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Jane Addams's Social Philosophy

Sympathetic Understanding and Cooperative Action

Jane Addams's Social Philosophy cover

Description

Bringing together Jane Addams' most influential writings alongside a nuanced examination of her methods and ideas, this book reveals a philosopher of remarkable creativity, rigor, and moral commitment.

Rooted in the tradition of American pragmatism, Addams' work emerges here as both historically significant and urgently relevant - speaking directly to contemporary questions of intersectional feminist ethics, democratic participation, and social justice.

The opening chapters foreground Addams' published work, tracing her pivotal role in shaping pragmatic thought in the United States, and highlighting how she anchored her inquiries into social morality and women's collective memory in the lived realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on this foundation, the book broadens its focus to explore the wider range of philosophies and practices Addams developed across her life in response to concrete social injustices. Many of these injustices - structural inequality, political exclusion, gendered labor, and community fragmentation - remain pressing concerns today. By revisiting Addams' diagnoses of these problems and her imaginative proposals for inclusive, participatory approaches to social reform, this book demonstrates the enduring vitality of her thought.

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Table of Contents

Part 1: Interpreting Addams's Books
1. Claiming Authority by Subverting the Stereotypes of Masculine Heroism and Feminine Virtue On Twenty Years at Hull-House, Chapter 1-4
2. Socializing Democracy: Jane Addams and John Dewey On Twenty Years at Hull-House and Democracy and Social Ethics
3. Morality is Social On Democracy and Social Ethics
4. Democracy as a Way of Life: Addams's Pragmatist Influence on Dewey On Democracy and Social Ethics
5. The Transformative Power of Women's Memories On The Long Road of Women's Memory
6. A Pragmatist Response to Death: Jane Addams on the Permanent and the Transient On The Excellent Becomes the Permanent Charlene Haddock Seigfried Sympathetic Understanding and Cooperative Action: Jane Addams's Social Philosophy
7. Methodological Implications of the Social Self On the Prefaces and Introductions of Addams's Corpus

Part 2: Learning of Life from Life Itself
8. Sympathetic Understanding and Cooperative Action
9. Principled Compromises
10. Sympathetic Interpretation as Democratic Practice

Part 3: Art as Transformative
11. The Influence of George Eliot's Middlemarch on Addams's Pragmatist Perspectivism
12. The Role of 'Place' in Addams and Margaret Preston
13. Struggles with the Life of Art and the Art of Life

Part 4: Recognizing Kinship in Diversity
14. Relating Identity and Diversity
15. The Dangers of Unilateralism
16. The 'Wise Latina Woman' Standard

Index
Bibliography

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 21 Jan 2027
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 400
ISBN 9781350425279
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 10 bw illus
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Charlene Haddock Seigfried

Charlene Haddock Seigfried is Professor Emerita of…

Anthology Editor

Jennifer Fenton

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