the role and responsibility of government in responding to economic crises?
And in what ways do economic crises impact poorer and wealthier countries differently and yield very different kinds of political and social responses?
This is very helpful to understand the evolution of the project, both in terms of your own research and of course how it relates to these wider present questions and historical questions more broadly.
But as much as in some ways those questions do speak to
so many different times and places and intellectual histories that could be investigated, you did obviously mention corporatism as being kind of an interest and that might be less familiar to our listeners.
So I wonder if you could tell us a bit more kind of about what it is, why it's tricky to define, and sort of its origins in terms of when and where it developed?
Yes, thank you for that question, and that is the big question of the book.
It is also one of the biggest challenges, I have to say, in writing the book and in talking about it, to define what is corporatism, to explain what distinguished corporatism from other political and economic programs, and to answer, why did it become such an influential ideology in the 1930s?
To begin with the simplest definition of corporatism, the one that appears in the title of the book, The dictators, intellectuals, and industrialists who endorsed this ideology celebrated corporatism as a third path.
They called corporatism a third path between laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the command economy or state-controlled economy associated with communism on the other hand.
There is an inherent problem in defining an ideology in terms of what it is not.
Brazilian and Portuguese conservative intellectuals and political officials were very keen to constantly call their program, their experiment, as neither liberal nor socialist, neither laissez-faire nor state-controlled.
But saying what something is not is not, in fact, a definition. So then what was corporatism?So to be more specific, corporatism is a system by which society is organized according to social and professional groups.
Think labor unions, farmers, guilds, industrial associations.
And the state then can regulate relations between different classes and different economic sectors by working alongside directing and regulating those professional associations with the ultimate goal being social peace and national development.
To give a more specific example, one that is especially relevant to how the Portuguese corporatist model worked,
In a corporatist society, wheat farmers, for example, will join a farmers association, one that is legally recognized by the state and responsible for representing all wheat farmers in a particular region.
This association, this Farmers Guild, or GRAMU as it was called in Portugal, would in theory work in coordination with state agencies, with government ministries, to regulate the wheat sector, to establish price guidelines, production quotas, quality standards for wheat and flour.
And it will also be responsible for delivering welfare benefits to its members.And so in theory, all sectors and professions in a particular economy would be organized in a similar fashion.
Although I'll say right at the start that in practice, there wasn't really an example or a nation where this corporatist model was ever implemented 100% or to encompass all individuals and all economic professions and sectors.
Rather, the implementation of corporatist policies was quite uneven and incomplete.And this is something that I pay attention to in the book.And I will also say that it's probably something that could be said of most economic systems.
So to your follow-up question, why did a system like this one hold so much appeal in the 1920s and 1930s?And this is where I do think it's important to consider corporatism in comparison to other economic systems.
And I think some historical context is useful here.So corporatism becomes a very popular political and economic program starting in the 1920s,
as a set of ideas and policies that are embraced primarily by conservative right-wing Catholic groups across Europe and Latin America.
Corporatism takes hold in many different dictatorships in these decades, including most famously in fascist Italy under Mussolini.
In Spain, first with the dictatorship of Miguel Trimo de Rivera in the early 1920s, and then again under Franco's 40-year dictatorship.In France, the Vichy government would experiment with corporatism during World War II.
And then there are the cases that I focus on in this book in Brazil and Portugal.In Brazil, you have dictators Júlio Vargas and Portuguese dictator Antonio da Levi de Salazar.
Both embrace corporatism as a core governing principle of the Estado Novo or New State regimes that they inaugurate in the 1930s.And both of these dictators give their governments or their regimes the name of Estado Novo or New State.
Now, as much as corporatism was and continues to be associated with dictatorships, it also has various expression in non-dictatorships or in some democratic contexts.And again, this makes the question of definition very, very tricky.
Corporatist policies and systems of labor relations were also introduced in places like Mexico and Argentina. And even a few elements of corporatism crept into some New Deal policies in the United States, as I explore in one of the book's chapters.
But it was in places like Brazil and Portugal where corporatism had its deepest and longest lasting expression, both in ideological terms and in practical or policy terms, which is why I focus on these places.
