Elisabeth Anderson's Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State helps us rethink the nature and origins of the modern welfare state in significant ways. She takes full advantage of the term “regulatory welfare state” to explore how regulatory and protective functions of the state overlapped, while many of us are inclined to treat them separately and associate the latter exclusively with social insurance. In this vein, this fascinating book echoes the literature underlining the expansion of governmental interventions into socioeconomic affairs, which indeed preceded the provision of welfare benefits in many places. Yet, in comparison to the works of historians such as William J. Novak and E. P. Hennock, Anderson's sociological inquiry focuses specifically on the emergence of worker protection, exploring more subtle aspects of the extension of the state's power into our lives.
Agents of Reform contributes to a better understanding of child labor, showing its centrality in the development of the modern state. Chapter 1 is an introduction that delineates the initial contours of child labor reform that made legislative advancements in continental Europe and the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, “when there was little demand for it from either above or below” (p. 5). Anderson highlights the role of middle-class and elite reformers in fighting for justice for toiling children in their localities. On the surface, her discussion reproduces classic narratives about child-saving crusades, which Clark Nardinelli, Viviana A. Zelizer, James D. Schmidt, and others have revised in recent decades in their efforts to analyze the economic, sociocultural, and legal dynamics resulting in the decline of children's industrial employment in developed economies. Yet this well-researched book, likewise notable for its comparative framework, moves beyond the portrayals of sympathetic elites, reminding us that their failures and institutional constraints on their endeavors mattered as much as their achievements.
Anderson's sociological expertise allows her to tease out microinteractive factors that social policy scholars have often left underexplored and unassociated with regulatory labor laws and their implementation. The book's core consists of seven case studies that uncover how two overlapping but distinct groups of reformers—whom the author calls “policy entrepreneurs” and “administrative entrepreneurs”—grappled with the child labor problem in Germany, France, Belgium, and two US states: Massachusetts and Illinois. According to Anderson, they combined six strategies—framing, citation, compromise, piggybacking, signaling expertise or competence, and expanding jurisdiction—to build allies for legislative and administrative developments. Perhaps business historians would be tempted here to challenge the way she adresses the concept of entrepreneurship, without much attention to profitmaking. Part 1 includes three chapters examining nascent attempts to regulate child labor from the 1830s to the 1840s. Chapter 2 focuses on Prussia, where two bureaucrats pursued different approaches, and in Chapter 3, Anderson explains why one reformer succeeded in France while his counterpart failed in Belgium, despite the macrostructural similarities between the two societies. Then, in chapter 4, she takes us to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, probing a process that led to the passage of Massachusetts child labor laws. Coupled with schooling, middle-class reformers’ proposal for child labor regulation gained a wider audience there than in Europe. This case study illustrates Anderson's argument that policy entrepreneurs had less influence on policy outcomes in the absence of political foes because there were fewer opportunities for “strategic alliance building and creative problem-solving” (p. 15).
In Part 2, Anderson presents three models of factory inspection as she examines the development of administrative apparatuses for regulating child labor in Imperial Germany, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Child labor laws from the mid-nineteenth century lacked practical resources for enforcement, and both Massachusetts and Imperial Germany adopted some forms of factory inspection in the late 1870s. What Anderson names the “advisory conciliation model” appeared through the legislative and bureaucratic struggles against German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, not by granting inspectors police power (p. 148). Chapter 6 explains the “conciliatory policing model” adopted in Massachusetts, which enabled industrialists to make patronage appointments (p. 195 ). In chapter 7, Anderson examines a more formidable approach, the “feminist enforcement model” found in Illinois, where women played a substantial role in factory inspection in the 1890s under Florence Kelley's lead (p. 230). The three models reflect how field-specific politics defined the ways in which reform-minded officials could navigate a path to institutional change. Anderson's framing, however, complicates her original emphasis on the agency of individual reformers, as these models characterize them by their strategic capacities rather than their practical impacts, leaving us puzzled as to what would constitute their agency. Chapter 7 also persuades us that more historical accounts of child labor laws should be written through a lens of gender from the beginning, since women were a part of child labor reform in other times and places.
For historians, the book's most intriguing claim is Anderson's chronological assertion that the 1830s marked the start of the welfare state, and she orients her case-based narratives tactfully to support it. Still, her examples seem narrowly focused on child labor even though nineteenth-century reformers dedicated themselves simultaneously to many causes of their times, most importantly the abolition of transatlantic slavery. From the 1830s onward, the United States was split over the issue of slavery, with Massachusetts emerging as an epicenter of antislavery advocacy. Did efforts against child labor strengthen other lines of reform movements? If so, to what extent? Did the abolition of the slave trade and slavery also signal the beginning of the regulatory welfare state? And in what ways could we use the concept of a regulatory welfare state to explain divergent patterns of welfare states? Despite its shortcomings, Anderson's argument is highly worthwhile to discuss. Her analysis of reformers’ strategies shows us how sociological viewpoints can enrich historical inquiries and how historical narratives can benefit sociological argumentation. Agents of Reform embodies the joy of interdisciplinary convergence, which is only one of many reasons to read it.
