ABSTRACT
The new capitalist industrial society that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century did not exist in a political and social vacuum. As the economy became based more on industrial work done by men and women in the towns and urban areas, changes had to be made to the society in which they lived. Dismantling the traditional family and community social safety net generated the need for a new order which would secure social reproduction. In the view published by Gustav K.Hamilton and others in 1865, the ‘era of large enterprises, the division of labour, the introduction of machinery and the advent of a monetary economy weakened family ties, fomented mistrust between master and worker and caused widespread pauperism’.1 New demands on central and local government were formulated by various special-interest groups that organised themselves to address the strains (and possibilities) associated with industrial change. Workers combined in trade unions and companies affiliated to employers’ associations, not only to protect their interests against others in the labour market but also to demand support for ‘the public interest’. Other groups made similar demands on ‘society’. As Karl Polyani puts it in his work The Great Transition (1944), these ‘counter-forces’ are as old as the modern capitalist industrial society itself. Radical changes in the economy give rise to new institutional arrangements. Together, these forces are a clear incentive structure, which in turn form the basis for various ‘new interests’.