And to further explain why corporatism became so popular in these places, I want to say something about how the rise of popularity of corporatism in the 1920s was, in fact, a response or reaction to political and economic transformations that had transpired over the previous centuries.
In the 1920s and 1930s, corporatism was not an entirely or totally new ideology.
Instead, it was an attempt by conservative Catholic right-wing groups to reinvent and modernize an older system of representation that had defined the medieval guild system and the imperial or monarchical systems of the early modern period, in which a person's profession or social standing determined their rights and privileges.
This was a world in which society was organized according to a fixed social hierarchy.And the economic system in place in that world was one defined by a guild system of controlled entry into a particular profession.
And for the major European empires, a mercantilist system in which monopoly companies were given special privileges to trade in certain goods and markets.
I'm, of course, making huge simplifications of what the world looked like prior to the rise of political liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism in the 19th century.
But what is very important for my study of corporatism is how these broad trends that I've described in this very particular way is the way in which conservative and Catholic groups in Portugal and Brazil understood their past.
And many of them were very nostalgic for this super hierarchical, controlled and imperial way of organizing society, because they associated those older traditions with order and with stability.
And so Brazilian and Portuguese conservatives spent a lot of time critiquing liberalism, a theory that, well, at least in practice, at least in theory, not always in practice, was, you know, liberalism, a system based in individual freedoms and equal rights for citizens.
These ideas, Brazilian and Portuguese conservatives were time and again say were out of place in their societies.They insisted their populations were not equipped for democracy and that liberalism really just translated to anarchy and chaos.
So, all of this is to say that in many ways, corporatism is being defined against liberalism.
And those who supported corporatism were fundamentally opposed to a system that in any ways talked or discussed about equality among citizens or about free exchange in the marketplace.
But these individuals were just as opposed to and afraid of socialism.And so in the 19th century, socialism became a very appealing alternative to laissez-faire capitalism because of the exploitation of working classes that went hand in hand
with the rise of industrial capitalism.
And so conservative tacit groups acknowledged the misery and social dislocations brought by fast-paced growth, and they worried that socialist doctrines might increasingly appeal to poor and working class groups.
The Russian Revolution, of course, became a turning point, and conservative elites became even more afraid of the violent means that poor and working classes might potentially use to seize power.
And so for many of those individuals who came to endorse corporatism, they endorsed this ideology because it offered a way of responding to the social question that didn't in any way threaten to undermine or overturn existing property and power relations.
They embraced corporatism because it was a way in which the state could
intervene to control or direct economic production, to regulate labor relations, at a moment where there was a lot of worry about both the failures of liberalism, but also a lot of fear about the rising appeal of socialist, communist, and other left-wing programs.
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Okay, so that's an incredibly helpful explanation of what corporatism is, why it was so enticing to, as you said, kind of dictators, but intellectuals, lots of different people talking about this.
And hopefully, I think not just in Brazil and Portugal, though, of course, why those are useful ones to focus on, you've helpfully also covered for us.
Lots of good foundation laid there, but it's one thing for people to have ideas that they're interested in, or even go, ooh, well, laissez-faire capitalism sounds not like a good idea.Socialism sounds not like a good idea.This could work.
There's still a gap, even if those people having those ideas are in power, between thinking those things and actually putting them into law.
So you mentioned that some interesting constitution building was being done in the 1930s in both Brazil and Portugal. Can you tell us a bit more about this?Why was constitution writing happening at this point?
And why was corporatism enshrined in the government, like through the mechanism of constitution writing?
Yeah, absolutely.So the legal dimensions of this project are actually something that took me by surprise while I was doing the archival research for the book in Brazil and in Portugal.
I'm not trained as a lawyer and I came somewhat late to legal history, but my interest in how the law impacts everyday economic life has grown in part thanks to some of the findings in the research on corporatism.
So my interest in the new constitutions drafted in Brazil in the 1930s is in part because I see these constitutions as the byproduct of intellectual and ideological competition between different economic systems.
not just between liberalism, the pre-existing system, and corporatism, the new system, but also between different varieties of corporatism.
That, you know, one of the things that I trace in the book is that corporatism itself is not a monolith, and not everybody agreed as to what it was and how it should be enshrined into law.
