Co-op Fortnight Lecture 2021
Co-operatives and legal recognition in the United Kingdom
The 2021 lecture explored the history of legal recognition for co-operatives in the United Kingdom from a critical and socio-legal perspective, situating this within broader transformations in political economy and forms of regulation in the mid-nineteenth century. The lecture considered ways in which legal recognition, while enabling co-operatives to develop, may have also had the effect of disciplining working class social movements and circumscribing the way that we imagine alternatives to capitalism.
Dr Tara Mulqueen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick. Dr Mulqueen’s research areas include the history of the co-operative movement in the United Kingdom, critical legal theory, and public legal education.
Mulqueen, T. (2018). History, alterity and obligation: Toward a genealogy of the co-operative. In D. Matthews & S. Veitch (Eds.), Law, obligation, community (pp. 122-138). Routledge
This chapter explores the dynamics of history, alterity and obligation in relation to the co-operative movement in England. Co-operatives are often regarded as an alternative to capitalist modes of organisation, with values of mutuality and solidarity prevailing over those of self-interest and profit-seeking. The chapter examines some initial gestures toward the possibility of a genealogy of the co-operative, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. It argues that the co-operative, as it is understood, was constituted in part through a process of legal recognition in the mid-nineteenth century. The chapter discusses the particular role of law and legal recognition. The co-operative emerges in the mid-nineteenth century as a distinct organisational form in part through a process of legal recognition. The idea that the market could serve this disciplinary function was relatively new in the nineteenth century, and reflects the increasing influence of the discourse of political economy.
