Abstract
As educators, we all continue to work on the best ways to enliven traditional material and to draw students into not only the familiar but also the not-yet-considered aspects of society. In recent years, I have found the research on happiness, which has been conducted empirically since the early 1970s but which has an intellectual linage tracing back to Aristotle, to be a powerful vehicle for opening up minds and conversations. Interestingly, the invocation of happiness as a classroom topic several decades ago elicited reactions of laughter or dismissal; today, the mere mention of happiness has a sobering effect on groups. Perhaps this is because at some deep but not always expressible level, advanced consumer-corporate capitalism isn’t always yielding the fulfillment it promises incessantly in its advertising and marketing.
Happiness still strikes many readers as an odd bedfellow with the typical considerations of economics, business, and organization. But, what is odd, really, is that there should be such a reaction. Research on happiness, especially in psychology, was initially dismissed as trivial or ‘commonsensical’ when Ed Diener and others began what was later known as the positive psychology movement. Today, important research on happiness extends into disciplines including not only economics but also political science, sociology, communication, anthropology, management, and of course, philosophy. Just as one unfortunate by-product of ‘Western’ philosophy was to divorce or abstract much of ethics from everyday life so a great deal of thinking and practice in economics ‘forgot’ about the well-being of people, including measures of economic productivity and success that incorporate individual and group assessments of happiness. Fortunately, many writers today are reintegrating various dimensions of well-being with economics, politics, and society. And these efforts parallel philosophical reformulations of Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia not so much as happiness commonly understood in English but rather as the more robust idea of ‘flourishing’ (see, for example, the works of Kwame Anthony Appiah). These needed intellectual correctives come at a time when, as one beneficial result of the Great Recession, the pursuit of economic solidarity and sustainable community economic development is taking many different forms. Although not yet widely acknowledged by the mainstream media, projects and organizations such as timebanking, alternative currencies, shared consumption, collectives, and cooperatives are making concrete differences both in economic and social terms. This book, Happiness, Democracy and the Cooperative Movement, is an important work because of the linkages it makes among psychological, social, political, and economic concepts and in terms of how it speaks to the soundness and viability of the cooperative model. In this regard, the message for organizational studies is quite timely and important. Mark Kaswan, a political scientist by training and practice, moves freely around a multi-disciplinary landscape to bring to light the radical utilitarianism of William Thompson (1775–1833), an early 19th-century social innovator, and to make meaningful and ultimately very practical applications to the present. Thompson and Kaswan both settle on worker ownership as an excellent vehicle to address both economic and sociopolitical dimensions of human experience, particularly with employee ownership’s twin pillars of shared equity and shared participation.
As Kaswan explains, Thompson’s work and influence have been underestimated, and in particular, his broad-ranging vision for the role of worker cooperatives in society has not been fully appreciated. This is the organizing principle of Kaswan’s book. The chapters of the book range across the issues already mentioned, including happiness, ethics, a reintegrated economics, a revitalized democracy, and the role for cooperatives in a new solidarity economy.
Following a helpful introduction which rejoins the idea of happiness with a sociopolitical sensibility, Kaswan moves into the first three chapters that explain in greater depth what it means, especially for the contemporary mindset, to shift from a ‘hedonic’ perspective on happiness to a much more robust and socially oriented conception of it based on eudaimonia. The author cites a variety of philosophical and religious perspectives and texts to suggest that ‘Western’ thinking has been limited by a focus on individual pleasure and desire particularly as it has manifested itself in the logic and pursuits of the capitalist system. Kaswan therefore distinguishes between the more familiar model of utilitarian benefit (and pleasure) championed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and the less well known but, in Kaswan’s view, more enlightened form espoused by one of Bentham’s close associates, Thompson. Bentham and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) are perhaps the most often cited writers on utilitarianism, although they and their followers made a number of distinctions that enriched the applications of maximizing pleasure and minimizing harm. The nuances of utilitarianism (or its counterpoint in ethics, deontology) are beyond the scope of this review, but suffice it to say that Kaswan lays a solid groundwork in the first three chapters for what follows in the book.
Chapter 4 presents the contours of a ‘reintegrated economics’, where market, community, and individual well-being occupy the same space. The crux of the discussion in this chapter is that the notion of utility, including its definitions, dimensions, and applications, is the conceptual spot to sort out different possible spirits and directions for utilitarianism. Utility marks the way Bentham and others consider the ethical ‘products’ of social, economic, and political arrangements, and the measurement of utility then becomes a fulcrum upon which rest determinations of the greater good. Through a careful and well-documented argument, Kaswan shows how Thompson’s view of utility is tied more directly to community well-being and therefore lends itself to the promotion of cooperatives and cooperative economies. Thompson showed how the capitalism of his day actually undermined utility through violating subsidiary principles of equality and security.
This part of the argument leads toward a reconsideration, in Chapter 5, of democracy and a discussion of the founding principles of cooperativism, often attributed to the Rochdale group in England (1844), but with origins and parallels in other contemporaneous and indeed prior moments. In fact, Kaswan traces the core cooperative principles, such as open admission, democratic control, shared equity, autonomy, education, and cooperation among cooperatives, and concern for community as being at least as attributable at their base to Thompson as to the Scottish industrialist Robert Owen (1771–1858). Moreover, Kaswan cites Thompson’s (and Bentham’s) philosophical necessitarianism as an important link between the circumstances surrounding one’s life and activities and his or her character. This is a very important point for ethical as well as practical assessments of cooperatives and worker ownership, especially within the contemporary frames of social economy, solidarity economy, and community wealth building.
Chapter 6 moves back to practical concerns for cooperatives in today’s economy but relies upon strongly ethical and social notions of happiness to reconsider wealth for a community. Ultimately, then, Kaswan explains that the unifying principle for cooperatives and the cooperative movement can be a robust vision of happiness and the greater good. These conceptual and practical linkages make Kaswan’s book very important and timely. The work provides a strong foundation for understanding and, by extension, advocating an enlarged role for cooperatives in the economy of the future.