From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth
By Alex Gourevitch
From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth by Alex Gourevitch (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Brown University) reconstructs how a group of nineteenth-century labor reformers appropriated and radicalized the republican tradition. These ‘labor republicans’ derived their definition of freedom from a long tradition of political theory dating back to the classical republics. In this tradition, to be free is to be independent of anyone else’s will – to be dependent is to be a slave. Borrowing these ideas, labor republicans argued that wage laborers were unfree because of their abject dependence on their employers. Workers in a cooperative, on the other hand, were considered free because they equally and collectively controlled their work. Although these labor republicans are relatively unknown, this book details their unique, contemporary, and valuable perspective on both American history and the organization of the economy.
Professor Gourevitch will present his new book From Slavery to the Cooperative: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015), in Oxford on 25 June 2015.
For more details about the event please visit this website.
