Corporate State and Personal Autonomy: A Phenomenological Approach

In order to understand the meaning of the contemporary crisis of modern society, it is worth going back to the challenges faced by liberalism, especially after the First World War. The aim of the paper is the critical reconstruction of the approach to the radically illiberal idea of the corporate state developed in the 1920s and 1930s within the phenomenological movement, especially by Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Aurel Kolnai. The discussion of the phenomenological positions in this regard focuses especially on the criticism against the implications of the idea of such a state for one of the most significant liberal values—personal autonomy. The fundamental distinction is made between solidarist, inherent to Catholic social teaching, and Fascist understanding of the idea of the corporate state. Insofar as one of the most influential corporatist theories within both Fascism and National Socialism was developed by the Austrian philosopher and sociologist Othmar Spann, the primary concern of the paper is to reconstruct the phenomenological meaning of the arguments against Spann’s concept of the corporate state delivered by Kolnai in his articles published in the Viennese journal “Der Christliche Ständesstaat”.