Injury Impoverished

Rezensionen / Stimmen

'Charting the shift from the tyranny of the trial to the tyranny of the (actuarial) table, Nate Holdren illuminates the biopolitics behind workers' compensation. Deeply humane, Injury Impoverished joins theory to storytelling to place the history of disability into conversation with the history of capitalism, rejecting the commodification of life.' Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 'Impoverished Injury masterfully melds acute historical analysis with insightful social theory to tell a compelling tale about the legal commodification of labor, the moral thinning of injury law, and the horrific ordeal of everyday Americans coping with workplace injuries.' Ajay K. Mehrotra, American Bar Foundation & Northwestern University 'Holdren's demonstration of how the law of accidents and the growth of capitalism abstracted away from the lived realities of workplace injuries is brilliantly argued, and a gripping, at times haunting, reading. A history of moral imagination, it is a work of moral imagination itself.' Jonathan Levy, author of Ages of American Capitalism 'Meticulous and gripping in equal parts, Injury Impoverished offers a compelling and beautifully written history of the emergence of workers' compensation law in the United States. More than that, however, this book delivers a flash of lightning that illuminates the precise legal contours of the terrifying machine that dismembered and reprocessed the American working class during the first decades of the twentieth century. Essential reading for every cog in the machine.' Rose Sydney Parfitt, Kent Law School, and author of The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance