In an era marked by rising authoritarianism and growing disillusionment with conventional capitalist structures, Jason Spicer’s Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American arrives as both timely and necessary.

Fueled by a pervasive sense of polycrisis and buoyed by calls for more democratic forms of economic organization, interest in cooperative enterprise is again gaining traction in the United States. If the past is prologue, however, there are reasons to question how enduring and sizable the impacts of this cooperative turn will be. Despite recurring waves of enthusiasm, the US cooperative movement has historically struggled to consolidate cooperative infrastructure on a national level, a pattern that contrasts starkly with cooperatives in other industrialized nations. Why has it been so hard for US cooperatives to develop durable scale? This is the question animating Spicer’s book. The answer, it appears, has a lot to do with racial capitalism and the legacy of postbellum liberalism.

Before elaborating on that provocative claim, Spicer takes the reader on a journey through detailed case studies of countries where cooperatives have achieved far greater national presence. At its core, the book is a historical study of why cooperatives in the United States remain underdeveloped compared to more expansive movements in Finland, France, and New Zealand. Organized into eight chapters, the book begins with an introduction and theory chapter, devotes individual chapters to each comparative case, and splits the US case into two—one focused on the nineteenth century and another on developments since 1900. The concluding chapter synthesizes the empirical findings and reflects on lessons for the contemporary cooperative movement. One benefit of this comparative approach is that it helps Spicer construct a capacious counterfactual understanding of what is possible while also illuminating how the failure of US cooperatives to achieve national scale is not due to inherent flaws in the cooperative model, but rather to historically specific structural barriers.

Spicer grounds his methodology in strategic action field theory (SAF), a strand of new institutionalism influential in sociological studies of social movements. SAF conceptualizes social life as organized into fields: structured arenas with their own “internal logics, bounds and practices” that shape how different actors contend over resources and influence (41). A secondary aim of the book is to demonstrate the analytic superiority of SAF over conventional historical institutionalism. On this, Spicer is persuasive. Employing process tracing, he maps contextual factors and the evolution of cooperative fields across his case studies. In Finland, for example, cooperative development was relatively top-down, shaped by geographic isolation and geopolitical vulnerability. The threat of foreign invasion helped forge a national identity centered on democratic autonomy and the desire for a middle path between capitalism and communism. These factors, combined with a coordinated market economy and a favorable industrial mix, supported cooperative field formation.

In France, the cooperative field developed more slowly through complex, layered reforms shaped by the ruptural legacy of the French Revolution. Skilled actors acted as bricoleurs, embedding cooperatives within national values of liberty and solidarity renegotiated through recurring political upheavals. Now legally part of the national framework for the social and solidarity economy, the cooperative field’s durability reflects its alignment with a coordinated market economy skeptical of liberalism.

New Zealand—once envisioned as a capitalist utopia—illustrates that cooperative enterprise can thrive even in liberal market economies. Spicer attributes this success to the balancing of British economic liberalism with state efforts to address geographic isolation. Limited export markets and resistance to foreign ownership—especially Australian—created favorable conditions. The cooperative field also benefited from good timing: the collapse of the investor-driven New Zealand Company in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the global rise of the cooperative movement.

For us, the book’s most powerful and original intervention comes in Chapter 6, where Spicer examines the Knights of Labor’s late nineteenth-century effort to build a multiracial cooperative movement as a direct challenge to the “wage slavery” of investor-owned firms (IOFs). Building on earlier communitarian experiments largely confined to non-slave-holding states, the Knights linked the abolition of chattel slavery to the abolition of capitalism, envisioning cooperative enterprise as the foundation for economic justice. Their organizing in the South, including efforts to build Black-led and multiracial cooperatives, was met with violent repression, culminating in the Thibodaux massacre, one of the bloodiest labor conflicts in US history. This event not only crushed the sugarcane strike but also shattered the Knights as a nascent apex organization for cooperative development. Their defeat marked the end of any serious national effort to institutionalize cooperatives across sectors. Spicer shows how racial capitalism—through both IOF consolidation and white supremacist violence—truncated the cooperative alternative.