One of the things that makes it so interesting to explore this question in Brazil and Portugal, and indeed one of the reasons why these countries work so well together in this trans-narrative connected comparative study of corporatism, is that it was in Portugal and Brazil
that corporatism took institutional and constitutional form.That is that these were the only two countries or only two of three countries to codify corporatism into constitutional form.
The other was Austria, but that constitution was very short-lived on account of then the Nazis' invasion.And so in Portugal and Brazil, you have a kind of longer lasting constitutional experiment with corporatism.
One of the things that I trace in the book is the ways in which the jurists, lawyers, intellectuals, and political officials charged with the responsibility of writing and drafting these new constitutions, how they really did take inspiration from one another, how they
looked across the Atlantic to see what was going on in the other country.And I find some examples of how constitutional drafts and legal ideas and legal books were circulating across the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic in this moment.
So why bother with a constitution at all?And this for me is a really interesting question to ask
considering how both of the dictatorships in power clearly weren't all that interested in abiding by the rule of law or in having their power circumscribed by what was written on paper.
Still, whenever dictators seize power or come to power, they still have to negotiate between the different dominant economic and social groups
They have to figure out who to bring into their power coalition and which individuals to listen to, which ideas to take seriously and how to distinguish their political programs from what preceded them.
And in both Brazil and Portugal, I became very interested in how the process of consolidating and giving legitimacy to these new political programs unfolded in part through the writing of new constitutions.
Of course, and I want to be very clear in stating this, that the process of power consolidation in both countries also unfolded through political violence and very extreme processes of political repression in which liberal, socialist, communist,
trade unionist and other opposition groups were ruthlessly attacked in the very years while these constitutions were being drafted and put into place.
And so I think it's very interesting to think about this obsession with law and occurring at the very same time as you have a lot of very violent forms of state repression taking place.And I think that that isn't an accident either for
So in both Brazil and Portugal, in some ways it's not, or rather for Brazil and Portugal, I'll mention also that in some ways it's not super surprising that constitutions would become so important for these regimes in part because of the legalistic culture in both countries and very longstanding legal traditions.
But also because both of these dictatorships, especially in Portugal, were largely run by jurists and law professors.And I think in part because of the over-representation of jurists and law professors in these dictatorships,
You have this way in which both regimes are kind of displaying a consistent, even obsessive, tendency not only to draft new constitutions and laws, but also to detail the legal theories that they're using to defend how their laws are departing from
normative liberal conventions.I think that the obsession with law is also important for thinking about how both Salazar and Vargas are trying to legitimize their regime as much to their own populations as to the international community.
Now, why did they choose to focus so much on constitutions?I think that also has to do with their bigger project to try to overturn
liberal democratic legal conventions, that in many ways, constitutions are an invention of late 18th and early 19th century liberalism.
The kind of project to codify and put onto paper the rules of governing are an outgrowth of that experiment with liberalism.And that when we think about the role of modern constitutions, it is, you know, something that we
kind of define constitutions as documents crafted to first and foremost itemize the rights and protections afforded to individual citizens, and second, to outline and thereby limit the powers of government.
Now, Vargas and Salazar were not interested in limiting their own powers. And they certainly did not feel that they were bound by the rules that they crafted on papers.
But in some ways, it's a really kind of genius approach to try to subvert liberalism by using one of the primary instruments of liberalism and to try to craft
document, a governing document, that makes a case for an alternative economic and political system, that these constitutions in many ways codified the antithesis of what we come to think of as
democratic-liberal conventions, that is, constitutions that emphasize equality among citizens, limited government powers, protections for private property.
The corporatist constitutions instead worked to codify the notion that the state or the government would sometimes need to curtail private property and individual rights for economic development.
And so in many ways, the ultimate goal of these interwar constitutions was to restrict individual rights and to create legal powers for the state to act on the economy.
That's a lot of very interesting changes that are showing up, as you said, in the document we may not necessarily look to.
Constitutions is, I agree, not necessarily where I'd initially think to look in investigating the questions you raised earlier in this conversation.
But as detailed in that answer, and of course, the book goes into way more detail for anyone who wants that, there is a lot to find by examining these constitutions and questions like, well, why did they even write them in the first place?
