Il corporativismo “normale”. Giuseppe Toniolo, tra medievalismo, laburismo cattolico e riforma dello Stato

Since his early studies on medieval Florence, the corporative framework of any society was, for Giuseppe Toniolo, its “normal” (as opposed to “pathological”) arrangement. It was so much so that Toniolo didn’t feel the need to theorize about corporativism in itself; but, especially in the sociological works published in the late 1890s and early 1900s, strongly inspired by Leone XXIII’s Rerum Novarum, the topic of a re-organization of contemporary industrial societies on the ground of a strong enhancement of both workers’ and employers’ trade unions was repeatedly addressed. It drove Toniolo to envisage a drastic and visionary State reform, in an anti-individualistic perspective, which apparently bore some similarity with the Corporative system established during the Fascist regime after 1926, but which radically diverged from it, in Toniolo’s view corporativism being essentially pluralistic.