Self-fashioning of a conservative revolutionary: Salazar's integral corporatism and the international networks of the 1930's

‘The 20th Century will be the Century of Corporatism, as the 19th Century was the Century of Liberalism.’ Written in the first pages of Le Siècle du Corporatisme, Mihail Manoilescu’s words encapsulated the perceived triumph of integral corporatism over liberal democracy and communism in the mid-1930s’ European political and intellectual landscape. Behind this deterministic assessment was the belief that this political doctrine represented an inevitable step in the philosophical evolution of Man and its political institutions; an evolution reaching political maturity in the early thirties, labelling a new hegemonic era in the European ideological scene and inaugurating a new historical period professing (integral) corporatist ideal as l’avenir, as the predictable future of Mankind. In this sense, as individual liberalism had replaced absolutism in the late 18th century, liberalism lost its cultural hegemony to socialism during the 19th century, so would integral corporatism replace these ideologies during the first quarter of the 20th century. 1 And despite Integral Corporatism’s incapacity to be presented as an eternal value as liberalism or socialism, Manoilescu, believing that ‘Liberalism was dead’ and ‘Socialism exhausted’, framed corporatism as the logical expression of a new historical period to which humanity would and should naturally evolve, politically and ideologically.