Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing

Constructing "Democracy and Social Ethics"

Marilyn Fischer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226631462
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

In Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing, Marilyn Fischer advances the bold and original claim that Addams's reasoning in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, is thoroughly evolutionary. While Democracy and Social Ethics, a foundational text of classical American pragmatism, is praised for advancing a sensitive and sophisticated method of ethical deliberation, Fischer is the first to explore its intellectual roots.Examining essays Addams wrote in the 1890s and showing how they were revised for Democracy and Social Ethics, Fischer draws from philosophy, history, literature, rhetoric, and more to uncover the array of social evolutionary thought Addams engaged with in her texts—from British socialist writings on the evolution of democracy to British and German anthropological accounts of the evolution of morality. By excavating Addams's evolutionary reasoning and rhetorical strategies, Fischer reveals the depth, subtlety, and richness of Addams's thought.

Chapter 1

An Evolving Democracy

“I agree with every word,” Samuel Barnett of London’s Toynbee Hall wrote to Addams upon reading “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” and “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement.”1 Others concurred. These two essays, the first ones Addams published, solidified Addams’s reputation as a leader in the rapidly growing social settlement movement. The body of “Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” can be read as a prelude to the theoretical orientations and rhetorical modes of presentation Addams would refine throughout the next decade. Although Addams names very few of the theorists or theories her words presuppose, she leaves some clues for identifying them. These clues may be as subtle as syntax or located in the penumbras of the words she uses. By reading “Subjective Necessity” closely, major strands of Victorian evolutionary theorizing can be identified and an initial sort of annotated bibliography for Democracy and Social Ethics can be established.

Addams and her colleagues in the settlement movement faced a world changing at a dizzying pace. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, industrialization and migration transformed cities across the United States and Europe. Migrants from rural areas and abroad streamed into these cities to meet the growing need for laborers. Existing municipal infrastructure proved inadequate for the burgeoning populations. As urban poverty and suffering became concentrated, these cities also became centers for social experimentation. Leading social theorists, seeking to understand and reform these cities, formed transatlantic networks. They exchanged data on many dimensions of urban life and circulated policy proposals.2 They also shared social theories with which to frame these proposals, theories set within the discourse of human social evolution. Within a few years of founding Hull House in 1889, Jane Addams became a central figure in these networks.3 Her writings reflect her participation in these networks and her reliance on social evolutionary theorizing.

When Addams founded Hull House, she had already had substantial international experience that enabled her to slip easily into these transatlantic networks. She spent two and a half years during the 1880s traveling throughout Europe and studying its history, languages, and culture.4 In June 1888 Addams, then twenty-seven years old, visited Toynbee Hall, a social settlement in the working class neighborhood of London’s East End. Founded by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Toynbee Hall provided a setting in which people of different social classes could mix. The settlement offered educational classes and cultural and recreational opportunities to its neighbors. Its residents, primarily affiliated with Oxford and Cambridge Universities, worked for social reforms in the neighborhood in housing, public health, and labor conditions.5 Addams established contacts with English social reformers during her time in London and was inspired to adapt the social settlement idea in the United States. In September 1889 she and Ellen Gates Starr, a college friend, opened Hull House in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward on the city’s Near West Side.

Chicago was an immigrant—and hence an international—city from the beginning. The first nonindigenous person to establish permanent residence at the trading site there was Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, of West African and French descent.6 By 1837 Chicago was a city of four thousand inhabitants. In the next two decades Chicago’s population increased twentyfold to eighty-four thousand, as immigrants from Ireland and Germany came in large numbers, quickly followed by people from Scandinavia and Great Britain.7 By 1856, when Charles Hull built his “country retreat” at the city’s edge, Chicago had a higher percentage of immigrants than any other large American city save Milwaukee.8 By 1880 Chicago’s population had reached 500,000. The neighborhood around the Hull mansion had become densely populated with immigrants, as people from southern and eastern Europe joined their counterparts from northern and western Europe.9 When Addams and Starr founded the settlement house a decade later, the city’s population had doubled to over one million. Almost 80 percent of Chicago’s residents at the time were immigrants and their children. The fifty thousand people packed into Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward were Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Bohemian, Irish, French Canadian, and other nationalities.10

