This paper considers Tunisian cooperatives and economic planning through a paths-not-taken approach. In Tunisia, in the rural sector, cooperatives were largely implanted from above, with minimal consultation with the peasantry. Their impact and reception varied widely: amongst northwestern proletarianized rural day-workers, cooperative labor was familiar and ownership of the land was minimal, lubricating their success. Elsewhere, as in the Sahel, petty commodity production and small-scale land ownership were part of the traditions of the region, and cooperatives encountered considerably more friction. This paper considers an aspect of the cooperative thinking extant in Tunisia by considering it from the perspective of its critics, both those endogenous – within the ISEA-AN planning bureaus – and exogenous, namely the Perspectives Movement, the leftist student grouplet. It examines their critiques, based largely on a more systematic engagement with peasant knowledge and participatory technological development, partially based on the experience of China. It places those critiques within a broader political sociology of bureaucratized Tunisian planning, emplaced in a broader macro-global sociology of the push to state planning in Tunisia, to elucidate why the path taken, was taken, and then to use that as a background to consider the various untaken paths traversed during the apex of Tunisian socialism until its disintegration in 1969.