Marilyn Fischer
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226631325
- eISBN:
- 9780226631462
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226631462.003.0008
- Subject:
- Philosophy, American Philosophy
This chapter examines how Addams revised previously written essays for Democracy and Social Ethics. Aside from the Introduction, little in the book is new. This chapter demonstrates that Addams’s ...
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This chapter examines how Addams revised previously written essays for Democracy and Social Ethics. Aside from the Introduction, little in the book is new. This chapter demonstrates that Addams’s principal revision was to replace the conceptual categories from British socialism and German anthropology she had used in the essays with “individual ethics” and “social ethics,” categories drawn from the German Historical School of Economics. The result is that Democracy and Social Ethics lacks a consistent, coherent line of reasoning. The meanings of key words such as democracy, sympathy, and experience are truncated and it is more difficult for readers to recognize Addams’s evolutionary arguments. Yet, the chapter concludes, in leaving the book conceptually untidy, Addams produced a richer, more enduring text. By defining individual ethics and social ethics loosely, Addams widened the entrance to her thought, encouraging readers to participate in creating the text’s meanings.Less
This chapter examines how Addams revised previously written essays for Democracy and Social Ethics. Aside from the Introduction, little in the book is new. This chapter demonstrates that Addams’s principal revision was to replace the conceptual categories from British socialism and German anthropology she had used in the essays with “individual ethics” and “social ethics,” categories drawn from the German Historical School of Economics. The result is that Democracy and Social Ethics lacks a consistent, coherent line of reasoning. The meanings of key words such as democracy, sympathy, and experience are truncated and it is more difficult for readers to recognize Addams’s evolutionary arguments. Yet, the chapter concludes, in leaving the book conceptually untidy, Addams produced a richer, more enduring text. By defining individual ethics and social ethics loosely, Addams widened the entrance to her thought, encouraging readers to participate in creating the text’s meanings.
Marilyn Fischer
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226631325
- eISBN:
- 9780226631462
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226631462.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, American Philosophy
This book makes the case that the key to reconstructing Addams’s arguments in Democracy and Social Ethics is to approach them through the lens of late nineteenth century social evolutionary ...
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This book makes the case that the key to reconstructing Addams’s arguments in Democracy and Social Ethics is to approach them through the lens of late nineteenth century social evolutionary theorizing. Although Democracy and Social Ethics is now regarded as a founding text of classical American pragmatism, its evolutionary content has not been explored. This book demonstrates that in essays written during the 1890s and lightly revised for Democracy and Social Ethics Addams relies on evolutionary concepts and patterns of reasoning to develop a method of ethical deliberation with which to address her era’s social problems. Chapters 1-6 examine how Addams in the original essays employs two distinct social evolutionary frameworks, one from British Fabian socialism and the other from German anthropology. Chapter 7 examines how Addams masks these frames in Democracy and Social Ethics by substituting the conceptual categories of individual ethics and social ethics. This substitution has the effect of diminishing the intellectual power and coherence of Addams’s theorizing. The book concludes that in leaving Democracy and Social Ethics conceptually untidy, Addams produced a richer and more enduring text, one that invites her readers to participate more deeply in ethical reflection.Less
This book makes the case that the key to reconstructing Addams’s arguments in Democracy and Social Ethics is to approach them through the lens of late nineteenth century social evolutionary theorizing. Although Democracy and Social Ethics is now regarded as a founding text of classical American pragmatism, its evolutionary content has not been explored. This book demonstrates that in essays written during the 1890s and lightly revised for Democracy and Social Ethics Addams relies on evolutionary concepts and patterns of reasoning to develop a method of ethical deliberation with which to address her era’s social problems. Chapters 1-6 examine how Addams in the original essays employs two distinct social evolutionary frameworks, one from British Fabian socialism and the other from German anthropology. Chapter 7 examines how Addams masks these frames in Democracy and Social Ethics by substituting the conceptual categories of individual ethics and social ethics. This substitution has the effect of diminishing the intellectual power and coherence of Addams’s theorizing. The book concludes that in leaving Democracy and Social Ethics conceptually untidy, Addams produced a richer and more enduring text, one that invites her readers to participate more deeply in ethical reflection.
James B. Salazar
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814741306
- eISBN:
- 9780814786536
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814741306.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter takes up the problems of emulation and exemplification in the reform of character by examining Jane Addams's critique and rearticulation of the character-forming effects of the class ...
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This chapter takes up the problems of emulation and exemplification in the reform of character by examining Jane Addams's critique and rearticulation of the character-forming effects of the class contact experienced in traditional charity work. In challenging the gendered assumptions of women's work as philanthropic “stewards of character” and exemplars of middle-class character, Addams was able to capitalize on the power of the charity relation as a scene of interclass and interethnic contact while also extricating it from its emulatory function of character building and from the assimilationist practices of “Americanization” being enacted on Native American reservations, boarding schools, and in the overseas territories of the United States after the Spanish–American War. Addams also stages her critique, forwarded in such works as Democracy and Social Ethics, through a complex refiguring of the literary dimension of her own autobiographical character in Twenty Years at Hull-House. In striking a performative middle ground between an understanding of character as either social inscription or radical self-determination, Addams makes a counterhierarchical notion of interclass and interethnic identification essential to a “Progressive” realization of a pluralist, democratic civic sphere.Less
This chapter takes up the problems of emulation and exemplification in the reform of character by examining Jane Addams's critique and rearticulation of the character-forming effects of the class contact experienced in traditional charity work. In challenging the gendered assumptions of women's work as philanthropic “stewards of character” and exemplars of middle-class character, Addams was able to capitalize on the power of the charity relation as a scene of interclass and interethnic contact while also extricating it from its emulatory function of character building and from the assimilationist practices of “Americanization” being enacted on Native American reservations, boarding schools, and in the overseas territories of the United States after the Spanish–American War. Addams also stages her critique, forwarded in such works as Democracy and Social Ethics, through a complex refiguring of the literary dimension of her own autobiographical character in Twenty Years at Hull-House. In striking a performative middle ground between an understanding of character as either social inscription or radical self-determination, Addams makes a counterhierarchical notion of interclass and interethnic identification essential to a “Progressive” realization of a pluralist, democratic civic sphere.
