Long recognized as a case that left tenement cigar workers in New York City unprotected from hazards to their health, the New York State high court's In re Jacobs ruling in 1885 also raised anew disagreements regarding the extent of legislative powers known as “police” that were reserved to the states by the federal constitution. Upholding unfettered freedom of contract, the Jacobs ruling prevailed as a governing precedent through a string of related cases until its reversal in Holden v. Hardy, 1898, a working hours law for Utah miners and smelter workers. Between Jacobs and Holden, new thinking emerged on the meaning of class, the role of government, and the drivers of the wealth of nations. In Holden, drawing from Munn v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court located a public interest in sustaining the health and strength of such workers on the grounds that the entire public depended on their productive capacity to ensure the public good of a strong and growing state economy. This precedent did not hold for New York State bakers in Lochner v. New York, but it became controlling again in West Coast Hotel v. Parish, which elevated the broadened conception of “police” from Holden to the national level. As labor union membership along with other vital structures of the New Deal order have declined during the New Gilded Age, employment regulation has tended to relapse toward the individualist, contractarian regime of the Old Gilded Age announced in In re Jacobs.

Investigating investigations, inquiring into inquiries, surveying the results of earlier surveys: for well over a century historians have been digging into the mountains of data amassed by generations of social investigators, seeking evidence to use in reconstructing past economic relations and social conditions. Like Karl Marx hunched over parliamentary Blue Books in the British Museum, we have parsed the tables and decoded the responses, searching for the stuff of social and cultural life. All this intense scrutiny suggests something of the importance of the subject. For social historians seeking nonelite sources, for policy historians studying conditions to be addressed by state or communal action, for cultural historians recovering elusive past identities, for intellectual historians listening for points of contact between action and belief, the accumulated lore deposited in past social inquiries provides indispensable concrete evidence.

During a crucial period of United States history, 1880s–1940s, ideas developed in political economy were the core component of a transformation in the way Americans thought about the social and political order. These decades, the era of the elaboration in the United States and internationally of what historians of liberal reform thought refer to as the New Liberalism, were the site of a general reassessment of the constitutive ideologies, Smithian/Lockean liberalism, and a democratized, commercialized version of classical republicanism hanging over from the agrarian republic. Scary, unexpectedly turbulent conditions in an economy plagued by recurrent cyclical downturns in investment and employment, accompanied by unprecedented levels of social conflict, placed a premium on new knowledge. This need arose just as the academic professionalization of the social sciences, the rise of critical political journalism, and highly mobilized women's and labor movements began providing impressive new analytical talent. Efforts to find answers to pressing issues raised by the “social question” were intended initially by most of those involved as a salvage operation for what remained valid among key tenets of American liberalism regarding individualism, competition, the efficacy of the market, and the role of the state. Instead, they led ultimately to a reconstruction in public philosophy, at least on the scale of the one underway since the 1970s, with the “the return of the market,” the unprecedented sway of neoclassicism, and the multidisciplinary appeal of rational choice theory.