Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State is an ambitious attempt to reframe our understanding of the early welfare state in Europe and the United States through a series of case studies centering around nineteenth-century battles for the passage and enforcement of child labor laws. Elisabeth Anderson argues for an understanding of a welfare state as something beyond the simple existence of social insurance programs such as old age insurance and health care systems. It should also, she says, include child labor laws, overtime pay, family leave, and various other policies supporting workers and restraining employers. The lengthy introduction to Agents of Reform departs from a typical historian’s introduction that might engage the literature on the development of welfare states by placing her approach firmly within sociological schools: Anderson seeks to “combine insights from Bourdieusian field theory and US pragmatism to build a novel approach to policy reform that highlights individual actors” (14).
Comparative welfare history is difficult to do well. Many factors shape a nation’s policies and few scholars are deeply knowledgeable about the histories of various nations. Anderson makes this problem manageable, however, by engaging a variety of primary and secondary sources thoroughly and thoughtfully while narrowing her focus specifically to laws surrounding child labor and factory inspection.
The first half of Agents of Reform examines efforts to pass laws limiting child labor in factories. This section is, in effect, a short book complete with its own introduction and conclusion. Two of the three chapters cover attempts to create child labor laws in Prussia and in Massachusetts, respectively, while the most interesting chapter compares efforts in France, where child labor laws were successfully passed, with neighboring Belgium, where they were not. All three chapters are effectively framed, clearly argued, and useful for scholars interested in the history of children, the working class, or government regulations. Whether Anderson is effective in arguing that these laws, which were limited and often unenforced, should be seen as the beginnings of welfare states is likely to vary from one reader to another, but the stories of their creation are nevertheless undeniably compelling and important.
Anderson pays close attention to the strategies of the individuals at the center of each story and takes pain to contextualize their work. The likelihood that laws restricting the hours children could work were passed depended upon many factors, such as the strength or weakness of a country’s labor movement and reformer’s relative strength within the broader national political system. If conditions were ripe, the actual success or failure of individual reformers still depended on “their alliance-building and creative problem-solving strategies” (39). Did they seek allies and were they willing to compromise, or did they stubbornly view their own proposals as the only acceptable way to accomplish their goals? If stymied, did they accept defeat or double-down and look for innovative ways to act outside of the system to get around political obstruction? In each case study, Anderson details how the conscious and deliberate actions of specific reformers either opened up possibilities for successful legislation or led toward the path of political defeat.
The second half of Agents of Reform, like the first, includes its own short introduction and conclusion and investigates three case studies. The focus here moves to the latter half of the nineteenth century by examining efforts to pass factory inspection laws with tangible enforcement mechanisms. Anderson looks at Germany, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Each case study could surely stand on its own, but, when woven into Anderson’s larger argument, offers compelling support for her broader thesis about the welfare state.
Anderson’s arguments about the important roles that individuals play within bureaucracies and political structures are especially compelling. In the short conclusion to Part II, on factory inspection laws, Anderson captures it nicely: “In sum, the model of factory inspection adopted in each of the three states resulted from an interplay between (1) reformers’ ideas, (2) the political and institutional conditions of their respective policy fields, (3) the opportunities afforded by their field positions, and (4) their alliance-building and problem-solving strategies” (279). Anderson’s careful deployment of illustrative case studies supports all four of these claims.
And yet some of Anderson’s broader historiographical interventions come up short. Anderson’s argument that our understanding of the origins of the welfare state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century should be pushed back to include mid-nineteenth-century child labor laws is an idea worth grappling with, but her arguments for it are not, ultimately, particularly convincing. Do unenforced laws, such as those covered in the first half of Agents of Reform, really constitute a version of a broad-based welfare state? Or, more broadly, does oversight of capitalist behavior through government inspection really belong under the welfare state umbrella? It may, but it’s an argument that requires greater engagement than Anderson is able to give here.
Scholars interested in the history of childhood, the working class, or the welfare state will find Agents of Reform a valuable contribution. It’s a smart and insightful work. The bulk of it is also clearly written and eminently accessible, although the book’s lengthy introduction, aimed seemingly at sociologists, might be difficult or even off-putting for undergraduates or other readers eager for an introduction to the topic but not particularly knowledgeable or curious about sociological theory. Anderson’s short introductions and conclusions for each of the two halves of the book, the first on child labor laws and the second on factory inspection laws, concisely present the historical arguments she makes in those chapters, allowing readers who are uncomfortable with or uninterested in sociological theory to dive more directly into this highly worthwhile history.
