a short while ago, philosopher Judy D. Whipps, an excellent scholar and careful reader of my book on Addams's Democracy and Social Ethics, confronted me with a question I had been avoiding. She asked that since Addams is now recognized as one of the founders of classical American pragmatism, why didn't I talk about pragmatism in the book (Whipps 115–16)?At the time, I wasn't ready to formulate an answer. I had heard Charlene Haddock Seigfried present her jaw-dropping discovery when she studied Dewey's class lecture notes on Democracy and Social Ethics. Seigfried found that when Dewey taught the book, his mind was still cluttered with Hegelianisms. Seigfried concluded, “In his early lectures Dewey simply did not recognize what was most original, what was most creatively pragmatic in theory and method in her book” (Seigfried, “Democracy as a Way of Life” 12). Now, Seigfried's reasoning was impeccable, but how could she possibly be right? How could Addams have been “creatively pragmatic in theory and in method” in a book published in 1902? The chronology doesn't work.I now have an answer to Whipps's question and a response to Seigfried's assertion, but they lead to an unsettling conclusion: either the story of pragmatism's founding generation needs to be fantastically enlarged, or, in histories of philosophizing in the Americas, “pragmatism” should shrink into a modest index entry. To show how I reached this conclusion, I'll give my answer to Whipps and sketch the story of how Addams came to be identified as one of pragmatism's founders. I then use an anecdote from Addams to show that if she is on the list of pragmatism's founders, that list needs to be greatly expanded. I also discuss some implications of doing so. A side note: In making my argument, I use Addams only because I know her work well. The same concerns could be raised using other figures from the founders’ era.My answer to Whipps is simple: chronology. My aim in my book was to track how Addams's thinking developed in essays she wrote throughout the 1890s and revised as chapters in Democracy and Social Ethics. When Addams submitted the book's manuscript for publication in 1902, pragmatism did not yet exist as a recognized school of thought. Stated colloquially, it was not yet a “thing.” Consider the standard trio most often listed as pragmatism's founders: Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I have found no evidence that Addams was familiar with any of Peirce's writings. At the time, Peirce's writings were largely unknown and read only in a few academic philosophy departments (Hollinger 95). In 1898, James announced in his talk “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” that he would name his philosophy “pragmatism.” Addams wrote most of the essays on which Democracy and Social Ethics is based before James's announcement was published. James's ideas about pragmatism wouldn't have much of an impact in the wider intellectual world until 1907, with the publication of his book Pragmatism.1Of the standard trio, Dewey was closest to Addams. But if, as Seigfried found, his mind was still cluttered with Hegelianisms in 1902, should we conclude that Addams generated pragmatism independently? This alters the question stemming from Seigfried's discovery: What enabled Addams to write Democracy and Social Ethics so that Seigfried could interpret it as pragmatist?To answer this question, it will be useful to establish when and how Addams became identified as a pragmatist. Dewey did not include her in his 1925 stripped-to-the-bone account of “The Development of American Pragmatism.” In that account, the trunk of pragmatism's tree contained only the standard trio of Peirce, James, and Dewey. The tree's taproot was made up of Kant, the British empiricists, and Hegel. Subsequent histories have kept the standard trio, while thickening the trunk with a few other names and permitting a few additional roots to germinate.2 Addams didn't show up in the pragmatist tree until the 1990s.That was when Seigfried challenged scholars of pragmatism, asking, “Where are the women? Where are the pragmatist feminists?” The audience was speechless; some were quietly hostile (Seigfried, “On Writing” 16). Seigfried began hunting for women with whom James and Dewey regularly interacted, and came up with an impressive list. Addams was foremost among them (Seigfried, “Classical”). Seigfried's list also included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elsie Ripley Clapp, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Jessie Taft, Ella Flagg Young, and Hull House residents Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, and Ellen Gates Starr (Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, chaps. 3 and 4).Seigfried gives a detailed explanation for why these women had been systematically excluded from the history of pragmatism. She brings out women's exclusion from graduate philosophy programs and academic appointments, and male academic philosophers’ refusal to take women's theorizing seriously (Pragmatism and Feminism 60–66). The fruits of Seigfried's analysis led to an outpouring of scholarly activity on Addams and other women who used pragmatist methods.3 Addams is now sometimes listed among the founders of classical American pragmatism.4Seigfried is right about women's exclusion on the basis of gender. However, there were other reasons for women's exclusion, and these reasons excluded many men, as well. Addams gives a clue to these reasons in one of her rare uses of the term “pragmatism.” Her first and most revealing use came in her 1910 Presidential Address to the National Conference on Charities and Correction, titled “Charity and Social Justice.” She could have titled it more accurately “Pragmatism: A Name for the Century-Long Evolution from Charity to Social Justice, in Conjunction with the Evolution of Industry and the State.” In her address, Addams illustrates her thesis by recounting the history of organized charity's century-long efforts to improve the appalling working conditions of chimney sweep boys in England. These organizations first tried to alleviate the boys’ suffering by encouraging the invention of machines to sweep chimneys. The aristocrats with governing power—and with crooked chimneys—objected. Next, the charities sent inspectors to watch the boys work. The aristocrats responded