Corporatism in the Romanian Tradition: Top-down and Bottom-up Lineages

The article traces the beginnings of corporatist advocacy and politics in interwar Romania to two distinct – however interrelated – paths of development: the top-down one, of ideological imports from the milieus of the rising right-wing political regimes with corporatist credentials, primarily that of fascist Italy; and the bottom-up one, leading from the grass-roots associational structures with petty entrepreneurial and white collar constituencies – themselves placed at the crossroads of the changing, and overlapping, legislative designs for the representation of professional interests – to projects of overall political reconstruction. The contextualization of Mihail Manoilescu’s theory of corporatism and of the corporatist conception of professional representation itself is the larger target of the inquiry.