I wonder then if you can help us understand kind of what happened next.Like, it's one thing again to write it down, even in all these ways that do, as you say, change so many different kinds of rights for citizens.
Did this also change kind of how the government was organized and how it was being run?
Yeah, that is a great question.And in fact, I end up spending a lot of time in the book thinking about price and thinking about price controls.
And that was an economic intervention that came to me in part because the right to a fair price was something that had in fact been codified into Brazil's 1933 corporatist constitution.
And similar promises to economic stability, economic security, economic protection had also been codified into Brazil's 1930s constitutions, in particular, the 1937 corporatist authoritarian constitution.
And so these regimes, both of them understood the very real, very everyday hardship that their populations were enduring
before, but especially after the 1929 Great Depression, in that price stability was a major issue in countries like Brazil and Portugal.
It was an issue that these economies had been dealing with in the 1920s, especially during and immediately after World War I.
when you had these disruptions to international trade where food became more scarce and it became harder for these economies to feed their own populations.These were crises that erupted in
unimaginable proportions after 1929, as you have a collapse of global trade, rising tariffs, commodity prices following, this would just set the internal economy into a bit of a spiral where at first you have a deflationary spiral take hold in which prices are collapsing kind of quickly and that's bad for farmers, it's also not great for other sectors of the economy.
But then, kind of to everybody's surprise, by the mid-1930s, you had an uptick of prices, especially for food in major urban cities, with kind of inflation becoming a new problem that these regimes had to deal with.
And so this problem of price stability is one of the reasons why questions of price and fair prices or defenses against price gouging were written into the constitutions promulgated in these years.
And it would also become some of the more interesting ways and unexpected ways in which corporatist economic theories were put into practice and that in turn impacted everyday economic life.
So here it's really important, I think, to emphasize that price controls were not a form of government intervention that was unique or even exclusive to Brazil and Portugal.
And certainly it's not a policy that only exists in corporatist countries, that price controls became fairly universal types of government policies in the 1930s.
You see price controls in the United States both before and especially during World War II and in a lot of different countries, right?So then why think so much about price controls in this study of corporatism?
And, well, for me, the key to answering that question is, first and foremost, that in any country, in any society, public officials have to justify their policies, their new pricing policies, according to local ideological and institutional traditions.
And so, in Brazil and Portugal,
The new legal and moral definitions to emerge about fair pricing and used to justify why the government was implementing price controls in so many different sectors depended on the way in which they embrace corporatist theories, and in particular, the corporatist critique of the free market.
So when you think about classical economic theory, prices are understood as variables that should be set according to the laws of supply and demand.
So in a kind of liberal free market laissez-faire economy, the price of a particular good is a price that's going to be derived on account of how much supply and how much demand exists for that particular good.
But in the 1930s, many economists, as well as ordinary people, were coming to the conclusion that those principles of the quote-unquote free market couldn't really be trusted to efficiently allocate goods and resources.
And in fact, many intellectuals, many public officials, and again, many kind of ordinary people were also increasingly calling this free market an instrument of chaos, a mechanism for greed, and just utterly inefficient.And so it's in this context
that these corporatist officials offer an alternative.They offer an alternative that they call a fair price or a just price, and they define this fair price not in terms of supply and demand, but rather as a variable that can be used to balance
or satisfy the interests of different social groups.So a fair price would need to be fair for consumers, for retailers, but also for the agricultural producers, the wheat farmers, to manage this new idea of a fair price.
The government would then create a lot of new agencies and special commissions.
But the idea in these corporatist societies is that corporatist associations, those organs created to represent farmers and bakers, would also have a voice and have a say in how these fair prices were being determined.
And so you have in this moment, Portuguese and Brazilian officials creating new laws and agencies to try to control and regulate pricing and production.And in theory, at least, they had committed to doing so in dialogue or in coordination
with the corporatist associations representing different interest groups in society.
Of course, in practice, what you have with this new system is the creation of new social frictions and new economic problems, as well, you know, theory and practice always kind of diverge, you know, once you have things getting set into motion.
Yeah, so did any of this make a difference?Like did this impact everyday consumers or was it a lot of kind of government doing stuff but didn't really have an impact on the ground?
