One of my chief concerns while writing this book has been to avoid the imputation that there existed a functional relationship between “the needs of capitalism” and the legal discourses construing labor and employment to which courts and treatise writers had resort in the early republic. This is not because I believe that law had no significance for the processes of industrialization and capital accumulation under way during the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed I think it was of vast significance. What I would wish to deny is simply the implication, as I put it at the outset, that this significance lies in a relationship that is unilinear and founded in the economy. What is “law” at any given moment is determined by legal discourse's own rules of formation rather than by its proponents' obedience to an overweening exterior influence. Law's relationship to economy, as to any social process, is hence mediated by the particularities and anomalies of its own process of creation.