The Western social state was born at the end of the nineteenth century with the adoption of a new regime of responsibility for industrial accidents. A perspicacious witness of this legal turning-point was Franz Kafka, whose professional career was devoted to applying the law on industrial accidents that Austria–Hungary had adopted in 1887. His legal studies had left him with mixed memories, as he wrote to his father: ‘I was positively living, in an intellectual sense, on sawdust, which had, moreover, already been chewed for me in thousands of other people’s mouths. But in a certain sense this very thing was to my taste.’ [...] His friend Max Brod recalled that Kafka’s ‘social conscience was greatly stirred when he saw workers crippled through neglect of safety precautions’. ‘How modest those men are’, he confided one day to Brod, his ‘eyes wide’. ‘Instead of storming the institute and smashing it to little pieces, they come and beg.’