Human nature, objective social structure, and social reforms: unionized Spanish workers attitudes towards social legislation, 1870–1930

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the question of why labour legislation produces diverse, often opposing, responses among sectors of the population that apparently benefit from it. In particular, it explores the changes in the attitudes of unionized Spanish workers to the social reforms between 1870 and 1930. These workers had previously rejected state intervention in labour relations. Since 1870, most continued without calling for social laws, but occasionally demanded the application of those already approved. A second current among them, organized in anarcho-syndicalist associations, reiterated their opposition to those reforms. A third trend, grouped around socialist organizations, initially rejected labour legislation, but ended up supporting it. The analysis presented here aims to explain these trade-union attitudes by examining their expressions in the press, in their manifestos and public statements, and in the labour conflicts. It shows that these attitudes were based on one of the two assumptions about the social relations that shaped workers conceptions and actions at the time: “sociable human nature” and “objective social structure.” Its main thesis is that these two assumptions about what society was emerged from the partial reformulation or rejection of prior conceptions that had driven trade-union actions until the late nineteenth century.