Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism.
In a corporatist society, the government vertically integrates economic and social groups into the state so that it can manage labor and economic production. In the 1930s, the dictatorships of Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Antonio de Oliveira Salazar in the Portuguese Empire seized upon corporatist ideas to jump-start state-led economic development. In “A Third Path,” Melissa Teixeira examines these pivotal but still understudied initiatives.
What distinguished Portuguese and Brazilian corporatism from other countries’ experiments with the mixed economy was how Vargas and Salazar dismantled liberal democratic institutions, celebrating their efforts to limit individual freedoms and property in pursuit of economic recovery and social peace.
