Jane Addams

Jane Addams

Jane Addams is remembered as a saintly social worker and a Nobel peace laureate, the founder of Hull House, and almost never as the philosopher she was. Yet the settlement house she opened in a Chicago slum was a philosophical experiment, the working laboratory of a pragmatist theory of knowledge and ethics every bit as rigorous as the books her friends John Dewey and William James wrote in their studies. Her governing claim was simple and demanding: you cannot truly know people, or do them any lasting good, from above them or outside their lives. Real knowledge of another comes only through sympathy and shared conditions. She called it sympathetic knowledge, and rather than argue for it she built a house to live it out.

Sympathetic knowledge. At the center of Addams's thought is a theory of how we come to understand one another. The detached observer who studies the poor from a distance, and the benefactor who dispenses charity from above, both fail in the same way: they never enter the life they presume to judge or help, and so they never really know it. Genuine knowledge of another person's situation is born of proximity and fellow feeling, of sharing conditions and learning reciprocally rather than instructing from a height. This is at once an epistemology, an account of how social understanding is actually achieved, and an ethics, since it makes humility and mutual exchange the condition of any help that is not also a humiliation.

Social ethics. Addams argued that morality itself had to grow up. The personal and familial ethics inherited from a simpler age, private virtue, charity to the individual case, was no longer adequate to a crowded, industrial, interdependent society, which needed a social ethic that extended moral concern across the lines of class and group. Democracy, on her account, is not merely a form of government but a rule of living, a way of being associated with others that obliges us to take one another's lives seriously. "We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class," she writes, "but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having." She called the alternative to private advancement "lateral progress," the lifting of a whole society together rather than the climbing of a few out of it.

Hull House. In 1889 Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in an immigrant district of Chicago, and the idea was as radical as it was practical: educated people would live there, among their poor neighbors rather than above them, offering classes, child care, clubs, and a meeting place, and, just as importantly, learning from the cultures and conditions around them. The house became a base for reform, behind the first juvenile court, factory inspection, child-labor law, and sanitary campaigns, and at the same time a working model of democratic social ethics. Theory and practice were not two things for Addams; the settlement was how she did philosophy, by social experiment.

Pragmatism in action. This is why Addams belongs with the pragmatists. Like Dewey and James, she held that ideas are tested by their consequences in action, and Hull House was her laboratory for testing them. Her exchange with Dewey ran both ways: he drew from the settlement the vision of democracy as a shared form of associated life that he would go on to theorize, and she gave his abstractions a body. For decades the profession filed her under reform and social work rather than philosophy, but recent scholarship has restored her as a central figure of American pragmatism, a thinker whose method happened to be a house full of people rather than a seminar room.

The philosophy of peace. Addams's pacifism was constructive rather than merely negative. In Newer Ideals of Peace she argues that peace is not the absence of war but a positive social process, and that its newer ideals were already growing up out of the cosmopolitan mixing of the immigrant city, the solidarity of labor, and the values of care that women were bringing into public life. She opposed the First World War at enormous cost to her once-universal popularity, and she worked through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom for a cooperation among peoples that went beyond the silencing of guns. The recognition came late, with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

What this room reads. The corpus carries two of her works, both from Project Gutenberg. Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) is her central book of moral and political philosophy, the source of sympathetic knowledge, social ethics, and lateral progress. Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910) is her account of the settlement and the thinking that grew from it. Citations run by work and chapter. Her further writings on peace, Newer Ideals of Peace and Peace and Bread in Time of War, are addressed partly from those volumes and partly from training knowledge, and the chat says when it reaches past the corpus.

The portrait of Addams as a kindly do-gooder, which she half cultivated and the textbooks fixed, long hid the philosopher beneath it, but the recovery is well advanced, and she now stands where she belongs, among the founders of American pragmatism. Beside her are John Dewey, who took from her settlement the democracy-as-shared-life he would make his own, and William James, who championed her work. She took from Tolstoy the conviction that one must share the conditions of the poor, visiting him at Yasnaya Polyana and trying his bread labor for a time, though she found his absolutism unworkable for the tasks in front of her; she stood with W. E. B. Du Bois in the era's arguments over reform and race; and her insistence that the values of care belong in public life carries forward the line of Mary Wollstonecraft. Read now, Jane Addams is the philosopher who proved her own epistemology by living it, and whose claim still puts a question to us: that no good is secure, or even worth having, until it is shared by everyone.