It did.It absolutely did.It's hard to measure at the national scale the impact in part because of the disaggregate nature of the economic data we have in this moment and the kind of piecemeal way of working through the archive.
But one of the places where I was able to find evidence of how these new laws, how these new ideas, how these new economic principles were impacting everyday economic life had to do with some of the very uncanny or very remarkable and unexpected enforcement mechanisms that were put into place.
Very interestingly, parallel things happen in both Brazil and Portugal, but for the sake of kind of time, I'm gonna focus on an example from Brazil.
So I had mentioned prior that Brazil's 1937 constitution included some protections and provisions about kind of the economic well-being of the people, about prices, et cetera.
In fact, one article in this constitution declared that it was the state's responsibility to protect the popular economy with popular economy meaning the kind of savings and economic well-being of ordinary people, ordinary Brazilians.
And this constitutional principle was given legal force with a special decree law that was issued in 1938.And this law was implemented to outline and clarify what kinds of economic activities could be considered crimes against the popular economy?
Or what kinds of economic activities were considered harmful to the well-being of ordinary citizens?
And some of the crimes outlined in this law included things like hoarding goods with the intent to manipulate prices, forming cartels, charging miserious interest rates,
or defying price tables or kind of defying the price controls that the government was trying to put into place in order to deal with some of the larger issues of price instability in this moment.
Now, for me, one of the very interesting twists in this history is that Vargas, in this moment, appointed a special military tribunal rather than ordinary courts to enforce this special decree law and to adjudicate economic crimes.
This special military tribunal, the National Security Tribunal, has a fascinating history, in part because it was first created in 1936 by Vargas to wage
a violent and very repressive campaign against his opponents, targeting communists and integralists, members of the far right wing faction in Brazil.
But after these kind of political purges transpired and Vargas was able to kind of solidify his hold on power, he transformed this tribunal into something else and used this tribunal in part to enforce new economic control.
And I found it really quite remarkable that a special tribunal, a special military tribunal created for political repression was then repurposed for the task of regulating everyday market activities.
For me, this National Security Tribunal kind of epitomized the ways in which you have the emergence of a new authoritarian legality in this moment, an authoritarian legality that is trying to enforce and drive a very statist approach to fixing economic problems in the Vargas
era.Now, I looked at hundreds of these trials, and many of them are quite fascinating, that looking at some of these legal proceedings allowed me to explore, for example, the ways in which coffee merchants were kind of
of brought to trial for price gouging, but also the ways in which coffee merchants try to advocate for their interests through their own professional association.I also got insight into the way in which street vendors and
small-time retailers would ultimately face the brunt of these new kind of draconian laws, the ways in which they kind of struggled to navigate the new bureaucracy, the new bureaucracies and laws that were now governing everyday economic life.
I show that certainly these laws didn't really work to guarantee fair pricing.They certainly didn't work in practice the ways in which the law professors and political officials who drafted them had intended these laws to work.
But what I also find and emphasize is the ways in which sometimes even incomplete experiments can generate a new set of economic expectations and can inform and shape rising popular demands that citizens pose to their governments.
So I find it really interesting how a new vocabulary for talking about the economy and economic fairness arises out of some of these market controls and these legal processes for trying to enforce these market controls.
I also find it very interesting the ways in which Vargas, and also Salazar in Portugal in very different ways, how they used these everyday examples to also make a case for their dictatorships, to defend the ways in which they were serving and acting as the protector of ordinary people from exploitation.
and how they continued making and kind of propagandizing these arguments, even though it became increasingly apparent that it was kind of poor working class, ordinary people who bore the brunt of enforcement mechanisms and had to, and in fact really struggled to figure out how to navigate their economic lives, how to satisfy very basic economic needs,
in an economy that, you know, was increasingly shaped by a very opaque set of laws and controls.
This is really interesting to trace, as you've done, from where was the idea coming from and why it was so interesting, why and how did it show up at the constitution, how did this impact the government, and then how did it impact people's actual economic behavior, but also, as you said, their expectations and their political expectations as well.
So that's a really interesting trajectory for you to have traced for us. I wonder if we can do another sort of tracing, rather than from ideas through government down to the people within Brazil or Portugal.
