A Third Path

Download or read book A Third Path written by Melissa Teixeira and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A transnational history of corporatism-a "third path" between capitalism and communism-centered on mid-twentieth century Brazil. Following the First World War, there was a widespread feeling that the unchecked free-market competition had given rise to financial crisis, social unrest, and chronic underdevelopment. With people and governments across the world looking for an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, Brazil took a central role in experimenting with a "third path" between capitalism and communism: corporatism. Remaking Capitalism: A Global History of Corporatism in Brazil, 1920s-1960s argues that corporatism transformed the Brazilian state into an agent of economic development, and it explains why it matters that this transformation was engineered under an authoritarian regime. Melissa Teixeira incorporates wide-ranging legal, economic, and cultural sources to document the process of state-building from the perspective of government ministries and grocery markets alike from 1917 to the 1950s. During the Getulio Vargas regime (1930-45), especially, the state took an unprecedented role in controlling social pressures and economic growth via wage and price agencies, labor tribunals and technical councils. Teixeira looks beyond categorical authoritarianism to explain how corporatism constituted an early experiment with the mixed economy as a path to development, combining state planning with a market economy. Corporatism, she shows, generated a model of development dependent on uneven and unequal citizenship, in which economic interests-and not individuals-organized and petitioned through the state. With Brazil at the center of this story of economic experimentation, Remaking Capitalism centers the Global South in the longer history of the production of economic thought. Drawing comparisons with the United States, Italy, and Portugal, Teixeira offers a transnational history of this important interwar attempt to create a third way between capitalism and communism"--