Corporatism

Corporatism is the only really stable social ontology because it starts from the fact that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Society is a body (Latin corpus), unable to survive dismemberment. The individual is a limb grown inside a living order: posterior, derivative, and defined fundamentally by his role.

Corporatism is directly opposed to both liberal individualism and Marxist classism. Both share a part-first social ontology, treating the individual or the class as primary and the group as at best a contractually bound aggregate or an instrument. Corporatism reverses this: the whole comes before the part, and the parts cooperate as organs: families, guilds, estates, professions, each with a function, a duty, and a stake in the integrity of the body.

Corporatism is heterarchical and pluralist rather than monist. It recognizes many bounded wholes, each with its own inner hierarchy, integrity, and sphere of rule.

At first glance "whole before part" seems to contradict differential ontology's "difference before unity." The contradiction dissolves once we specify scope: within a bounded whole, the whole precedes the part; but the bounded whole exists at all only as against other wholes. Sparta is Sparta because it is not Athens. The folk or nation is the natural upper limit of the social body.