Agents of Reform

"An account of how the welfare state began with early nineteenth-century child labor laws, and how middle-class and elite reformers made it happen. The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers' efforts to appeal to working-class voters. Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws. Middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state's capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. This book compares seven cases of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors' ideas and coalition-building strategies."--From the publisher's description.