The multinational character of Addams’s immediate surroundings contributed in crucial ways to her thinking. Not only did she quickly become acquainted with a wide range of cultural practices, she also became immersed in ideas and modes of theorizing from the immigrants’ nations of origin. While many of Chicago’s immigrants were uneducated, some were intellectually sophisticated. Intellectuals and political leaders from abroad visited their conationals in Chicago and often paid a call at Hull House.11 Evolutionary perspectives threaded through their conversations. The way Addams incorporated these perspectives into her earliest speeches and essays is evident in “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements.”

Addams delivered “Subjective Necessity” and “Objective Value” in July 1892 as lectures at the School of Applied Ethics, a six-week summer school affiliated with Felix Adler’s Society for Ethical Culture.12 University of Michigan economist Henry Carter Adams organized sessions for the summer school’s Department of Economics, choosing “social progress” as the curriculum’s theme.13 He, Jane Addams, and the other lecturers at the conference located the meaning of this theme within the conception of society as an evolving social organism.

To adapt a phrase from William James, the image of the social organism was at the center of most intellectuals’ vision, including Addams’s.14 Early in the nineteenth century this image was present in idealism and romanticism. Evolutionists throughout the century adapted it to fit their own theorizing by noting the ways in which biological organisms and social groups function analogously. Herbert Spencer stirred in the idea that progress occurs as biological and social organisms become more highly differentiated and integrated in structure and function, thus achieving greater complexity.15 The social theorists and reformers with whom Addams worked routinely described society as an organism, with its inhabitants, customs, and institutions continually undergoing disequilibrium and readaptation. University of Chicago sociologist Albion Small, who served with Addams in Chicago’s Civic Federation, thought it an undeniable truism that society is a social organism. Within a given society, persons and groups function within complex webs of interdependency.16 In their interactions, each modifies the others. These mutual modifications, Small notes, take place in society’s industrial and domestic relations, as well as in tastes, morals, religious practices and beliefs, and people’s hopes and fears.17 The process of modification is uneven, resulting in social disequilibrium. Some members of the social organism may experience suffering and loss. To find relief, they and other members of the society must find ways of establishing a new equilibrium.

As the health of the social organism depends on the well-being of its inhabitants, ethical concerns permeated social scientific thinking. Beatrice Potter Webb, English economist, social reformer, and friend of Addams, spoke for many when she characterized the age as uniting scientific investigation as the means for solving social problems with the “consciousness of a new motive; the transference of the emotion of self-sacrificing service from God to man.”18 These were precisely the concerns Henry Carter Adams had in mind in planning the summer school’s sessions. His aim was to bring “the complex relations of modern life” and “the claims of man’s moral nature” into adjustment.19 This reflected the mission of the School of Applied Ethics as a whole. Founded to address social dislocations caused by extensive labor unrest, the school explored ways to bring the various components and functions of the social organism into harmony.20

Addams lectured during a week devoted to “Philanthropy in Social Progress.” Henry Carter Adams introduced Addams as “the guiding spirit of Hull House in Chicago, probably the most influential Settlement in this country.”21 In her second lecture, “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” Addams’s description of the physical condition of her neighborhood would have sounded familiar to many in the audience. As in their cities, Chicago’s Hull House neighborhood lacked sanitation, tenement houses were flimsily built, and the streets were poorly paved, if at all. Working conditions were unregulated; workers were ill paid and frequently injured. Addams also described many of the activities and programs of the settlement, including social clubs for children and adults, a vast array of educational offerings and vocational classes, a kindergarten and a coffee house, and assistance to help new immigrants navigate the city’s services.22 While audience members were familiar with a range of benevolent organizations that offered similar programs, they would have been impressed by Hull House’s vitality and the sheer number and variety of activities offered there.23

