Corporate Catholicism and neoliberalism reconciled in Chile around depoliticizing civil society.

Evidence

Jaime Guzmán, who drafted the junta’s 1974 Declaration of Principles, had been interested in using law to depoliticise Chilean society since his early days as president of the Catholic University Law School’s Student Union. As a student, Guzmán led the ultraconservative Catholic gremialista student group, which united with the Chicago Boys in 1967 to oppose a student revolt demanding democratic selection of the university hierarchy. Guzmán – then a devotee of the fascist corporatism of Franco’s Spanish dictatorship and the reactionary anti-liberal Catholic tradition of Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre – was never a friend of democracy. In Chile, that tradition was represented by Jaime Eyzaguirre and Osvaldo Lira, the latter of whom was an early disciple of Jacques Maritain, who contributed to the early stages of the UDHR, and who Lira described as ‘one of the greatest neo-Scholastic figures’. For this conservative corporatist tradition, the person was enmeshed in intermediate institutions that were threatened by the intrusions of those Lira termed the ‘ignorant, uncultivated and unintelligent’ masses. Guzmán’s Declaration of Principles reflected this tradition by defining the role of social power as ‘securing the independence and depoliticisation of all intermediate societies between individuals and the state’. It was this goal, and a common ‘totalitarian’ adversary, that facilitated Guzmán’s reconciliation of conservative Catholicism with neoliberalism. The ultimate outcome was Chile’s 1980 ‘Constitution of Liberty’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading on market ethics and how legal-constitutional order encodes market protection — parallels later Latin American and Indonesian right-authoritarian legal depoliticization. — connects to: Neoliberals needed Chile’s dictatorship to find the means to depoliticize economies. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 301; Chile’s future pension privatizer argued markets betrayed Christian human dignity — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 352; Chilean corporatist thinkers like Guzmán converged with neoliberalism on antistatism and subsidiarity — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1567 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: The odd claim that Jacques Maritain’s anti-totalitarian thought fed both UDHR drafting and a conservative corporatist tradition hostile to masses — worth chasing how these strands diverged.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that conservative Catholic corporatism and market liberalism shared a common ‘totalitarian’ adversary and could be fused into a ‘Constitution of Liberty’ is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how rights talk was weaponized against democracy.

Broader Connections

• Chilean corporatist thinkers like Guzmán converged with neoliberalism on antistatism and subsidiarity #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1567