Jane Addams on Technology, Communication, and the Social Ethics of Democracy

• In Event: Critical Theory and the Global Left in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

Recent years have seen a resurgence, in both scholarly and popular discourse, of meditations on the relationship between democracy and technology. In a contemporary moment characterized by rapidly evolving communicative technologies, in particular, many justifiably worry about the threat that such technologies pose to the social life of democracy, especially the normative commitment of democracy to the shared and intertwined humanity of citizens. This concern takes on even more urgency given the stark and expanding chasms, in democracies all over the world, between groups that wield political, economic, and social power and groups merely subject to that power. Under conditions of inequality and oppression, certain forms of technological innovation will almost certainly expose subordinated groups to harms that are objectionable on the terms of both justice and democracy. The relationship between technological change and the human conditions is, of course, a central concern for critical theory. Perhaps this strand of critical theory can learn from the insights of thinkers not typically associated with that tradition; and perhaps thinkers outside the critical theory canon can be viewed anew, in light of critical theory’s insights.

Responding to this contemporary landscape, this essay turns to the thought of an underappreciated theorist: Jane Addams (1860-1935). A pioneering community organizer, advocate for international peace, and philosopher of democracy, Addams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, making her the first American woman to receive the honor. Regnant interpretations of Addams’s work have focused on her social reform activism, contributions to the founding of social work as a distinct discipline, relationship to pragmatism, and writings on the epistemology of the social sciences. Few scholars, however, have drawn attention to the ways in which her democratic theory aimed to respond to the necessity of forging ambitious social ties between democratic citizens under conditions of enormous economic and technological change. This article will remedy this gap in the literature and, in so doing, contribute to a growing body of scholarship that derives democratic theoretic lessons from Addams’s innovative thought.

My argument proceeds in three parts, with a focus throughout on Addams’s writings from the first part of the twentieth century (especially Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Newer Ideals of Peace (1906), and Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)). The first substantive section draws upon Addams’s intellectual overlaps with John Dewey in order to reconstruct the former’s conception of experience, a mode of unmediated intersubjective relation that was vital for democratic life. The second section argues that, for Addams, certain industrial and technological changes in the early twentieth century posed particularly acute threats for experience. The third and final section analyzes the practices whereby Addams thought experience could be salvaged and revitalized in the United States, including especially the kind of ‘education in preparation for social relations’ in which all groups, across social hierarchies, ought to be engaged.

Author

• Hari Ramesh, Wesleyan University