Cooperation Facing Liberalism, Crisis and War: One Hundred Years of Portuguese Cooperative Experiences

Abstract

"These article highlights how pre-modern social capital shaped cooperative experiences during the Portuguese liberal period. Based on a comprehensive review of cooperative societies’ foundation acts and statutes, it illustrates pre-modern networks, norms and codes of conduct resilience. It also explores the exceptional First World War and post-war period, to show how, despite the structural changes to the State and civil society relationships, pre-modern values were present. It argues that one can observe significant similarities between the ‘motors’, ‘conditions’ and ‘motives’ fostering both craft guilds and commons’ emergence (DE MOOR, 2008) and nineteen century cooperative movement. However, by analysing this new wave of institutions for collective action, social capital inheritances seem to have played a new determinant role."