@article{1478785,
      recid = {1478785},
      author = {Witt, John Fabian, },
      title = {The Accidental Republic : Crippled Workingmen, Destitute  Widows, and the Remaking of American Law /},
      pages = {1 online resource (321 p.)},
      abstract = {In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States  witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to  cope with the nation's exceptionally acute industrial  accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of  torts. Workingmen's organizations founded a widespread  system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers  instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And  social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as  workmen's compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that  experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth  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  twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law;  they laid the foundations of the American administrative  state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal  transformation from the principles of free labor to the  categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment  at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes  American accident law as a contingent set of institutions  that might plausibly have developed along a number of  historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of  American accident law is the story of the equally  contingent remaking of our accidental republic. Table of  Contents: Introduction 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 John 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 19th 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 20th  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 CurrenciesIn 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, The  University of Chicago, author of The People's Welfare: Law  and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1478785},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674045279},
}