Peter Giraudo

This book project discloses a tradition of thought in fin-de-siècle France and Germany that understood socialist trade unions as ‘laboratories’ of a new cooperative culture in capitalist society. The leading figures in this tradition were the socialists Georges Sorel, Eduard Bernstein, and Jean Jaurès, along with the left-liberal thinkers Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. By reconstructing these theorists’ intellectual and political context, this project shows that they as a group constitute a coherent tradition, which I call “political trade unionism.”