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formation to achieve Bentham’s ideal of happiness maximization. With Thompson making this move, Kaswan believes that Bentham’s bourgeois individualism is unmasked: together, they are read as precursors of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of capitalist hegemony. Subjective happiness as mere experience of discrete pleasures gives way to an objective and continuous sense of well-being. Thompson lists four components of pleasure that are essential for happiness: “the preservation of health,” “individual independence” as the provision of one’s own physical space, “social and intellectual enjoyment and self-improvement,” and “economy of labor” as shortening its time and intensity and combining it with more pleasurable accompaniments (p. 69). These ends share many features of contemporary discussions of objective well-being and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach for measuring social happiness. Kaswan thus stresses Thompson’s belief that institutions should not be evaluated “based on how well they perform the role they are meant to play” but, rather, on “the principles on which the institutions are based and howwell they adhere to those principles.”The questions of need fulfillment and the development of capacities become practical and political questions regarding the structuring of the institutions “through which we fulfill our needs and exercise our abilities” (p. 91). The second part of the book addresses Thompson’s “politics of happiness.”While Bentham’s “greatest happiness” is a sum of individual happiness, Thompson’s is always a political question regarding “the structure of the social institutions within which people act” (p. 96). Bentham’s happiness rests on security of (individual) expectations, premised on private property and contractual enforcement producing subsistence and abundance—and, with luck and over time, increasing material equality. Governments are required only to provide security by enforcing property and contractual rights. Thompson held that enforcing Bentham’s “security” guaranteed poverty and inequality. His answer was political democracy and common property. Kasawn reads Thompson’s theories as prescient anticipations of the critiques of political economy byMarx and Engels. And it is here—more than halfway through the book—that the author addresses Thompson’s cooperative answer. Only one of Thompson’s writings specifically outlines his cooperative ideal. Each community, of between 500 and 2,000 members, would be autarkic, both in production and consumption. He saw little need for outside market relationships because cooperation would result in enough for all and no incentive to produce more for outside sale. On this rather sketchy foundation, Kaswan then constructs two contrasting theories of political democracy. For Bentham (and James Mill), representative democracy is only a check against misrule; for Thompson, political democracy is a shared way of life—a social practice that pervades all relationships. Thompson’s cooperatives, by abolishing any distinction between public and private, screen out “politics” altogether: public opinion replaces legal coercion, while “governance becomes little more than a way of solving coordination problems” (p. 155). The least satisfactory part of Happiness, Democracy, and the Cooperative Movement concludes by exploring Thompson’s principles put into practice, first by looking at early (and short-lived) cooperative societies such as the Rochdale Pioneers and various Owenite initiatives. Kaswan’s examples of long-lived contemporary cooperative societies are bitterly ironic: Sunkist (oranges), Ocean Spray (cranberries), and Land o’ Lakes (dairy)—mega–consumer advertisers and distributors of the produce of large-scale (but family-owned) industrial farms. That said, Kaswan’s study of Thompson reminds us that supposedly fixed concepts in political theory can become metaphors that creatively migrate and mutate from mind to mind. Those like Bentham, and Hobbes before him, fought losing battles with their readers who have minds of their own.