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2Internationally important sources of these deliberations were not only fascist Italy and nazi Germany, but also the corporatist reforms in Portugal and Brazil. Melissa Teixeira shows that the corporatist alternative was discussed and practiced transatlantically among Portuguese and Brazilian politicians, lawyers and intellectuals between the 1920s and 1950s. The perception of crisis after the First World War and, in particular, the economic crisis since 1929 gave impetus to the founding of professional associations in both countries, which were to represent the interests of their sectors with state legitimacy and organize them in the public interest. The Portuguese government, in which António Salazar was already effectively in charge at this time, established municipal farmers' guilds (grémios de lavoura) in 1929, which were to monitor price controls and quality standards, but also manage the social security of their members. In 1930, Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas inaugurated a Ministry of Labor, which reorganized the existing employer associations, agricultural cooperatives and labor unions by decree, so that only one organization with state recognition was allowed to represent the regional interests of an economic sector.

3This was the beginning of a chain of legal measures that culminated in an “Estado Novo” (New State) in both countries, which presented itself as corporatist. The Portuguese leadership drafted a new constitution in 1933, in which the establishment of an advisory Câmara Corporativa (Corporatist Chamber) and the state's obligation to build a corporatist economy were laid down. Brazil's provisional constitution of 1932 introduced corporatist representation, which ultimately led to the Conselho de Economia Nacional (National Economic Council) in the constitution of 1937, through which representatives from five economic sectors were involved in legislation. The justification for this policy in both states mirrored arguments that were widely used internationally: The liberal individualism of the 19^th century was held responsible for the political, social and economic disruption of the time. Careerist party politics and entrepreneurial greed for profit seemed to have replaced the focus on the common good. Only a legal anchoring of collective professional interests in state decision-making was supposed to be able to resolve social class conflicts, end party disputes and make a new economic and political beginning possible.

6Teixeira's assessment of this development appears to be undecided. In some passages, she seems to support the distinction in principle –for example, when she explains that Brazil's corporatist organizations were state-directed, but not state-controlled (p. 213). In another passage (p. 199), however, she uses this distinction to deny that Nazi Germany had corporatist structures because of alleged state control. In many other passages, in turn, she emphasizes the dominance of the state in Portuguese and Brazilian corporatism, which was further expanded in Brazil during the Second World War, with the founding of the Coordenação da Mobilização Econômica (Coordination for Economic Mobilization). Recurring formulations that interpret the Brazilian and Portuguese claim to democracy as merely a strategic means of their respective foreign policies match this description. Finally, for the period after the Second World War, Teixeira speaks of a normalization of corporatism, whose institutions had become part of the state architecture (p. 225).

7Obviously, contemporaries drafted divergent versions of the relationship between the state and corporatist organizations. The transnational side of this debate is an aspect that has been too rarely considered to date, although it served in the 1930s and 1940s to differentiate ideas from one another and position them among competing proposals. Without a conceptual compass, however, it remains unclear what mechanisms governed the transnational field of discussion and what interpretation the author herself argues for, given the multitude of perspectives in Teixeira's account that are not easy to reconcile.

8Part of the complexity of this question is due to the association of corporatist structures with fascism, the Vichy dictatorship and National Socialism, which became very influential after the Second World War. Even though skepticism towards parliamentary democracy and liberalized capitalism remained widespread, corporatist ideas were often given a new ideological guise because of their ambivalent past. In the final chapter of her book, Melissa Teixeira draws attention to the fact that, despite the partial elimination of the vocabulary after 1945, corporatist institutions continued to exist under a new name but became now part of the beginnings of a planned economy, among other things. Previous organizations of professional representation were given new functions in Brazil and Portugal (but also in Mexico, Argentina and elsewhere) as bodies for the coordination of private and public cooperation.