Description
Book SynopsisWitt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the 20th century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped 20th- and 21st-century American accident law and laid the foundations of the American administrative state.
Trade ReviewEmerging from legal history,
Accidental Republic offers a broad political narrative that explores how Americans confronted the hazards and insecurities of industrialization… A very fine book that is consistently engaging to read. -- Jennifer Klein * Business History Review *
The Accidental Republic is a book about the origins of workmen’s compensation, and it is probably the best book we will ever get on the subject. But it is also about much more. It is about the relationship between risk and industrial capitalism, about whether fingers are worth thirty dollars or sixty dollars, and about the political representation of pain—how it has been measured, commodified, expressed, and silenced. It is also about democratic institutions that distinguished brave soldiers and helpless trainmen from unworthy scoundrels… It is about the relationship between sympathy and citizenship and about finding a place for unfortunate people in a fortunate society. It is a book about risks, not only about why we foolishly attempt to control them, but why, even then, we still need to take them. It is, at bottom, a profound examination of how we value our fellow gamblers in the two riskiest collective enterprises of American life: capitalism and democracy…
The Accidental Republic is a masterful work of legal history that will leave scholars in numerous fields arguing for years to come. -- Christopher Capozzola * Georgetown Law Journal *
Witt carefully reconstructs the uncertain path that ultimately led to the adoption of workmen’s compensation… Witt’s narrative is brimming with rich insights… Workmen’s compensation, as he persuasively argues, represented a dramatic, although deeply contested, paradigm shift from free labor to risk and insurance that extended beyond the workplace to the building of the twentieth-century social welfare state. -- Barbara Y. Welke * Journal of American History *
Witt offers compelling evidence of the dangers workers faced as the United States rapidly industrialized after the Civil War… The book describes the numerous experiments in social, institutional, and legal reform that attempted to craft some form of protection for workers and, in the case of accidental death, their survivors… The book traces how the sheer number of industrial accidents and the attendant destitution of families deprived of their breadwinner challenged the societal notion that injuries were individual problems between employers and workers… Witt’s superb efforts will hopefully stimulate other historical examinations of dangerous work in America. -- Robert Forrant * Labor History *
In 1940 Willard Hurst and Lloyd Garrison inaugurated modern socio-legal studies in the United States with their history of workers’ injuries and legal process in Wisconsin. Two generations later, John Fabian Witt’s
The Accidental Republic marks the full maturation of that field of inquiry. Deftly integrating a legal analysis of tort doctrine, a history of industrial accidents, and a fresh political-economic understanding of statecraft, Witt demonstrates the significance of turn-of-the-century struggles over work, injury, risk, reparation, and regulation in the making of our modern world. Sophisticated, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary,
The Accidental Republic is legal history as Hurst and Garrison imagined it could be. -- William Novak, University of Chicago, author of
The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century AmericaJohn Witt paints his portrait of industrializing America with the subtlety of a master and on an immense canvas. His magisterial history is much more than an account of the rise of workers compensation, still one of our greatest social reforms. Witt vividly recreates the social context of the late-nineteenth-century industrial world—workers’ appalling injury and death rates, their mutual help and insurance associations, mass immigration, the rise of Taylorist management, the struggles to give new meaning to the free labor ideal, the encounter between European social engineering and American anti-statism and individualism, and the politics and economics of labor relations in the Progressive era. Out of these materials, Witt shows, the law helped fashion a new social order. His analysis has great contemporary significance, revealing both the alluring possibilities and the enduring limits of legal reform in America. It is destined to become a classic of social and legal history. -- Peter H. Schuck, author of
Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe DistanceJohn Witt shows us the power of perceptive legal history at work. Within the tangle of compensation for industrial accidents, he discovers not only a legal struggle whose outcome set the pattern for many twentieth-century interventions of government in economic life, but also a momentous confrontation between contract and collective responsibility. Anyone who finds American history absorbing will gain pleasure and insight from this book. -- Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University, author of
The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other CurrenciesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Crisis of Free Labor 2. The Dilemmas of Classical Tort Law 3. The Cooperative Insurance Movement 4. From Markets to Managers 5. Widows, Actuaries, and the Logics of Social Insurance 6. The Passion of William Werner 7. The Accidental Republic Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index
