ABSTRACT
Childs’ influential book, Sweden: The Middle Way (1936, 1961), was set in the turbulent years of the 1930s, against a backdrop of massive economic, political and social unrest in most of Europe. This was illustrated by the Soviet Revolution, the aftermath of the Great Depression throughout Europe, the rise of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy and elsewhere. Sweden and its Nordic neighbours appeared to be an idyllic isolated region of social tranquility and everyday pragmatism, dominated by the politics of compromise combined with economic and social progress. Childs attributed a major role to the Swedish cooperative movements in achieving this, in particular the consumer cooperatives and the building and tenant cooperatives. He devoted most of five chapters to the cooperative movements. They provided a pragmatic commercial alternative to the rampages of laissez-faire capitalism in the US and to communism in the Soviet Union.
