Why did the drawbacks of the Industrial Revolution require both political and economic changes?

The Industrial Revolution enormously increased the level of economic output and therefore wealth, and raised the standard of living for millions of people.

But it did not raise everyone's standard of living equally, and it created considerable turmoil in the existing system. People who depended upon old methods of production by hand were rapidly made obsolete, losing their jobs and therefore their livelihoods. Many refused to take this lying down.

Perhaps the most famous example is the Luddites, an often misunderstood group of protesters, mostly former textile workers who lost their jobs to new industrial machinery. They were more nuanced than the use of the word "Luddite" today would reflect; they were not opposed to labor-saving technology in general, but rather the use of labor-saving technology to kick out skilled artisans and replace them with unskilled machine operators. Above all they cared about maintaining high wages and strong labor standards, and they saw that industrial machinery was being used to undermine those efforts.

The Industrial Revolution changed so much about the way that wealth was produced and societies were organized that it forced people to make other changes in the political and economic system in order to adapt. Family farms were no longer profitable compared to industrialized agribusinesses. Individual artisans could no longer compete with mass-production factories. People who had worked their whole lives at a single craft were suddenly forced to find new jobs.

The harsh working conditions of early factories required governments to create labor regulations. The high rates of harmful pollution forced governments to establish environmental regulations. To this day we see an ongoing conflict between industrialized businesses that want to escape regulations versus the society as a whole that realizes we need to protect workers and the environment from exploitation.

Even the social welfare state was largely a response to industrialization, in two ways: The rising wealth inequality drove people to find some way to redistribute wealth to the needy, and the rising overall wealth allowed that redistribution to take place without dramatically harming the standard of living of those at the top.