In 1824 the Irish political economist William Thompson introduced the term social science to English. In Building a Social Science: 19th Century British Cooperative Thought, Kirsten Madden and Joseph Persky start from the somewhat earlier work of Robert Owen and trace the development of social science, specifically as applied to the cooperative movement, in Britain through the long nineteenth century, ending in the early 1920s. The work is remarkably thorough in its coverage of the debates, divergences, and diffusion of these ideas through the period.

This fine book is organized into four parts. The first part is focused on particular individuals who established the foundations for what was to come: Robert Owen, William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler, and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. Of note here is the inclusion of Wheeler and Taylor, whose contributions are often glossed over or entirely ignored in work on the subject. The second part is less focused on individuals and more on schools of thought: the Christian Socialists, the consumer cooperative movement, and the Women's Cooperative Guild. A brief final chapter in the section looks at arguments for profit-sharing arrangements, which some saw as a conservative alternative to the more egalitarian and transformative ideology of the cooperative movement. The third part returns to a consideration of specific individuals—a chapter (with Nicholas Armstrong credited as co-author) on William Morris and one on G.D.H. Cole's Guild Socialist model. The final section offers an overview of reactions to cooperative socialism from the left, right, and center, before a concluding chapter offers a synthesis of the ideas of the British cooperative movement of the nineteenth century.

The book's introduction situates its subject within two linked historical streams: the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist economic system that rose alongside it, and the field of political economics, which arose as a scientific discipline expanding on the work of Adam Smith to explain and “offer a dazzling intellectual apology for the emerging capitalist system” (1). Madden and Persky set out to provide a kind of roadmap to the alternative that developed alongside political economy—a social science that sought to replace competition with cooperation and that would provide a path forward to a more equitable, fair, and just society.

At the center of the book is an analysis of the development of the cooperative movement, from its early stage in the visionary work of Owen and the more theoretical and practical work of Thompson and Wheeler, followed by Mill and Taylor, and then through the debates of the latter half of the century. Consistent throughout are a set of interrogations focused on the theorists’ ideas about social psychology, the particular shape of cooperative institutions, their ideas about the use of technology, and how they imagined the transition happening to a fully cooperative society.

One of the interesting elements of this nineteenth-century social science was the way that ideas and concepts from political economics are redeployed to support a very different model for the economy. Where capitalist economists rely on an individualistic psychology of narrow self-interest, the cooperative socialists thought in terms of a social psychology based on the premise advanced by Owen that people's characters are formed by their social condition, and that establishing a more cooperative economy will lead to a more cooperative society. And where abundance—the so-called “Wealth of Nations”—was the central concern of political economists, the cooperative economists argued that a society based on cooperative principles would produce a superabundance that would reduce the need for labor and increase leisure time by making the machines work for the people instead of for the capitalists.

Madden and Persky examine in some detail the various institutional forms considered by the cooperativists. For some, like Owen and Thompson, this was clear: largely autarchic, self-governing communities of 500–2000 people. For Mill, this involved a slow transition to worker control of companies. Christian socialists were divided on the question, however, and the consumer cooperative movement turned from cooperative communities to retail operations and an autonomous business model that moved away from a labor-centric focus. By the end of the period, Morris and Cole return to the idea of advancing producer (worker) cooperatives as the focal point of cooperative organization.

Building a Social Science does an excellent job of articulating the central ideas of the cooperative movement of the nineteenth century, showing how later work built on the foundations laid by earlier thinkers. It also very effectively shows how these ideas—or at least some of them—worked out in practice. What it does not do, and what I wish it had done, is to discuss the legacy of those ideas in terms of what it all means for the cooperative movement now and going forward. The cooperative movement has faced substantial challenges even as it has grown and changed in the more than one hundred years since Cole put Guild Socialism to rest, not just in Britain but around the world. Widespread recession and increasing concern about ecological sustainability have given rise to considerable interest in alternatives to the global capitalist system. In June 2024, two hundred years after Thompson introduced “social science” into English, and for the second time in the twenty-first century (the first was in 2012), the United Nations declared 2025 the International Year of the Cooperative. Still, there are important lessons to be learned from the nineteenth-century cooperative socialists, many of whom were eager to challenge capitalism head-on. It would have been nice to see the book take on some of those questions, but it is nonetheless of great value in the way that it brings those ideas to the fore once again in a well-organized, accessible manner.