The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (review)

The significance of Jane Addams as a pioneer social worker and progressive reformer is pretty much without question in the annals of American history. Addams will naturally be remembered, along with Ellen Gates Starr, as the founder of the Hull House in Chicago (and thus the founder of the American settlement house movement) and as the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But along with being a social activist, Addams was also an author and compelling critical thinker who deserves to be recognized as a unique philosophical voice in her own right. It is fair to say that Maurice Hamington has established himself as the most prominent defender of Addams with respect to this latter claim, devoting much of his published research to analyzing her thought and to pushing for her recognition as “an important original thinker” within the American pragmatist tradition and as “a significant public philosopher” (5). One has only to google “Jane Addams” with the words “philosophy” or “pragmatism” to find that much of the available material on this topic has been written by Hamington. In The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, Hamington delivers his most extended treatment of Addams thus far, examining the foundation as well as the practical application of her theoretical framework and making the case that “it is no longer acceptable to ignore Addams’s central role in shaping American philosophy” (10).

The book is neatly divided into two sections, the first of which develops Hamington’s characterization of Addams’s thought as a critical feminist pragmatism (10), which, according to Hamington, is a “unique integration” of “care ethics” and “affective epistemology” centering around Addams’s notion of “sympathetic knowledge” (10–11). Hamington handles each piece of this formula one step at a time, attending to Addams’s pragmatism in the second chapter (the first chapter is devoted to early intellectual influences), her feminism in the third chapter, and then specifically her notion of “sympathetic knowledge” in the fourth chapter. “Sympathetic knowledge” is by far the most important term in this analysis, constituting, for Hamington, the core of Addams’s approach to social philosophy. Thus, the fourth chapter seems to represent the core of Hamington’s text as well, focusing upon the “four interrelated claims” of sympathetic knowledge that Hamington identifies, which have to do with (a) the interconnectedness of human existence, (b) the potential of empathetic caring to disrupt epistemologies, (c) the potential of empathetic caring to promote ethical action, and (d) the dependence of an “effective democratic society” on the ability to embody “caring responses” (71–72).

Though I suspect this was not Hamington’s intention, this first half of the book leading up to the analysis of sympathetic knowledge is by far the most interesting with respect to identifying and defending Addams’s uniqueness and importance as a social philosopher (which is Hamington’s stated purpose in writing the book). The second half, which is a topic-by-topic analysis of how Addams worked her philosophy out in the practical arena, is a fascinating though ultimately less compelling study in that its connection to Hamington’s overarching interpretation of Addams is more noticeably sparse. These latter five chapters, focusing (in order) on Addams’s approach to peace, race, socialism, education, and civil religion, seem to suffer in small degree from not being connected by any central thread of analysis. Hamington is obviously attempting to demonstrate consistency with Addams’s own emphasis on the interplay of theory and practice by devoting so many chapters to ethical reflection, but these chapters run the risk of being read as token nods to practical application since they do not work together to answer any identifiable common question beyond the very broad one of “What Would Addams Do?”

Granted, the question of what Addams would do turns out to be genuinely intriguing and often unpredictable for initiates in Addams’s thought, and Hamington does a superb job of exploring the subtleties and complexities of her responses to various social issues. Some notable highlights of...