scholarly journals Democracy and Social Ethics. Jane Addams

1903 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-377
Author(s):  
John A. Hobson
Keyword(s):  
Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492095858
Author(s):  
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The author uses methods of intellectual history to construct the concept of the public from Addams’s books: Democracy and Social Ethics and The Newer Ideals of Peace, showing that all three authors, Lippmann, Dewey and Addams, discuss the same topic of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life. Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism. Her argument regarding the public, as constructed by the author, consists of two premises. First, public engagement is a method of democratic inclusion as well as social and political inquiry for Addams. She sees the extension of relationality across social divisions as a necessary method to understand society and materialise democracy. Second, Addams emphasises cooperative and reflexive involvement especially in the characteristic developments of a time. She considers industrialisation and cosmopolitanism as characteristic developments of her own era. Addams suggests an in-principle cosmopolitan concept of the public that includes marginalised persons and groups. Compared to Lippmann’s and Dewey’s accounts of the public, Jane Addams’s argument is more radical and far more sensitive to the social inequality and plurality of a drastically morphing society.


2021 ◽  

Jane Addams (b. 1860–d. 1935) is considered one of the founding figures in American pragmatist philosophy, social work, and sociology. The daughter of a prominent American politician from Illinois, Addams grew up in a privileged environment that included graduating from college, an opportunity not afforded the majority of women at the time. Addams cofounded one of the earliest social settlements of the Progressive Era, Hull House in Chicago. The settlement began with an unfocused commitment to social amelioration and would evolve into a dynamo social projects. Living there for the remaining nearly fifty years of her life amid one of the most significant migrant influxes that the United States has known, Addams led a community of mostly women who pioneered improving community welfare in education, recreation, labor, sanitation, health, criminal justice, and the arts. An accomplished writer and speaker, Addams engaged the public through academic articles, popular articles, books, and speeches amid her community activism. She would become a friend and colleague of John Dewey, William James, and George Herbert Mead, influencing them as much as they did her. A dominant theme of her work is the idea that democracy is more than a system of government and entails a moral way of being with one another. Addams’s first book was Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), and the title reveals her abiding belief that democracy was a social morality that is in ongoing need of enrichment. A relational social democracy underpins Addams’s social analysis. Her writings address various social and political subjects, including education, peace, labor organizing, child labor laws, race, women’s rights, philanthropy, sex trafficking, and familial relations. Internationally, Addams is best known for her work on peace. She was the first American woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931. Able to adapt her message to audience and context, Addams also wrote about events such as the Pullman Strike of 1894 and the murder trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti during the 1920s, as well as about people such as Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, and Julia Lathrop. In the spirit of American pragmatism, Addams would draw more prominent social themes from individual experiences she confronted, as she did in finding psychosocial forces at work in the proliferation of “Devil Baby” stories among immigrant populations in the summer of 1916. Consistently recognized for her outstanding activism, her intellectual work was overshadowed by prominent male figures during most of the 20th century. However, a reclamation of Addams’s unique contribution began in the 1990s, and in the 2020s, Addams studies are growing as more scholars find inspiration in her methods and writings.


Ethics ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
John A. Hobson
Keyword(s):  

1902 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Arbuthnot
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
pp. 226-258
Author(s):  
Chris Voparil

Despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing limited commentary on Jane Addams, this chapter illuminates their distinctive shared contribution to pragmatist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite sympathetic understanding with the cultivation of social ethical responsibility and orient their ethical projects explicitly toward responsiveness to marginalized or excluded others. Its chief claims are: first, that Rorty can be read as extending Addams’s project of creating a democratic moral community; and second, that a constructive dialogue between Rorty and Addams reveals key points of complementarity that, when taken together, generate a more robust conception of democratic social ethics than Addams’s alone. Reading Rorty alongside Addams elucidates the ethical commitments implicit in his more familiar epistemological critiques, including how Rorty’s understanding of the social practice of justification can be understood as a philosophical defense of Addams’s notion of a “social test.”


1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (11) ◽  
pp. 966-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Prilleltensky
Keyword(s):  

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora S. Eggen

In the Qur'an we find different concepts of trust situated within different ethical discourses. A rather unambiguous ethico-religious discourse of the trust relationship between the believer and God can be seen embodied in conceptions of tawakkul. God is the absolute wakīl, the guardian, trustee or protector. Consequently He is the only holder of an all-encompassing trusteeship, and the normative claim upon the human being is to trust God unconditionally. There are however other, more polyvalent, conceptions of trust. The main discussion in this article evolves around the conceptions of trust as expressed in the polysemic notion of amāna, involving both trust relationships between God and man and inter-human trust relationships. This concept of trust involves both trusting and being trusted, although the strongest and most explicit normative claim put forward is on being trustworthy in terms of social ethics as well as in ethico-religious discourse. However, ‘trusting’ when it comes to fellow human beings is, as we shall see, framed in the Qur'an in less absolute terms, and conditioned by circumstantial factors; the Qur'anic antithesis to social trust is primarily betrayal, ‘khiyāna’, rather than mistrust.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 306
Author(s):  
Silvana Panza

The focus of this study concerns a deep analysis on the innovative educational method utilized by Jane Addams (1860-1935) at Hull House. She was a philosopher, but first of all we can consider this woman as a sociologist, because of her careful survey on society, Addams’s activities also implied a new educational project based on the social care of poor workers and their families. She chose for her extraordinary experience one of the most slummy suburbs in Chicago, where with her friend Ellen Gates Starr founded in 1889 this settlement. The main intention of the sociologist was to give immigrants lots of opportunities to understand Chicago’s social and political context. It was important to create a place where immigrant families could socialize, learning more about their rights and possibilities. For this reason Addams suggested that it needed to start from education, taking a particular care of children who lived in that area. It was necessary to promote a reform on the different culture learning to support immigrants in their integration, people who came there hoping to find a job into factories. In 1889 when the settlement was founded, there were about four hundred social houses around the States. Addams’ s important social and political idea was to develop a democratic society, where each person could recognize himself/herself as a part of it, avoiding marginalization and segregation. The sociologist was a central figure at Hull House for about twenty years.


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