The Relations of “Life”

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and spilling over into the twentieth, as the United States grew into a large-scale industrial economy, it began to experience a new set of problems: mounting capital–labor conflict, massive income inequality, spreading urbanization, and mass immigration. Beginning in the 1870s, in response to such pressures, a variety of groups – farmers, workers, businesses, consumers, reformers – called increasingly stridently for government intervention in economy and society. The federal and state governments responded with a spate of legislation that regulated railroads, utilities, banks, and insurance companies; reigned in monopolies; and sought to reshape capital–labor relations. But there was also considerable opposition to such regulation from a variety of quarters, ranging from those generally distrustful of government to big business interests to a common law–centered bench and bar traditionally hostile to legislation. Increasingly, American democracy would be discussed in terms of the contest between laissez-faire and social democracy, between the immunity of the private sphere from legislative interference and the power of democratic majorities to regulate it.

In the late nineteenth century, although there were strands of laissez-faire thought that reached back to the Scottish Enlightenment through Jackson and Jefferson, by far the most significant version of laissez-faire thought, replete with a coherent philosophy of history, was that associated with what we now call Social Darwinism.