Alex Gourevitch’s excellent and stimulating From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century recovers the development of a distinctively republican critique of industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century America. In its own way, it provides a belated answer to the eponymous question of Werner Sombart’s classic study—Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1976). As Gourevitch shows, there was socialism in America—and a version of socialism that, crucially, articulated its demands in the vocabulary of republican freedom. He focuses on the ideological and practical program of the Knights of Labor, a group that seized the mantle of republicanism but contended that republican ideals could only be realized through a fundamental reorganization of the modern workplace. They argued that real freedom requires workers’ self-government through cooperative workplaces. Gourevitch looks to this tradition both to challenge the historiography of republicanism, which tends to view the nineteenth century as the bosom of barren liberalism, and to argue that the realization of republican ideals today requires a demanding transformation of economic institutions and practices.

His reconstruction of labor republicanism forces a two-fold revision of republican theory. First, contemporary republican thinkers can point to an Atlantic republican tradition only insofar as they suppress or ignore this internal challenge to the scope and implications of republican freedom. In the story told by Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, republicanism only had to go through one self-transcendence, divorcing the ideal of the free individual from the defense of slavery. For Gourevitch, however, the critique of slavery then authorized an equally powerful critique of wage-slavery, the force of which contemporary republican theorists have not appreciated. Second, Gourevitch shows that, in reaction to the development of labor republicanism, legislators and courts adapted republican ideas to defend a laissez-faire view of the economy. The republican tradition itself, then, could paradoxically provide powerful legitimacy to the aggressively pro-market stance that scholars like Skinner and Pettit abjure as contrary to republican principles. It is not enough to point to “the” republican critique of liberalism. Rather, the question becomes what form of republicanism one means, given that some in the nineteenth century deployed republican notions to defend pro-market ideals, and did so precisely in order to fend off the socialist brand of republican argument made by the Knights of Labor.

In this respect, Gourevitch contributes to the growing excavation of a plebeian or populist counter-tradition within republicanism. In one of his most successful chapters, he draws on William Manning, the eighteenth-century populist writer, to develop a “political theory of the dependent classes” (p. 149). Because workers’ collective interests in free, independent conditions can, in principle, be universalized, they stand as the best protectors of free institutions. In contrast, economic and political elites are inherently interested in exploiting and oppressing the masses. Manning’s argument justifies a broad program of economic redistribution and workplace reordering as not just consistent with but necessary for the preservation of republican freedom.

Yet the labor republicans who Gourevitch examines go beyond the arguments of other notable “plebeian” republicans (such as Machiavelli) in how they apply the idea of freedom to the workplace. Responding to the rise of industrial capitalism, with its universalization of dependent wage labor, workers drew on the republican image of the freeman to argue for a “cooperative commonwealth” (p. 10)—an economic order based on workers’ and consumers’ cooperatives—where no individual would be subject to the will of another. For Gourevitch, labor republicanism is characterized by arguing that, under modern conditions, the wage-labor contract as such constitutes domination. Realizing freedom as non-domination requires organizing the economy so that no individual has to sell discretionary control over their labor.

This is the most radical and striking claim that Gourevitch recovers from labor republicanism. Insofar as individuals have no direct access to productive assets, they will be forced to enter into a labor relationship that is, in its most significant features, objectionable in many of the same ways as slavery. Gourevitch further argues that this is so even where workers have achieved considerable collective bargaining power, legal protections, and capacity to change jobs, as the “labor contract, no matter how carefully regulated, cannot help but give employers the lion’s share of . . . residual, discretionary authority” (p. 177).

As a historical study, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth succeeds splendidly, forcing an important revision of republican theory and opening up new avenues for historical exploration. In particular, Gourevitch’s account could be complemented and enriched by a consideration of the parallel appropriation of republican ideas to critique American forms of gender and racial subordination. While the Knights of Labor were admirably universal in their pursuit of racial integration, they never developed a view of racial subordination to match their critique of labor subordination.

To what extent can contemporary republican theorists draw inspiration from the labor republican view? Does freedom as non-domination require the transformation of the economy in the direction of cooperative ownership? For Gourevitch, this question in large part turns on the sociological assumptions in which we embed the ideal of freedom—on whether you agree with the labor republican critique of the structural domination that follows when the working majority lacks any option other than to sell their labor power. However, it also turns on crucial normative and conceptual questions that Gourevitch leaves underexplored. For him, the labor republican critique of wage slavery centers on the worker’s surrender of control over their labor. This is consistent with Pettit’s account of non-domination, which focuses on the robustness of agency and choice over possible competing worlds.

Yet if freedom requires control over your activities such that any “residual, discretionary authority” (p. 177) on the part of another constitutes domination, it is then hard to see how any complex institutional structure—ranging from political representation to the legal system—can pass muster. No matter how hemmed in by legal statutes or political mandates, the politician and the judge retain a discretionary power—the lion’s share—over those subject to their authority. The labor republican view becomes more plausible once you bring to bear a more expansive normative concern with self-realization—insofar as you move from a critique of domination to a critique of alienation. Cooperative labor, unlike wage labor, enables the development of the workers’ innate capacities. But insofar as this is the case, then the labor republican critique points to the limits of the republican conception of freedom, not the conditions for its full realization.

There is another respect in which Gourevitch’s argument follows Pettit’s path, perhaps to its detriment. In that philosophical reformulation of republicanism, freedom becomes a good to be maximized. In approaching republicanism through this lens, some of the texture, richness, and skepticism of the republican intellectual tradition fades. Political life is no longer a fragile achievement, subject to the constant forces of conflict, corruption, and decline. Rather, universal freedom becomes a singular ideal towards which we must constantly strive. Setbacks, for Gourevitch, are caused by strategic mistakes or the difficulty in inculcating among workers the self-discipline necessary for political transformation. The labor republican tradition is romantic, if not utopian, in its ambition of fully democratizing, not just formal political institutions, but the economic institutions in which we spend a large part of our waking lives. In this, too, it may break with some of the most significant aspects of the republican tradition. Yet, as with Gourevitch’s emphasis on self-realization through cooperative labor, this break provides an important and valuable challenge to the complacency of contemporary republican theory.

From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth exemplifies historically-grounded and practically-engaged political theory. It will spur efforts to recover radical and socialist challenges to the republican tradition and contemporary republican theory. Even if the ideal of cooperative labor is no longer—and perhaps never was—a fully feasible alternative to wage-labor, Gourevitch’s provocative challenge places on the agenda questions about the organization of the workplace and the compatibility of capitalism and democracy that have for too long been neglected by political theorists.