From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth

This book 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.