Patronage

PATRONAGE. - The concept of p. is the typical expression of a Catholic social position of the late nineteenth century that reflects a static vision of wealth and a paternalistic vision of the entrepreneur's function and of social relations.

In the concept of p., property and the entrepreneur's function smack somewhat of divine investiture: the entrepreneur is the father, conservator and distributor of wealth, minister Dei in bonum; the company community is the working family. In the concept of the family are sought the normative canons of labor relations.

I. HISTORICAL FUNCTION OF PATRONAGE

When social legislation and trade unionism had not yet regulated labor relations, and in a climate of absolute liberalism (v.) the law was constituted only by the individual conscience of the entrepreneur (v.), in Catholic practice and spirituality the ideal emerged of a good-hearted Christian master who, for reasons of faith, enlightened sentiment of justice and charity, knew how to accept all the responsibilities that accompany his social authority, making himself an instrument of divine Providence for the ordering and government of society. In this ideal the master protects, directs, and helps his dependents with affectionate moral and material assistance, and concerns himself with their natural and supernatural life. As in the family biologically understood, so in the family constituted by the productive unit, the master uses all natural and supernatural means to help and educate those entrusted to him. The firm is a field of apostolate like the family.

II. RELATIONS BETWEEN EMPLOYER AND WORKER IN THE PATERNALISTIC CONCEPTION

A typical document of this sociological position is the Catechism of the Employer by Léon Harmel (v.). "Between the employer and the worker there exist relations analogous to those existing between fathers and children." "The association between employer and worker is called the working family." "The employer is the head of the working family." "The working family derives from a material fact... from a contract... from a principle of natural law... from the duty the employer has to use the authority granted to him by the contract of obligations...." "The working family has the purpose of protecting the natural and supernatural rights of the natural family: of enforcing respect for the foundations of civil society, of watching over the material and spiritual interests of its members" (cf. L. Harmel, Catechismo del padrone, Siena 1895, §§ 3, 17, 22). This concept of the working family and the vision of the social question that follows from it as a "question of the heart" well express the situation of labor relations prior to the rise of modern trade unionism and of the legal regulation of those relations themselves.

III. TOWARD NEW FORMS OF WORKER PROTECTION

As, through the work of trade-union associations, a structure capable of regulating labor relations on the juridical plane rather than on the affective one gradually came to be elaborated, both the concept of patronage and that of the working-class family were superseded; in parallel, science clarified the concept of the entrepreneur as the technical factor coordinating the various elements of production, and of his function, founded necessarily on personal capacities of initiative and responsibility, and not only on factors of tradition and environment. The progressive ascent of the working class within the complex economy of modern social relations and structures, the growing clarity and definition of the worker's rights as a person, the progressive intervention of the State in the economy, and the passage from the regime of free competition to that of a mixed economy have made this concept entirely alien to the modern spirit.

The demand, on the other hand, for the necessity of an entrepreneurial action, both personal and of a group, for the perfecting of structures and relations alongside the action of legislative institutions, spread above all in the Christian world of the postwar period and is documented by the contemporary rise of employers' associations of a Christian character in many countries of Europe and of the New World, recently gathered together in a Christian employers' international (Union Internationale des Associations Patronales Catholiques - UNIAPAC). The existence of such associations, which operate in the living substance of the social fabric of the productive order, is meant to demonstrate that no legislative structure is sufficient to guarantee social order, if the action of individual conscience does not accompany the structures.

The codifier of paternalism, Léon Harmel, who is in the theoretical sphere the codifier of industrial paternalism, is in practice a man of the avant-garde who has gone beyond his doctrinal positions. Honest historical research will have to revise the commonplaces that still distort the physiognomy and the value of this man who remains a precursor even for our times, notwithstanding the limits of his social doctrine. His concept of social justice, of entrepreneurial authority, his pedagogy of the working world are extremely alive and would make the boldest theorists of the enterprise and the moralists of the entrepreneurial function shudder for their modernity.

Vittorio Vaccari