Economic foundations of conflicts and solidarity within the traditional rural community of Slovenia

Abstract

The following article focuses on the economic conflicts in the local rural communities in Slovenia until World War II and analyses the example of the privatisation of a public good, the relations between labour and capital, and economic solidarity in form of cooperatives as a tool for ensuring social cohesion at the local level. The author presents a viewpoint that the feeling of social justice (moral economy) represented a cohesive element in the analysed local communities. Justice, defined according to the rules of traditional law, provided the relations in the local communities with a status of legitimacy. If the feeling of justice was questioned, then the legitimacy of the social relations and consequently the cohesion of the local communities were uncertain as well.