What about, if that's vertically, horizontally, I suppose, or more crucially, transnationally?
You've mentioned a few times that it's not just Brazil and Portugal, obviously, that are dealing with these problems or thinking about corporatism as a solution.
Can you tell us a bit more about the ways in which this is a transnational enterprise and sort of what using this lens helps us understand? Yeah, absolutely.
So one of the things that really drew me to corporatism is the way in which it is a word, an ism, that is often used to explain, to describe a wide variety of national economic political systems or different approaches to labor relations.
And so it is a very diffused political system, political ideology.
And I think in part of, because of that diffusion, the ways in which it kind of appears everywhere, there's also a kind of assumption made by a lot of scholars that because a little bit of it appears in so many different places, ultimately it's not especially distinct or perhaps especially interesting, right?
ambitions in writing this book is to try to bring specificity to this political program, to this set of ideas and practices that would shape the economic lives of millions of people, while still emphasizing and accounting for how it was a very transnational program and project.
And in fact, both of these two things go together.That, you know, one of the reasons why you have it appearing in various forms in various different places is because people, their ideas, and they both circulated a lot in the 1930s.
And this is interesting to point out in and of itself, because when we think about the 1930s, we think about this as a period of rising protectionism and violent nationalism and political extremism and kind of countries closing in on themselves.
But rising nationalism in this period didn't block transnational circulation.It didn't prevent the movement of people, ideas, and books from place to place.And in fact, it became easier in this decade to borrow from some places than from others.
And so I show how Brazilian and Portuguese intellectuals drew inspiration and legitimacy from one another.
how different individuals' ideas and policies circulated between these two countries in the 1930s and 40s, in part because these two countries were connected by a shared language, a shared history.
a history which was being mobilized, as I mentioned earlier, in order to defend their rejection of liberalism, in order to defend their project to try to restore this older corporatist tradition.
And so because of this, the Luso-Brazilian corridor of the Atlantic Ocean became really vibrant with intellectual and policy exchange, exchanges that in turn emboldened the rise of dictators in both places.
Now, in the book, I focus primarily on connections between Brazilian and Portuguese intellectuals, but I'm also very interested in showing how Brazilian officials, Portuguese officials, how they were also influenced by and in dialogue with U.S.
intellectuals and U.S.policymakers, those responsible for the New Deal.I also show how Italian economists and Italian jurists
travel to Brazil and Portugal in the 1930s and the ways in which Mussolini's own experiment with corporatism in fascist Italy was also an important point of inspiration for both Brazilian and Portuguese dictatorships in these years.
But there is something that becomes very unique, I think, to Brazilian and Portuguese exchanges.
I think that conservative intellectuals in Brazil and Portugal turned to one another because of how they wanted to celebrate their kind of very particular Catholic, corporatist, and authoritarian traditions and how they saw their experiment as an antidote or as a response to the materialist, capitalist, Anglo-American block of nations
and to the collectivist totalitarian Soviet experiments.And so they wanted to create or show and celebrate this Luso-Brazilian world, this Portuguese-Brazilian world, as a sea of a kind of third path between these two extremes.
And I think this is really important to highlight because so much of how we study the 1930s and 40s tends to get refracted through the ideological conflicts of the Cold War, a conflict that made it seem as if there were only two options available to the developing world.
US-style capitalism or Soviet-style communism.And so I think to study corporatism and to be reminded of the connected experiments in Brazil and Portugal,
is to consider and to emphasize that there were more than two economic systems to choose from in these years, and that poor and underdeveloped countries experimented with many alternative paths in these decades, and they also creatively combined policies from many different parts of the world.
This is, I think, a very key point, right, that we can just assume that because of what happens, you know, in the 50s, 60s, 70s, etc., that must be what was happening in the 30s and 40s as well.
There was a lot going on, as you mentioned, with experiments.Obviously, another big thing that was happening was World War II.So could we sort of, you know, we've already got a lot of things that we're discussing, but can we throw that in as well?
What impact did World War II have on corporatism, on corporatism as it was relating to these ideological and economic discussions?
Yeah, I mean, World War II, you know, it was a major global moment and it was a huge, it presented a huge political and economic crisis for both the Salazar dictatorship and the Vargas dictatorship in the 1940s.