The two introductory paragraphs of Addams’s first lecture, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” point out the economic and psychological impacts of living in a time of rapid change. Addams writes, “Hull House endeavors to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society.”24 By 1890 the ideal of economic self-sufficiency for individuals and families was little more than nostalgia for much of the country’s population. Rapid industrialization and urbanization had fundamentally reshaped economic relations into dense patterns of interdependence. Social relations, however, between rich and poor and among the many immigrant groups remained distant at best. Historian Daniel Rodgers observes, “Though a place of fractures and fragments, the city was at the same time an enormous collectivity. . . . City dwellers lived in a web of mutual dependency that was at once extraordinarily powerful and barely visible.”25 Addams’s task in this essay is to consider how to overcome this fragmentation so that social relations expressed the same interdependence as economic ones.

This would require more than policy proposals. Economist John R. Commons clarified the dimensions of the task, writing,

The problem of poverty is not an isolated problem. It is a part of all the social questions of today—of the questions of labor, of crime, of intemperance. On account of the organic nature of society these problems are laced and interlaced—they act and react on one another. The causes and remedies of poverty can be comprehended only through an understanding of its relations to the whole social organism; and this involves a thorough acquaintance with human nature, with the laws of psychology and biology.26

In “Subjective Necessity” Addams focuses on psychological mechanisms rooted in biology and history that motivated settlement work. The settlement movement, Addams writes, is “based not only upon conviction, but genuine emotion [as] . . . educated young people are seeking an outlet for that sentiment of universal brotherhood which the best spirit of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive.”27 This statement signaled the complex relationships psychologists then posited among intellect, emotions, and the motivation to act. All are needed for the task at hand.

Addams organizes “Subjective Necessity” around what she calls “three great lines” of motives for settlement work. These are, in Addams’s words, “the desire to make the entire social organism democratic,” “the impulse to share the race life,” and “a certain renaissance of Christianity.”28 In describing them, Addams in effect integrates physiology, emotion, and intellect with the motivation to act. These three lines of motives represent three major strands of Victorian evolutionary thought: theories of historical progress toward democracy, of evolutionary biology, and of the evolution of religion. It is difficult for readers unfamiliar with late nineteenth-century evolutionary thought to recognize these strands of reasoning. Addams does not lay out their theoretical contents in a systematic way, but her syntax and her words’ penumbras of association carry these evolutionary assumptions.

“The Desire to Make the Entire Social Organism Democratic”

With the first line of motives, Addams claims, settlements are responding to the “subjective pressure . . . to make the entire social organism democratic.” American democracy has been only partially achieved because it does not extend into patterns of social interactions. “The social organism,” Addams explains, “has broken down through large districts of our great cities. . . . [The poor live] without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind.”29 Rich and poor are socially isolated from each other even though they live side by side. Poor people’s energies are consumed with meeting the bare necessities of subsistence. Meanwhile, those with the money and leisure to enjoy the arts, education, and social gatherings stay away from the poor. Educated young people apprehend this disparity intellectually as they note the gap between the social realities of city life and their own beliefs in democracy and the kinship of all humanity. They also apprehend the disparity emotionally, as they are troubled when their own actions do not address the city’s glaring social divisions. They seek a motive strong enough to turn these beliefs and feelings into action.30 In settlements, Addams suggests, such young people find this motive as they encounter opportunities to enter into relations of fellowship with the poor and to open spaces for educational, cultural, and social exchange between social classes.

To explain her claim that settlement residents aim “to make the entire social organism democratic,” Addams introduces her conception of democracy as a historical, evolving phenomenon. She will develop this conception extensively in later essays and use it as the basis of her analyses in three chapters in Democracy and Social Ethics. Addams writes, “We are perhaps entering upon the second phase of democracy, as the French philosophers entered upon the first.”31 In presenting democracy as an evolutionary process, Addams amplifies the conception of democracy she shares with the Society of Ethical Culture. In his introduction to the published collection of the week’s lectures, Henry Carter Adams notes that these lectures carry “a strongly marked vein of democratic sentiment.” He clarifies that by democracy he is not referring to a form of government but to “a social ideal, a purpose, a feeling.”32

Addams’s reference to the first phase of democra...