LA TOUR DU PIN, Charles-Humbert-René, Count of. - Marquis de la Charce, b. 1 April 1834 at Arrancy (Aisne), d. at Lausanne on 4 Dec. 1924.
In 1871 he founded the Work of the Catholic Workers' Circles; on 20 Feb. 1885 he took part in the first pilgrimage of Catholic industrialists to Rome, together with Léon Harmel, and from 1884 in the Union of Fribourg, which soon became the International Union of "social Catholics."
L. T. du P.'s fame is due to the fact that he is generally considered the theorist of corporatism, having been the first to formulate its fundamental principles in a systematic framework, although one cannot fail to recognize the great influence exercised on his thought by certain German social Catholics, among them Msgr. Ketteler and Baron de Vogelsang, whom he knew personally.
The organic conception of society as opposed to the atomistic one of liberalism; the principle of the intervention, however limited, of the State in the economy as opposed to liberal individualism and to the socialist statu-letizia; the ethical conception of the economy and particularly of labor as opposed to the commodity-based one 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 bases of the corporatism that L. T. du P. set out in a detailed but overly theoretical and schematic design, from the base to the periphery, attaching to it a representative system that was also political, which, through local and provincial corporative representations, was to have culminated in a Grand Council of the Corporations, a kind of consultative senate of the monarchy of France.
It is not without significance that this theorist of the corporative economy was an essentially traditionalist spirit, to such a degree as to have upheld the system of voting by category (ordre) and not by head, within the corporation, and as not to have followed, with regard to the Third Republic, the policy of the ralliement advised to French Catholics by Leo XIII. But apart from the exaggerations and absolutisms of L. T. du P., which are due to his overly systematic and abstract spirit and therefore 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. For while according to "State" corporatism, so called in contrast to that "of association," the corporation must be essentially an organ of the executive power, consequently without legal personality, directed toward the progressive increase and centralization of state functions, for L. T. du P., by contrast, it is to be considered as an autarchic body of public law, detached from the State (although not entirely independent of it), understood essentially as a valid defense of natural rights against the invasion of the State and against the predominance of political power.
The corporation therefore, according to L. T. du P., was to have constituted, with its statute and with its legal magistracy, the juridical guarantee of the profession and of its members, and was to have been, like the Commune, "a State within the State, bound to it by reciprocal obligations and attributions."
Bibliography
Alberto Canaletti Gaudenti