Jane Addams on Inequality and Political Friendship

Wynne Walker Moskop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138303348
• eBook ISBN: 9781351399326
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, Wynne Walker Moskop addresses the practical and theoretical problem of how unequal political friendships evolve toward arrangements the parties consider reciprocal and just, a problem neglected by scholars of democracy who associate reciprocity and justice only with equal parties. Jane Addams insisted that Hull House was not a charity with philanthropic aspirations; rather it had to bring "two classes" to a shared purpose and more egalitarian relation. The problem was, and still is, how?

Drawing on several bodies of scholarship—including Addams's writings, secondary works about her collaborations, literature on Aristotelian political friendship, and feminist scholarship on the global migration of care workers—Moskop shows the importance of Addams's practices to the continuing relevance of unequal economic relations for shaping political friendship.

Contributing to a lively conversation about Addams's work as a pragmatist thinker and social reformer that began three decades ago, Jane Addams on Inequality and Political Friendship is an invaluable resource to students of democratic theory, feminist political theory and philosophy, and American pragmatism. It illuminates the importance of overlooked conditions for friendship and justice in unequal relations, given people's ongoing subordination because of race, class, gender, and citizenship status in the U.S. and transnationally.

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INTRODUCTION

Political Friendship and Justice among Unequals

Jane Addams, co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House settlement and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, described the relationship between the philanthropist and the beneficiary in the Progressive Era industrial world as the one of the most “incredibly painful obstacles” that confronted her and other democratic-minded residents of Hull House as they lived and worked in a poor immigrant neighborhood spawned, and then neglected by, industrial capitalism (Addams 2002c, 63). Even though Addams insisted that Hull House was not a charity with philanthropic aspirations, its residents nonetheless had to confront the hierarchical class division that charitable organizations do—“an unconscious division of the world into the philanthropists and those to be helped.” Their upper-middle class status positioned Addams and most Hull House residents among the philanthropist class; yet, Addams wrote, the democratic motives of Hull House residents were in “revolt” against this “assumption of two classes” (62). Somehow the “two classes” had to be brought to a shared purpose that transformed their unequal economic relation into a more egalitarian relation. The puzzle was, and still is, how?

Addams’s solution, which she describes in multiple accounts, is that persons and groups who are unequal due to their different status in philanthropist and beneficiary classes must become friends who build cosmopolitan democratic communities—despite their economic inequality and, actually, in the context of that inequality.¹ By many accounts, Addams was a first-rate practitioner of personal friendship. Scholars note that her close and enduring friendships with Hull House co-founder Ellen Gates Starr, philanthropist Mary Rozet Smith, and many labor activists and social reformers—including Mary Kenney, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and John Dewey—contributed to her successes (Deegan 2002; Elshtain 2002, 24; Hamington 2005; Knight 2010; Fischer 2014). They note also that she relied on personal friendships among Hull House residents as a source of strength for the whole community (Stebner 1997; Elshtain 2002; Hamington 2004; Knight 2010). However, those accounts do not focus on the hierarchical class relations that concern Addams, the changes that must occur for unequal parties to become friends, or the economic underpinnings of her collaborative friendships. Those topics are my interests in this book. Instead of seeing the world as a mix of independent actors—whether these be individuals, corporations, nonprofits, or established political entities like nations and international organizations—Addams sees the world in relational terms. Her accounts explore the hierarchical social and economic relations that shape our daily lives and our place in the larger society. Her pragmatist approach uncovers these relational underpinnings of society in ways that are helpful for understanding and countering xenophobic political and economic divides today.

I focus on Addams’s experiential accounts of her collaborations with and among immigrant groups surrounding Hull House. I argue that she is a first-rate practitioner of political friendship, understood in the Aristotelian sense of an association that is just because the parties make reciprocal contributions to a mutual utilitarian purpose. Addams’s friendship practices contribute to democratic theory in two ways. First, she develops political friendships where contemporary democratic thinkers generally do not think to look—among persons and groups who are unequal in power and resources. Her experiential accounts detail the epistemological and structural changes through which unequal persons or groups become friends by discovering mutual interests and negotiating reciprocal contributions to a common goal. Second, Addams’s pragmatist, process-oriented accounts expand political friendship beyond current applications to democratic citizens, in fact, beyond the boundaries of any formal association; her accounts provide a model that is useful for understanding possibilities for political friendship even in today’s transnational market relations.