by refusing to enact regulations requiring inspection. The final phase came when charity workers, aided by newly collected statistical data and the power of public opinion, broadened their mission to raise the standard of living for everyone (Addams, “Charity” 2–5). Addams writes: During this long century the Philanthropists also worked out a philosophy resembling pragmatism, at least many of them came to believe that the concrete truth for them was that in which all their “experiences most profitably combined” and agreed that the final test was its “propitious reaction” upon the poor, the relief it brought to the most wretched members of the community. This may have been the basis for the social philosophy which Professor Patten declares we are now forming. (“Charity” 5)In Addams's telling, the true founders of pragmatism were the generations of charity workers and their counterparts in all areas of social reform, for which James provided some apt descriptors.5 The historical dimensions of the process are critical to Addams's account. Each phase built upon previous ones. The process involved continuous testing of methods used with empirical data in hand, coordinated with humanitarian appeals to the public, and with further developments in Britain's industrial and political systems.It is noteworthy that Addams turns to economist Simon Patten, and not Peirce, James, or Dewey, for a discussion of the social philosophy initiated by these charitable organizations. Patten states, “Pragmatism, sociology, economics, and history are not distinct sciences, but merely different ways of looking at the same facts. The logic, the method, and the mode of verification are the same in all of them.”6 In other words, pragmatism was not sui generis in its method. Pragmatism was the name some philosophers gave to their iteration of what theorists in other disciplines were also doing. Dewey intimated as much in 1910, when he wrote that pragmatism was less “a reaction against older schools of philosophy” than to regard it “quite vaguely as part and parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction” (Influence of Darwin iii–v).Patten then asks a series of questions to differentiate older methods of inquiry from the new methods being adopted in these several disciplines. He asks, “Is truth measured through its consequences or through its antecedents? Is thought static or dynamic? Is the mind a structural unit or a genetic growth? Shall investigation proceed positively from data or skeptically from analysis and differentiation of ideas?” Social progress, Patten concludes, depends on these new methods of investigation (“Pragmatism and Social Science” 660). This description fits pragmatism; it also fits methods adopted by the majority of social theorists at the time, found in all disciplines.Addams was one of these theorists. In her day, she was known as a sociologist, and her writings and activism fit right in with what sociology then meant. Knowing what sociology meant at the time is crucial to understanding Addams's writings, crucial to explaining why Seigfried was able to identify her as a pragmatist, and crucial to understanding this essay's unwieldy title.When Addams founded Hull House in 1889, sociology was the name given to the scientific study of the development of Homo sapiens from their emergence as a species up to the present. Under sociology's purview were sciences now called economics, psychology, political science, anthropology, history, and social ethics.7 The lines separating these fields into separate disciplines were just beginning to emerge and were still extremely porous. For example, when Simon Patten and his colleagues founded the American Economic Association in reaction against laissez-faire economics, most initial members also belonged to the American Historical Association. It would be nearly twenty years before sociologists and political scientists split off and formed their own associations.8 Some of the economists, though, had become disgruntled, thinking they had heard quite enough from sociologists like “Miss Addams” and “Mr. Felix Adler.”9To see why Addams was regarded as a sociologist, we need to trace the history of the discipline. August Comte coined the term “sociology” in the 1830s (Renwick 3). He thought of it as the final, truly empirical science to emerge, following mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and physiology (i.e., biology).10 Comte divided sociology into two sub-fields. The first, social statics, is the study of how order is maintained through a given society's institutions of the family, economy, religion, and governance. The second, social dynamics, studies qualitative changes in social functioning over time and seeks to identify laws of the growth of social progress (Comte, Positive Philosophy II:84). Comte called his philosophy “Positivism.”Early sociological textbooks in the United States were structured on Comte's division of social statics and dynamics.11 On this scheme, Addams was a sociologist of social dynamics. She used a historical lens to examine the rapid social changes then being brought about by industrialization, urbanization, and massive migrations of peoples. She proposed ways for society to progress to a higher level of healthy social organization. Charles Cooley, Dewey's colleague at the University of Michigan, wrote in his journal: “The sociologist needs to be at once a disinterested accumulator of facts and a vivid sympathizer with active life—things not easy to reconcile. He must have the spirit of the naturalist with much of the sentiment of the moralist and the poet” (72). That description fits Addams's writings perfectly.By the 1920s, the lines between the various human sciences had become fixed. The field of social dynamics was eliminated. Comte's term “positivism” was distorted beyond recognition and redefined as a purely objective, value-free empirical study of society.12 Dewey honored his discipline's hardened walls in his 1925 account of pragmatism's development, which named only professional academic philosophers. That essay contains no hint that just fifteen years earlier, Dewey had identified pragmatism as “part and parcel of a general movement of intellectual reconstruction” (Dewey, Influence iii–v). Addams's place within the earlier meaning of sociology has been almost universally