Correction to this article

IN ZAMBIA, where he was helping Kenneth Kaunda run the economy, Robert Oakeshott once ran out of petrol. He decided that he and a colleague could push the car the many miles home, while the woman of the party, the writer Doris Lessing, sat behind the wheel to steer. To his cheerful shouts of “Almost there!” they reached the top of a hill from where, he had reckoned, they could easily cruise down. As they crested it, with Lessing half-in and half-out, the car rolled back over her, cracking her hip. She was confined to the sofa for some days.

An apt metaphor, some might think, for the back-and-forth progress of Mr Oakeshott's favourite idea: workers' co-operatives, in which workers own and run their companies. His life was devoted to pushing, in the most amiably persistent way, the notion that if workers became stakeholders, if the gap between management and labour vanished, and if effort and profit were shared for the common good, human beings would be happier, freer and, just possibly, better off. Round the world he went, inspecting foundries in Florence, care-providers in New York, coffee-shops in Dublin, to see how they were doing. In his ears, along with merry snatches of Handel, rang the words of J.S. Mill: that if production became co-operative, there would be a moral revolution.

He knew—being a realistic man as well as a crashingly impractical one, who once missed Greta Garbo's glass by a mile when serving her at Chateau Lafite, and also drove a horse and trap through a gate only wide enough for the horse—that co-ops were hard to create. Capital was scanty. Unions were hostile. Management and worker functions clashed uneasily together. For decades, both right and left ignored co-ops (though both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have recently endorsed the ideal). Marx had mocked them as “dwarfish”, a word Mr Oakeshott ruefully relished. The Economist, for which he wrote occasionally, was cool about them. Undaunted, he pressed his case.

For most of the 1970s he ran his own building co-op, Sunderlandia, in the north-east of England. The region was in steep decline, but he liked it, dropping his Balliol accent to say “New-cassle” like a local, and finding it fertile ground for his schemes. As he ate with his fellow-workers in the greasy spoon, enjoying their competitive talk of growing leeks and selling scrap, he realised that under the industrial overalls lurked canny capitalist peasants. Sunderlandia bowled along for some time; but then a downturn came, and the worker-members would not agree to cut their own pay. In 1978 it went into liquidation.

Others might have been set back, but not Mr Oakeshott. He adjusted his glasses, usually held together with Sellotape and rubber bands, hitched up his trousers, usually belted with string, and forged on. He could point to co-operative successes: the worker-owned John Lewis department store, current turnover around £8 billion a year, and in particular the cluster of machine-making co-ops at Mondragon in Spain, founded by five defecting engineers in 1956, now with 85,000 workers and an annual turnover of €15 billion. A key element in Mondragon, it seemed to him, was the inspirational leadership of a priest, José Maria Arizmendi, who surprised him by producing Mao's “Little Red Book” out of his bottom drawer.

Solidarity in drinking

Mr Oakeshott became an inspiration himself, drawing up business plans for fledgling co-ops, securing capital and founding the Employee Ownership Association in 1979 to speak for them. As communism fell he eagerly took his ideas to eastern Europe, in the hope of installing co-ops there before the oligarchs arrived. His own politics were briefly Labour and more often Liberal, though he admitted, when he ran unsuccessfully for Darlington as a Liberal in 1966, that he had joined the party on his way north on the train.

Despite his upbringing, surrounded by books and learning as the son of a man who became vice-chancellor of Oxford, snobbery never touched him. He loved red wine, but the quantity mattered rather than the quality. His idea of an elegant dinner was macaroni cheese with a kipper thrown in, and with pages of the Financial Times (for which he had written from Paris) spread on the table as a cloth. His decade in Africa in the 1960s made him feel “in more vainglorious moments” that he was a black-Africa buff and an old Kalahari hand, but he approached the place humbly: at his school at Shashe River he dug fields and scrubbed latrines with the rest.

Perhaps his biggest innovation there was a course in development studies, which was then barely taught anywhere. The improvement of human lives was his passion: whether training Botswanan boys to be builders and farmers, or encouraging Europeans to discover the freedom of working without a boss.

He was especially pleased to note that the chiquitos, or drinking clubs, of Mondragon had furnished much of the capital for the co-ops there. Though small, they composed a network of trust. And he mused happily in his book “The Case for Worker's Co-ops” (1978), that if such clubs could not foster co-operative behaviour in Britain and America, they “might well deserve to be copied on their own account”.





Correction: The petrol incident described in the first paragraph took place in Zambia, not Botswana as we originally wrote. This was corrected on July 18th 2011.