Wherever one looks in the Iberic-Latin world, corporatist or neocorporatist forms of authority and sociopolitical organization appear to have staged a resurgence. One is used to thinking about such traditional states and societies as Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Paraguay in terms of their authoritarian and corporatist structures, and Portugal has by now been a self-proclaimed corporatist state for some 40 years. We shall have more to say regarding these “persistent strains” later on; what concerns us now is the apparent reemergence of corporatist ideology and organization in a variety of rapidly modernizing systems. Brazil, for instance, has always been less corporatist than Portugal in theory and in law, but today is probably just as corporatist in actual practice. Research on Mexico has by this time largely abandoned the approach that stressed that country's quasi-democratic character or its supposed democratic aspirations in favor of an approach that takes Mexico on its own terms and analyzes its frankly authoritarian and corporatist structures. The resurgence of Peronismo in Argentina clearly carries with it echoes of the corporatist, in this case “justicialist,” solutions of the 1930's and 1940's. In Peru the military elite has vowed to carry through a “revolution from above” employing corporatist ideas and organizations to structure popular participation at the grass-roots and intermediary levels and reaching up to the Council of Ministers and the central state apparatus. And of course in Chile we have seen both Allende's abortive design to install a unicameral legislature based on corporative functional representation, as well as the plans by the generals that overthrew him to inaugurate a similarly functionally representative congress (though obviously the groups represented and their weights would be significantly different in these two designs) and to deal with price, wage, and production issues through a government regulated and controlled system of gremio-sindicato relations.

In the aftermath of the military revolt that overthrew the Popular Unity government of Dr. Salvador Allende in September 1973, reports began to seep out of Chile that the junta was supervising revision of the constitution in a “corporativist” sense. The structural alterations contemplated are designed, in the first instance, to ensure permanent military representation in the councils of government. However, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, head of the military junta, has made it known that the new constitution will also give a prominent place to industrial, commercial, agrobusiness, mining, and professional associations, which he terms “the authentic representatives of the people.” Such employers' and trade associations—known collectively as “gremios patronales,” to distinguish them from trade unions or “gremios de obreros” — have been in existence for many years, but a number of them experienced a sharp upsurge of political militancy in the late 1960's in reaction to what their leaders perceived as the leftward drift of the then-ruling Christian Democratic Party. Their role, under the direction of the Confederation of Production and Commerce, in arousing resistance to the Popular Unity government elected in 1970 and, ultimately, in paralyzing it before its final downfall is widely known, at least in outline.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest among social scientists in authoritarianism, both as a type of regime and as a specific political approach to the problems of economic development and modernization. This revival of interest has been spurred in part by the proliferation of authoritarian regimes in the less developed countries and by the fact that many of these regimes are doing a more than creditable job in stimulating and managing the process of development and modernization.

Until recently, Manoilesco's confident prediction could easily be dismissed as yet another example of the ideological bias, wishful thinking and overinflated rhetoric of the thirties, an événementielle response to a peculiar environment and period. With the subsequent defeat of fascism and National Socialism, the spectre of corporatism no longer seemed to haunt the European scene so fatalistically. For a while, the concept itself was virtually retired from the active lexicon of politics, although it was left on behavioral exhibit, so to speak, in such museums of atavistic political practice as Portugal and Spain.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a few republics began to enjoy more prolonged moments of political stability, Latin American leaders developed a mania for economic progress. Under the influence of a heterodox form of positivism and in many instances inclined to emulate United States social and economic models, progress-oriented Latin Americans looked upon classical liberalism and the bourgeois, individualistic, profit ethic as the keys to success. Traditional paternalistic devices were repudiated in the interest of converting all members of society who were capable of the transformation — considerable doubt prevailed as to whether Indians, Blacks and various mixed bloods were capable — into competitive, individualistic capitalists whose success in attaining self-reliance and economic independence would propel their nations onward.