The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15.2 (2001) 86-104

University of Oregon

We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy, but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means. . . . The political object is the goal, war the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation of their purpose.

--Carl Von Clausewitz, On War

The women in all the belligerent countries who feel so alike in regard to the horror and human waste of this war yet refrain from speaking out, may be putting into jeopardy that power inherent in human affairs to right themselves through mankind's instinctive shifting towards what the satisfactions recommend and the antagonisms repulse. The expression of such basic impulses in regard to human relationships may be most important in this moment of warfare which is itself a reversion to primitive methods of determining relations between man and man or nation and nation.

--Jane Addams, Long Road of Women's Memory

I. Introduction

This essay continues the process, initiated by feminist scholars such as Mary Jo Deegan (1988), Mary Mahowald (1997), Linda Schott (1993), and Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1991, 1996) of recovering the contributions made by Jane Addams to American pragmatism and political philosophy. While most work on Jane Addams examines her struggles for women's rights, child health and safety, and immigrant rights, I will consider the less studied matter of her unyielding pacifism during the First World War. In looking at Addams's pacifism and trying to gain a posit on why she held this position with such steadfastness when it cost her the widespread respect she earned as an advocate for social justice, I will suggest a reexamination of common assumptions about the theoretical grounding of Addams's pacifism. Ultimately, a careful assessment of her engaged pacifism reveals that she pioneered positions on war and democracy later adopted by dominant figures in American philosophy, and that her work radically challenged dominant assumptions about the proper relationship between war and politics.

My two central claims about Addams's pacifism are best framed in terms outlined by Deegan. First, if we read Addams's pacifism through the lens of critical pragmatism, a politically engaged version of the pragmatist philosophy then emerging from the Chicago School, which argued that "democracy and education needed to be used as tools to improve social institutions, community control, and the vitality of everyday life," we find that her work radically challenged the prevalent idea that war was a necessary, if unwieldy, tool of politics (Deegan 1988, 273). While there is no shortage of political theorists who viewed war as a necessary part of political life, it is most useful to place Addams in dialogue with the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz, whose posthumously published classic On War ([1832] 1976) presents the paradigmatic formulation of this idea. Clausewitz not only wrote the definitive text of Western military theory in the prenuclear age, but held powerful sway over the generals who orchestrated the destruction of World War I that Addams so powerfully critiqued.

My second argument moves away from the role of Addams's critique of war within Western political theory to consider the question of why she critiques it. In my view, we gloss over the full significance of Addams's pacifism until we see it as a stance rooted in both critical pragmatism and cultural feminism, and not as one that emerged from the latter and rejected the former as many of her readers argue. To address this point, I examine an aspect of her work that, perhaps more than any other, raises the question of gender essentialism: the...