This article connects three different intellectual traditions - the sociological, the juridical and the historical tradition - in an attempt to interpret the different conceptions about the worker’s protection against the labor activity risks, which aroused in the discussion of the Civil Code and of the social legislation, along the Brazilian "First Republic" (1891-1930). The article focuses on the theoretical embedment of the legislation devised to regulate the social relations in the beginning of the republican social order. The arguments concerning the protection of the laborers, and mainly its risk and security aspects, allow us to devise the conflicts inherent to the modernization of the social relations in the onset of brazilian industrialization.
Civil Code, 1916; legislation on work, 1919; injuries; risk; security and civil responsibility; modernization; modernity; social and union movements