Abstract
It is impossible to identify the single most important contribution of Elizabeth Anderson's study of 19th-century child labor regulations. In Agents of Reform, Anderson seeks to explain the emergence (part 1) and the enforcement (part 2) of child labor laws across a wide range of cases in 19th-century Europe and North America. During this period, it was not uncommon for children as young as six to toil for twelve or more hours in textile mills, glass factories, or mines, with little to no hygiene and labor standards to protect them from the dangers of performing debilitating and back-breaking tasks.
Anderson posits that early efforts to regulate child labor really should be understood as the beginning of the modern welfare state, thereby challenging conventional narratives about its development. This is a bold claim, to be sure, but she presents a convincing historical account. It revolves around the following question: Given the absence of a strong labor movement in the early 19th century and a predominant understanding that children must work to supplement family incomes, how is it possible that legislators introduced a set of regulations that, to some degree, decommodified child labor and put an external cost on employers? Anderson's core argument is that this is a story about the agency and creativity of individual middle and upper-class reformers (among them, mid-level bureaucrats) who were convinced that excessive, unregulated child labor was wrong—and who knew how to advance their claims by navigating the crucial bureaucracy, intellectual, and business networks of imperial Germany, republican France, democratic Massachusetts, and Illinois. However, as the author notes, this is not a “‘great-man’ theory of history,” it is rather about the “structural and field-specific factors” that equipped these individuals with an agency (p. 7).
Carefully designed comparison of historical cases buttresses Anderson's argument. In the book's first part, she considers Belgium as a negative case where most of the conditions also found in France and imperial Prussia were present. However, Belgian reformers failed to pass commensurate laws until decades later because they performed poorly when it came to the crucial challenge of building the right alliances and signaling readiness to compromise along the way. Regarding Prussia and France, Anderson portrays a successful and a failing reformer for each case, a strategy that allows her to highlight the nuts and bolts of what an effective reform agency looks like. It is determined, it turns out, by a whole range of things, such as employing frames that resonate with discursive opportunities (for instance, framing child labor as a moral problem, the “degeneration” of children's character as an issue of concern for the nation's future), citing the right people (not relying too much on outsiders), weaving the right relational alliances (overlapping alliances in multiple fields are advantageous), being open to compromise but also subverting existing rules when necessary.
The book positions itself in the tradition of Polanyian, ideational welfare research espoused by Fred Blok and Margaret Somers (2014), combined with pragmatist field-theoretical, institutionalist traditions. It effectively challenges economistic assumptions in welfare research. Anderson shows that the influence of factory owners (and business interests more broadly) varies across the cases—it is far from the only or a predominant explanatory factor. She portrays her mid-tier reformers in brief political biographies, revealing their determination to mold the relationship between the state and the economy in their own image. The excellent chapter on two female reformers in Illinois—who are, in the book's overarching narrative, concerned with enforcing the regulations adopted decades earlier but often ignored in practice—underscores that gender is a crucial determinant when it comes to performing the role of the welfare reformer. It reveals how, despite all their strategizing, Anderson's reformers crucially depended on their audience and the ways in which they successfully and credibly achieved to be seen as “acting on behalf” of the nation, the economy, the moral order, and finally, the children that these regulations are ultimately about. Her insights into the cultural contingency of performance may, in fact, be further elaborated theoretically—they seem to fit quite well with Isaac Reed's (2020) recent analysis of the ideational and relational sources of modern state power.
Drawing on the “genetic approach” (Ermakoff 2019), Agents of Reform is a holistic account that challenges monocausal explanations for institutional change. One wonders what the implications of reading the wide array of sources in the vast number of cases considered by Anderson are in this respect. How do we locate, and how do we make sure we are able to see, the bits and pieces relevant to social policy claims-making in these historical documents? A more detailed account of the methodological challenges would have been a wonderful addition to this book. After all, the welfare state has now been with us for some time—and, following Anderson, for much longer than we typically assume. Thus, the craft of combining different types of data from various cultural and historical contexts has arguably become ever more central to social policy research.