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David Huyssen, Nate Holdren. Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era., The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 4, December 2021, Pages 1658–1659, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab572
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Between 1908 and 1922, Franz Kafka built a career at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. He spent his days using bureaucratic reform’s mending thread to repair capitalism’s fraying ends. His evening compositions, however, became literary classics in part for their unsettling suggestion that such social needlework produced no neatly hemmed cloth but instead only hideous, choking tangles. Bureaucratic modernity in Kafka’s fiction not only fails to remedy his characters’ physical and psychological agonies but reveals itself as their grotesque reflection, reproducing them in devastating new forms.
Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, although it does not mention Kafka, indicates that his fiction may hold at least as much insight into the consequences of Progressive Era workplace injury and compensation law as his career administering such laws’ Bohemian corollaries. Nate Holdren traces the path from workplace injury law’s “tyranny of the trial” (6)—in which obtaining or evading redress for injury depended on ad hoc judicial sensibilities—to workers’ compensation reform and its “tyranny of the table” (5), which traded sensibility of any kind for unyielding schedules of human limbs and lives, priced as so many assets and liabilities. With erudition, moral force, theoretical sophistication, and refreshing polemical candor, his account enriches several fields of study. It deserves a wide readership.
