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The Practical Utopians
American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the Gilded Age

Steven Leikin		 Between 1865 and 1890, in the aftermath of the Civil War, virtually every important American labor reform organization was advocating "cooperation" over "competitive" capitalism and several thousand cooperatives opened for business during this era.
The Practical Utopians closely examines the experiences of working men and women as they built their cooperatives, contested the meanings of cooperation, and reconciled the realities of the marketplace with their various and often conflicting conceptions of democratic participation. Steve Leikin provides new theories and examples of the failure and successes of the cooperative movement, including how the Gilded Age's most powerful labor organization, the Knights of Labor, collapsed in the face of the expanding industrial economy. 		"Any scholar wishing to understand the views and motivations of nineteenth-century workers must come to grips with the allure and promise of the cooperative movement. Any scholar wishing to understand the cooperative movement must read Steve Leikin."
— Timothy Messer-Kruse, University of Toledo

Steve Leikin is lecturer for the Department of History at San Francisco State University.
$44.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-3128-9

256 pages / 6 x 9
20 illustrations

2005

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