In the Sign of Self-help and Solidarity. Cooperatives, Cooperative Elites, and Politics in Central Europe in the Second Half of the 19th Century and the First Half of the 20th Century
Abstract
The collective volume brings new insights into a nowadays often ignored, but in the past remarkably important phenomenon of cooperatives in the 2nd half of the 19th and 1st half of the 20th centuries. It demonstrates a rather surprising scale of cooperatives' activities in almost all aspects of the human being's life.
It deals with many secondary (non-economic) roles of cooperatives, mainly the enlightenment, educational, modernization, cultural, identity-making, national(ist), and protective ones. The book also proves multiple and various linkages between cooperatives and the political sphere that are traceable in law-making, cooperatives' involvement in the state economic policy, or through subsidies.
Direct connections between cooperatives and political parties were analyzed as well whether in the form of personal interconnections or (relatively rarely) of the direct subordination of the cooperatives to the political parties.