Addams and other residents of Hull House worked for more than 40 years in their diverse immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side to move beyond class divisions and build a cosmopolitan democratic community to address common civic problems (Addams 1907/1964, 2002a, 2002b; Seigfried 1996; Sarvasy 2010). Addams forged across-class collaborative friendships with and among her diverse immigrant neighbors, labor unions, professional experts, philanthropists, and government agencies in Chicago’s Progressive Era industrial world. Hull House residents helped to organize or hosted day care facilities, art classes, a social science debate club, a museum, dramatic performances, and a women’s club, among other functions. They also investigated and responded to causes of the problems that threatened their neighborhood. For example, they tracked high death rates to uncollected garbage; then they sent volunteers into the filthy alleys to document the failures of city garbage inspectors, advocated for improvements, and eventually led successful neighborhood initiatives to improve services and reduce death rates (Addams 1911). Hull House became a social laboratory for experimenting with and gradually working out how middle-class, educated Hull House residents and disparate, impoverished neighboring ethnic groups could come together as a community to investigate, understand, and address the common problems they experienced. Although Addams disliked the clinical connotation of the term social laboratory (Seigfried 1999, 214), she spoke often of the need to maintain an experimental approach open to change with circumstances and community needs. Jane Addams’s many books provide numerous accounts of how these unequal relationships evolved toward collaborative partnerships that were more egalitarian and closer to the democratic ideals that motivated Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull House in the first place. She often describes them as friendships or friendly relations. She also refers to their comradeship or fellowship (Whipps 2004; Lake 2014).

Of particular interest to me is Addams’s suggestion that the cosmopolitan communities of immigrants that grew from friendly cross-class relations at Hull House can serve as a model for developing peaceful and more just relations transnationally (Addams 1907, 11–19, 235–236; 1911, 308). Addams, who won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, worked to spread her pragmatist approach through international organizations, especially the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as through settlement houses, labor unions, and public service agencies. In Newer Ideals of Peace (Addams 1907/1964), written as Addams worried about the increasing nationalistic fervor and belligerence she observed in the world, Addams reflects on different approaches to peace, including the “peace-secured-by-the-preparation-for-war theory” that seems to prevail (5), the “older dovelike ideal” illustrated by Tolstoy’s moral appeal to pity for the suffering caused by war (3–4), and the “newer, more aggressive ideals” she has in mind (3). She considers the first absurd. And she deems older ideals of peace “passive” and dependent on recruiting people to a personal moral dogma, in the face of existing industrial conditions that require a more social and active approach (3–4). Addams identifies this approach with “newer ideals of peace” that rely on possibilities for building community among people of different classes and ethnicities who are linked by their need to address common problematic conditions. Her goal is to replace the old nationalist version of patriotism and the “war virtues” that go with it by a “cosmic patriotism” (237) that requires practical attention to a “larger and more varied environment” (214).

As a path forward, Addams argues for attention to the growing “industrial relations” that can respond “to the cause of the poor” and to the “unfolding of world-wide processes” that can “nurture … human life” (113, 237–238). She distances herself from the ideas of speculative philosophers, such as Kant, that progress inevitably will result in the “subsidence of war” (23); instead she looks for “an adequate ethical code” in the newer “wide commercial relations” of her time (221).

To Addams, commercial and industrial relations are “social relations,” not in the vague sense of merely involving other persons, but in the sense of economic relations that shape an entire society. In this context, an adequate ethical code means “free[ing] ourselves from the individualistic point of view sufficiently to group events in their social relations and to judge fairly those who are endeavoring to produce a social result through all the difficulties of associated action” (Addams 1907, 175). Identifying the economic relations and drawing our ethics from them is the challenge; it is easier for the benevolent philanthropist to stick to the individualist path, which attracts recognition from others, than to aim for a humbler democratic “social ethic,” or “social morality” that is less visible to others (175). To develop collaborative political friendships, we must turn to a social ethic that is grounded in the wider industrial and commercial relations that shape the particular relations that we observe and feel in our immediate experiences.

Even though Addams founded Hull House “on the theory that the dependence of the classes on each other is reciprocal” (Addams 1911, 91) and sees interdependence as the key to cross-class friendships, she recognizes that the distance between philanthropist and beneficiary classes is geographic as well as economic. The wider social relations that concern Addams are not always evident to people in their daily lives. Even in the same city, “the poor and overburdened” beneficiary class often are invisible to the philanthropist class because space separates them; only “the daily paper” connects them (Addams 1907, 215). Their economic reciprocity and interdependence are difficult to identify. Along with newspapers, Addams and other Hull House residents reduced the invisibility of Chicago classes to each other by examining and publicizing their interdependent economic relations and facilitating collaborative friendships that could address problems spawned by those relations. Addams sees similar possibilities in the international arena, despite much greater distances.

Addams’s Expansion of Political Friendship

Most modern democratic thinkers do not entertain the possibility of political friendships as broad as those Addams envisioned. Schooled in the tradition of Kantian universalism to associate friendship and justice with equality, they tend to overlook the kinds of unequal relations that concern Addams, even though such relations affect all of us. We spend most of our lives in unequal relations, as children and parents, employees and employers, students and teachers, members of subordinate and dominant social groups; yet treatments of justice, friendship, and reciprocity almost invariably focus on equal relations. In this vein, political theorists and philosophers who focus on political friendship cast it narrowly as civic friendship among ostensibly equal democratic citizens (see Allen 2004; Schwarzenbach 2009; Inamura 2015). This puts aside difficult questions about whether and how diverse unequal parties—citizens and noncitizens, dominant and marginalized racial groups, philanthropists and beneficiaries, professional experts and their clients—can collaborate on terms that are not merely kind or charitable, but reciprocal and just in the context of their particular unequal relations.² The very idea that unequal collaborations can be just seems strange to most democratic thinkers. Their association of justice and reciprocity with egalitarian relations necessarily neglects the pervasive need in today’s global environment to understand possibilities for political friendship among unequal transnational parties.