Without a national champion, the movement became fragmented along racial and sectoral lines. The once radical rhetoric of “wage slavery” narrowed, coming to signify only the exploitation of Black and migrant labor, while cooperatives faded as a viable national political strategy. This shift was reinforced by the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose embrace of collective bargaining effectively conceded the dominance of the IOF form. Cooperatives, which scale through collaboration and the creation of interfirm ecosystems or “cooperative commonwealths,” have also repeatedly run afoul of antitrust actions designed to reinforce IOF norms and liberal market principles.

The book concludes by asking how today’s crisis-driven wave of cooperative activity might be transformed into more durable and institutional forms. Spicer points to the need for new organizational archetypes and skilled field champions to help carry the movement forward. Importantly, he also argues that any effort to grow the cooperative movement in the United States must involve a reckoning with race—insisting that it become an explicitly antiracist project. While the “chrononaut moment” structure—looking back at missed opportunities—can at times risk narrowing the horizon of future possibilities, the strength of the book lies in its identification of the diverse conditions that have enabled cooperative development across different national contexts. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all strategy, the comparative analysis highlights key factors to consider, helping to inform historically grounded, locally specific pathways forward. In this way, the book serves less as a prescriptive blueprint and more as a generative framework for thinking about cooperative futures.

The book is extraordinarily well researched and replete with enlightening details on policies, cooperative leaders, and organizational strategies. The countries selected notably differ from widely used cooperative case studies in Spain, Italy, and Argentina. This alone makes the book valuable for scholars of cooperatives and economic democracy. Additionally, Spicer’s provocative findings on how white supremacy constrained the cooperative movement should prompt scholars and practitioners alike to reexamine core assumptions about the communities cooperatives are built to serve.

The book does, nonetheless, leave a few areas underdeveloped. We present three lines of critique. First, the book is built around a presumption of scarcity: the scarcity of national-level cooperative infrastructure in the United States. While this opens an important line of inquiry, such a scarcity-driven perspective comes with costs. By focusing so heavily on failure, fragmentation, and dissolution, the analysis risks overlooking the forms of abundance that have sustained US cooperatives over time, particularly in Black communities. How, we wonder, would the analysis change if the focus were less on truncation and loss and more on survival, creativity, and collective possibility—what Priscilla Pinto Ferreira describes as joyful abundance—as a basis for solidarity and ongoing survival. This would not mean turning away from the brutality of racist anti-cooperativism. However, it would be more fully to explore examples of racial politics that elevate cooperation and collective possibility despite such opposition.

Our second critique pertains to scale and his prioritizing of national-level institutions. He, for example, characterizes segments of the US cooperative movement as “trapped” at the subnational scale (250). This framing risks overlooking where much cooperative innovation actually occurs: at the neighborhood, municipal, and regional levels. In our experience, it is cities—through local policies, grassroots organizing, and municipal apex institutions like Cooperation Jackson—where the cooperative field is most vibrant and politically consequential. By privileging the national scale, the analysis flattens the landscape and misses the institutional layering, informal cooperative organizing, and local resistance that challenge dominant economic models from below. From such a vantage, the opposite problem might be of greater consequence: federal regulations so abstracted that they become “trapped” at the national scale, unresponsive to grassroots cooperative efforts.

Our final critique concerns the book’s uneven treatment of racialized politics across its case studies. While Spicer brilliantly centers race in his account of truncated cooperative development in the United States, race is largely absent from his analyses of Finland, France, and New Zealand. This raises an important question: is race truly peripheral to the cooperative trajectories in these countries, or has its relevance simply gone unexamined? Given our own work on racial capitalism and solidarity economies, we wonder what insights might emerge if these cases were approached through a racial capitalist lens. How might colonial histories, migration, and indigenous sovereignty complicate the narrative of cooperative success in these contexts? A more sustained engagement with race beyond the US case would enrich the comparative scope of the book and deepen its theoretical contributions.