Sponsored by the Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps, jurist and economist Juan Vicente Sola enters as an academician
Juan Vicente Sola, doctor in Law and Economics, entered as a full academician into the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED) during a solemn session held last Friday, June 1, in Barcelona. The recipient read his entry speech “Pluralismo y corporativismo: el freno a la economía dinámica” (Pluralism and corporatism: the brake on the dynamic economy). Edmund Phelps, honorary academician and Nobel Prize winner in Economics for 2006, answered on behalf of the corporation.
Sola began his presentation by referring to the bases of political coexistence of the current democracies: individualism, pluralism and constitutionalism, posing as their main brake the corporatism, and from there developed strategies to identify their different forms, some with a great political predicament, and establish the best strategies to combat it. “In modern democratic societies, individualism, pluralism and constitutionalism are the foundations of political coexistence -the new academician added his speech-. This requires restrictions on the duration of rulers, the separation of powers and checks and balances as limits to the monopolistic concentration of power”.
“However -he continued-, individualism, pluralism and constitutionalism have a strong adversary: corporatism, a traditional and recurrent form of political and economic theory that aims to solve the same problems as pluralism and constitutionalism, but with answers totally different corporatism implies clan, race, religion, economic or military organization structures integrated in the government with the purpose of achieving a coordinated national activity, forming a political system excluding pluralism and the political competition of democracy”.
Sola concluded that, in its different forms, corporatism is a movement that is often defined in opposition to established forms, with authoritarian, populist and anti-democratic tones that represent an authentic and constant brake on economic dynamism in Western societies.