So, in some ways, the war, kind of one of the immediate impacts of the war for these two different countries became the new economic crisis that was brought by World War II, that you have on account of the war,
and economic blockades, general disruptions to international trade.And so in Portugal, in Brazil, you have food shortages.This intensified the kind of existence of contraband illegal markets.
This also meant that it became harder to regulate the internal economy. And so, in many ways, World War II became a huge and obvious test to the corporatist system, right?
I mean, if the corporatist system had been implemented in response to the Great Depression, and if it was implemented to try to replace the free market and to show how governments can organize farmers, organize workers into guilds and unions,
and use these associations in order to regulate economic production, in order to prevent kind of rapid or huge highs and lows of prices, all of that was put to the test during World War II.
And this carefully constructed corporatist system of the 1930s very quickly started to collapse as this new economic crisis unfolded.
So what becomes interesting during World War II isn't just that the corporatist controls don't work to ensure price stability, social peace, don't work to kind of regulate a stable amount of economic production in key factors.
What becomes interesting is that as it becomes clearer and clearer that the controls in place are actually part of the problem, how you have the rise of
black markets or contraband markets on account of price controls, how you have more hoarding on account of the market and kind of production quotas, how the kind of failures of the system lead governments in both Brazil and Portugal to in fact double down on the corporatist system and to double down and in fact increase the scope of state interventions and market controls over the economy.
And so in both countries, you see the creation of even more special government commissions, staffed by experts, staffed by economists and statisticians, in order to proliferate the number of price controls, export licenses, and other ordinances to regulate local production.
In Brazil, you have the way in which that military tribunal I mentioned
is doing even more work during World War II, that you have a rise of denunciations, that you have a rise in the number of legal proceedings about economic crimes, about price dodging, about violations to price controls.
And so you have a way in which this new bureaucracy is both expanding very, very quickly, but it's also kind of bursting at the seams in that these new institutions aren't very effective at administering justice.
They're not very effective at responding to the new economic crises emerging with World War II.And so what becomes very interesting for me isn't that, oh, corporatism works really well, or, oh, actually the system ended up not working really well.
It ended up being a little bit of a failure.
For me, what becomes really interesting is the ways in which, despite the ways in which the system doesn't work as well as expected or hoped, various elements of this corporatist system end up surviving both of these regimes into the post-war period.
And they also continue to inform the ways in which ordinary popular citizens make expectations and kind of voice their expectations and demands in terms of how government should respond to economic crisis.
So price controls might not work as intended or as desired, and yet this idea of a fair price or even the ways in which people wanted price controls, some of that persists, even as World War II shows the weaknesses of these economic systems.
I found that so fascinating to read about in the book.I think you had a quote, eclipsed but not erased after World War II, and this idea of the kind of continued influence of it, even as so many other things change, is really interesting.
Is there anything further we should understand in terms of the kind of long-term influences or impacts of corporatism as we come towards the end of our discussion?
Yeah, so I think here it's important to think about the diverging impacts of the continued legacies of corporatism or kind of the divergent legacies of corporatism, I might say more
clearly or more straightforwardly, that again, one of the uses for me in thinking about Brazil and Portugal together is not to say that corporatism was the same in both countries, right?Quite the contrary.
And in fact, one of the things that I think makes this transnational story so productive is that these were two very, very different countries. two very different sizes, different demographics, different historical trajectories.
And that also shapes the kind of legacies of corporatism in both places that, in the case of Brazil, you have a really interesting way in which corporatism is
erase, or people try to erase corporatism after 1945, that you have Vargas being kind of deposed or asked to leave power in 1945 after World War II. And in those immediate years, the word corporatism was erased from the Constitution.
It was erased from many of the laws that had been promulgated by Vargas in the 1930s and 40s.
Yet in very interesting ways, in some of these laws, they really do just erase the word, but they keep the institutions and the kind of intent behind those institutions and laws in place.
And so erasing the word didn't lead to a dismantling of those corporatist institutions.And in fact, Vargas himself didn't disappear.In fact, he returned to power in 1951, popularly elected, and he became
you know, hugely powerful and influential populist figure in the early 1950s, in part because of how he had kind of incorporated working classes into his political coalition.His policies also didn't disappear.