unrecognized.13There are reasons why the sociological conceptual apparatus Addams used has not been recognized by the many fine scholars who have done stellar work on her thought. The first is that Addams, who wrote for lay audiences, placed her conceptual apparatus just below the surface of her texts. If one does not already know the early history of sociology, it is difficult to detect it (Fischer, Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing 1–10, 68–69, 164–65). Also, unlike many of her colleagues, Addams used sociology's conceptual apparatus to support social justice and compassion for the oppressed. It would be difficult for today's scholars of pragmatism to welcome Addams's contemporaries who used the same conceptual apparatus to defend imperialism, white supremacy, and governance by elites.14A second reason is that contemporary scholarship on Addams relies heavily on Democracy and Social Ethics.15 This was Addams's first book, written when she had not yet settled on an underlying methodology (Fischer, Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing, chap. 7). Much less attention has been paid to her second book, Newer Ideals of Peace, a more mature work in which Addams adapts her methodological framework from Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.To understand Newer Ideals of Peace, one needs to interpret Addams's key terms of militarism, industrialism, and humanitarianism as Comte and Spencer defined them. Briefly stated, Comte proposed two scales in his analysis of humans’ historical development. His “Law of Three Stages” measured humans’ intellectual development over time. For Addams, the more important scale was Comte's second scale of militarism and industrialism, used to describe modes of social organization and moral development. Comte projected that a third mode of humanitarianism would emerge, as projected in his “Religion of Humanity.”16Herbert Spencer placed these terms within an evolutionary frame. The difference between militarist and industrial societies is not the presence or absence of military apparatus or industrial machinery, but in how societies are organized throughout (Spencer, Principles 706–07). A militarist society is organized hierarchically, primarily to defend itself through violence against external attacks. This pattern is replicated in the society's internal relations and social institutions. Violence and revenge occur frequently; women, children, and others who do not fight have low status and are treated with contempt. By contrast, an industrial society is organized principally for material production to benefit its own members. Relations in governance, the economy, and the household are voluntary and characterized by free exchanges. Like Comte, Spencer projected that a third form of social organization, humanitarianism, was yet to emerge (Spencer, Principles 594–96).In Newer Ideals of Peace, Addams adapts Comte's and Spencer's interpretations of militarism, industrialism, and a projected humanitarian ethic as key concepts. She demonstrates that ostensibly “industrial” practices and institutions in fact exhibit militarist features, and cause regression along civilization's evolutionary timeline. She identifies imperialism, white supremacy, and corporate capitalism as forms of militarism that cause civilization to regress. Addams adapts Comte's and Spencer's projections of a future humanitarianism to chart a path toward a “genuine evolutionary democracy.”17 Her social reform efforts were in the service of advancing along that path. If Addams was a founder of pragmatism, then Comte and Spencer belong to the root system of pragmatism's tree.Addams's reliance on Comte's and Spencer's theorizing may be offensive to some scholars of pragmatism. Peirce, James, and Dewey criticized them fiercely.18 Yet, if Addams is included as a founder of pragmatism, then Comte and Spencer belong in pragmatism's taproot, along with Kant, Hegel, and the British empiricists. John Fiske, a member of the Metaphysical Club with Peirce and James, wrote that Spencer's ideas run “like the weft through all the warp of modern thought.”19 Sociologist Daniel Breslau speaks correctly when he writes that the early sociologists were all Spencerians in regarding their field as “a holistic, naturalistic, and evolutionary science of society.”20 It is true that Spencer's writings are voluminous, turgid, and inconsistent. However, recent historians of science have posited that Spencer's deepest concern was to find a scientific basis for attaining a moral society characterized by fellow-feeling, mutuality, and altruism.21 Scholars of pragmatism would be wise to reconsider Spencer's influence on the early pragmatists, as Trevor Pearce has done in Pragmatism's Evolution.22Addams's engagement with Comte comes primarily through the work of a small number of British intellectuals who were inspired by Comte's Positivism and his Religion of Humanity, but did not adopt it wholesale. These included Frederic Harrison, John Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, John Morley, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Patrick Geddes (Farmer; Fischer, “Imperialism's Critics”). Addams's voice complements their voices directly, far more so than of James and Dewey. If Addams was a founder of classical pragmatism, then these along with Comte and Spencer also belong on pragmatism's benefit of Comte is that it up Comte was in most theorists there used his writings to some used his writings for as has in Positivism to in all of the figures to Addams's theorizing turns pragmatism's early tree from a into a to these names included in from on American list from the American and many more that scholars have the become unwieldy to the of is to the of and L. in their book, American Philosophy from to the a to Peirce, James, and Dewey. The list these classical pragmatists, along with and others because they in a of of the book's are titled In the “pragmatism” only a modest and than pragmatism's is also a of recounting pragmatism's generation history, and the history it writes the of it of American are now being written to the of from all of throughout the American are making lines are This is an time to the history of the founding of American pragmatism.
Marilyn Fischer (Thu,) studied this question.
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