The corporative third way in Social Catholicism (1830 to 1918)

Social Catholicism opposed individualistic conceptions of society in favour of an order of associative institutions fostering a communality of interests between those involved in production processes. As a consequence, guilds were idealised and their model transposed in different ways to the industrial society of the nineteenth century. This paper discusses the different streams of Social Catholicism and the theoretical roots of corporatism in natural law. It will discuss how the idea of a ‘corporative order’ is more grounded in German corporative law than in Neo-Thomism.