And in fact, when he came back to power in 1951, he really continued with many of the policies that had been tested or inaugurated in the 1930s and 40s, including price control.
And so those policies then really do become the kind of institutional substrata for how Vargas and subsequent leaders in Brazil would really inaugurate a big push for industrialization and economic development in the post-war periods.
not only in terms of the policies and laws in place, but in terms of a governing logic in which the state was responsible for organizing class and economic interests in pursuit of social peace and development.
So I think Brazil is an interesting case because even though you have an effort to kind of erase some of the influence of corporatism, as corporatism becomes increasingly associated with
interwar dictatorship, with interwar fascism, you also have the survival of many of the kind of core assumptions and core laws and institutions that were created in the 1930s and 40s.
And so I think that that is kind of one of the major takeaways to think about the kind of origins of the post-war development state in these 1930s experiments.
Yeah, it's really interesting to think about that and definitely kind of gives even more impetus to why this is an important topic to excavate historically because it isn't just sort of one moment in the early 30s.
It does have all of these different impacts and legacies.So thank you for taking us on the journey through the economics and the politics and the law and the transnational, I mean, so many things wrapped up in this book.
And a lot of work, obviously, that went into kind of making sense of it.So now that it's done, and I suppose, finally off your plate, is it too soon to ask about what might be on the horizon for you?
I don't know, sometimes there are spinoff projects from a book, or something sparked the next idea, or maybe the answer is, I'm going to go sleep for six months.What does the future look like?
I mean, that's a great question.And I'm very excited to speak about my new project because I'm very excited about it.My new project is on inflation and post-war Brazil.
I became interested in inflation while doing this research on corporatism, in part because I was really surprised by how price instability was such a big social, economic, political challenge
that Vargas and Salazar had to deal with and the way in which price controls were implemented and how these price controls, even though they really work, how they kind of stayed in place and became an important feature
in these post-war economies, especially as a way of stabilizing the cost of living issue, as Brazil in particular underwent a very fast-paced process of economic development.
And so this got me thinking about inflation, to thinking about inflation as an intellectual problem.How do you explain inflation?What drives inflation?The economic debates often very polemical about the causes and consequences of inflation.
I also, you know, I started working on this project before the COVID pandemic and post-pandemic recovery made inflation an issue that everybody was talking about.
And certainly that has been a huge topic of debate and concern here in the United States during the 2024 election cycle.And so these kind of contemporary debates about inflation have
made me even more excited to think about inflation in a historical context and to think about the ways in which governments try to address, respond to inflation or kind of mitigate the consequences. for working classes and middle classes.
And I think Brazil makes a really great case study to explore these questions, in part because Brazil experienced persistently high and chronic inflation from the 1950s to the 1990s.When I say high, I mean very, very high.
We have double-digit rates in the 60s and 70s when the military dictatorship takes power in 1964.
And by the time that Brazil is undergoing its redemocratization in the mid-1980s, inflation has reached triple-digit rates, and it would reach 3,000% by the early 1990s.
So these are very, very high inflation rates, very destabilizing, and a huge concern in a country with such high levels of economic and social inequality.
And so I'm very interested in thinking about inflation, thinking about this in terms of the policymaking around inflation, but also thinking about how popular classes
mobilized around the cost of living issue and mobilized in order to turn inflation and their concerns about rising cost of living into one of the major kind of mobilizing points to oppose a military dictatorship, to try to bring about democratization.
in the 1980s, and so I'm really interested in inflation as an economic history, as a social history, but also as a political history in terms of how popular classes go about demanding price stability, demanding economic shareness, and how this in turn becomes really important
to the making of a new democracy in Brazil in the 1980s and in subsequent decades.All right.
Well, that sounds like a very intriguing project.So best of luck with that.And thank you for the sneak peek.In many ways, it sounds similar in terms of weaving lots of different pieces together.
It has, of course, this book, so I'm sure it'll end up with something very interesting.But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled A Third Path.
Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal, published by Princeton University Press in 2024.Melissa, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about the book.
Thank you so much, Miranda.This has been a really delightful conversation.So thank you for your questions and for the venue, for the opportunity.
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