ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an agrarian social movement, the movement to establish producer co-operatives among farmers which began in Ireland towards the end of the 19th century. It addresses the value of a social movements approach for illuminating processes of social development, particularly given the structuralist and quantitative bias which has tended to dominate 'official' sociology in Ireland. The chapter describes the contribution of agrarian actors to constructing Irish civil society, which that bias has also helped to obscure. It argues that the construction or re-construction of civil society was a self-conscious goal of the early co-operative movement in Ireland; and as such, it offers an interesting challenge to conventional distinctions in the social movements literature between 'old' and 'new' social movements. Western social thought has been deeply structured by the assumption that rurality, particularity and traditionality go together to make up one side of an opposition, the obverse of which is urbanity, cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment project of modernity.
