LA TOUR DU PIN, CHARLES-HUMBERT-RENÉ, count of. — Marquis de La Charce, born on 1 April 1834 at Arrancy (Aisne), died at Lausanne on 4 December 1924.
In 1871 he founded the Work of Catholic Workers’ Circles; on 20 February 1885 he took part, together with Leone Harmel, in the first pilgrimage of Catholic industrialists to Rome, and from 1884 was a member of the Union of Fribourg, which soon became the International Union of “social Catholics.”
The fame of L. T. du P. is due to the fact that he is generally regarded as the theorist of corporatism, having been the first to formulate its fundamental principles within a systematic framework, although one cannot fail to acknowledge the great influence exerted upon his thought by certain German social Catholics, including Mgr. Ketteler and Baron de Vogelsang, whom he knew personally.
The organic conception of society, in antithesis to the atomistic conception of liberalism; the principle of State intervention, however limited, in the economy, in opposition to liberal individualism and socialist statism; the ethical conception of the economy and particularly of labor, in opposition to the commodity-based conception of utilitarianism; the recognition of the right of property, understood essentially as a social function; and the principle of professional class representation constitute the essential foundations of the corporatism that L. T. du P. expounded in a detailed but excessively theoretical and schematic design, from its base to its periphery. To this he attached a representative political system as well, which, through local and provincial corporative representations, was to culminate in a Grand Council of Corporations, a kind of consultative senate of the French monarchy.
It is not without significance that this theorist of corporative economics was an essentially traditionalist spirit, to such an extent that he supported voting by category (ordre) rather than by head within the corporation, and did not follow, in relation to the Third Republic, the policy of ralliement recommended to French Catholics by Leo XIII. But, leaving aside the exaggerations and absolutism of L. T. du P., which resulted from his excessively systematic and abstract spirit and hence were often closed to economic reality, what remains is his corporative system as a whole and his conception of the corporation, which substantially coincides with the fundamental principles of the Catholic social school. Whereas, in the case of “State” corporatism, so called in opposition to “association” corporatism, the corporation must essentially be an organ of the executive power, and consequently without legal personality, directed toward the progressive expansion and centralization of State functions, for L. T. du P. it must instead be regarded as an autonomous public-law entity, detached from the State (although not entirely independent of it), understood essentially as an effective defense of natural rights against the encroachment of the State and against the predominance of political power.
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magistrature, the juridical guarantee of the profession and its members, and should have been, like the Commune, “a state within the State, bound to it by reciprocal obligations and powers.”