Fortunately, the concept of political friendship admits a broader interpretation, one rooted in Aristotle’s claim that just political regimes and associations of all kinds—whether equal or unequal—are utilitarian friendships built on common interests (Aristotle 1999, Nicomachean Ethics VIII.9–12). Addams’s feminist pragmatist friendship practices demonstrate both the possibility and the usefulness of a broad and flexible understanding of political friendship that illuminates possibilities for democratizing the unequal relations that contemporary democratic thinkers neglect. As Wendy Sarvasy among others observes, Addams was a pioneer in forging “woman-centered” cross-class alliances that transcended the gendered divisions between public and private spheres, as well as divisions of ethnicity and race, to address neglected but pervasive public problems (Sarvasy 2010; also see Deegan 2002; Fischer 2004). Thus, Addams’s approach to political friendship updates the concept to cover inequalities of race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as class, by including groups commonly relegated to the margins in formal politics. Her approach can serve a similar purpose in the international arena. It sends us to look for potential political friendships in the context of commercial and industrial relations that do not observe national borders.

For any who may be skeptical that Addams’s collaborations qualify as political friendship, it is important to keep in mind the definitive features that Addams’s political friendships share with democratic civic friendship. In both cases, the key point is not to think of all friendships as personal, as Sibyl Schwarzenbach (2011) reminds us that many in the modern West do. All political friendships—equal or unequal—center on shared utilitarian interests. This means that they can be forged among persons who are strangers when they gradually develop mutual trust and reciprocity through bonds forged by common interests or projects rather than personal bonds, as Danielle Allen (2004, 156–157) persuasively elaborates. According to Schwarzenbach, features of personal friendship such as “reciprocal awareness and liking,” treating others as “moral equals,” wishing them well, and acting on that wish are introduced into democratic civic friendship through social customs, institutions, and law; for example, when we educate ourselves “about how citizens live in other parts of [our] city or country,” and when we are “willing to help [others] in times of crisis,” or to ungrudgingly give “tax dollars for basic assistance” (Schwarzenbach 2011; also see Schwarzenbach 2009).

Jane Addams’s political friendships, like democratic civic friendships, originate when strangers pursue a common utilitarian purpose. However, her political friendships have a more specific pragmatic purpose and origin than friendship based on citizenship in a democratic society. They center on problems that cannot be addressed by a predefined national group of citizens; they require collaboration among those who are affected by a specific problem. This origin of Addams’s political friendships will resonate with those who are familiar with John Dewey’s explanation of the origin of the “public” in The Public and Its Problems published in 1927. “Public” does not refer to government institutions, but rather to actual relations among those who perceive themselves to be “seriously affected” by the consequences of actions taken by others, and who form a group to control those consequences (Dewey 1927/1954, 35). Addams’s collaborative friendship practices informed the more abstract works of Chicago School pragmatists Dewey and George Herbert Mead, who were her friends and sometime collaborators at Hull House. Dewey used Addams’s book Democracy and Social Ethics in his classes, served as a trustee of Hull House, and participated in many events there (Fischer 2002, 279, 284). Although these male writers are better known as the theorists and philosophers of pragmatism, feminist scholars recognize that Addams also was a chief theorist whose “theory/activism dynamic” informed the more theoretical writings of Dewey and other Chicago School men (Sarvasy 2010, 294–295; Fischer 2004, 44). Whereas not all male pragmatist philosophers gave Addams credit, Dewey did—although, perhaps not to the extent he should have, as Charlene Seigfried observes (Dewey 1945; Seigfried 1996, 30, 45–49, 58–75; Seigfried 1999, 213).

Seigfried was among the first to document Addams’s influence on Dewey (Seigfried 1996, 45, 49, 58–59, 73–79; 1999, 212–213) and describes two ways in which Addams’s contributions to pragmatism go beyond those of Dewey and other classical pragmatists. First, Addams draws from “a wider and more diverse range of experiences …, particularly those outside of the white, male middle class, such as factory and domestic workers, various ethnic groups of recent immigrants, and poor and working-class women” (Seigfried 1999, 221). Second,

she develops a pragmatist account of experience from women’s experiences, pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Political Friendship and Justice among Unequals
• 2. Addams’s Friendship Practices
• 3. Economic Foundations of Pragmatist Political Friendships
• 4. Economic Foundations of War and Peace
• 5. Possibilities for Transnational Political Friendship
• 6. Conclusion: A Feminist Pragmatist Approach to Political Friendship
• Index