Democracy and Social Ethics
Jane Addams (1860–1935), 1902
★ 3.94 from 177 ratings on Goodreads
Chicago's ward bosses delivered coal and funeral carriages while reformers delivered lectures. Addams asks what democracy actually requires of people who mean well. A plain, earnest voice presses you into unease about shared responsibility, then leaves room for hope.
Feels like unease and hope. About power, solitude and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy ethical argument grounded in everyday city life and are willing to follow Addams's formal, example-heavy reasoning. The prose is from 1902 and often assumes familiarity with its reform-era cases, so it can feel slow or distant.
Why read it
Addams asks what democracy asks of well-meaning people, and her question about shared responsibility still sharpens how you see public life.
Pages from the book
The bill for a corrupt city is addressed to everyone who lives in it.
We are all involved in this political corruption, and as members of the community stand indicted. This is the penalty of a democracy—that we are bound to move forward or retrograde together. None of us can stand aside; our feet are mired in the same soil, and our lungs breathe the same air. Doing good to people is a way of never having to ask them anything.
By the very exigencies of business demands, the employer is too often cut off from the social ethics developing in regard to our larger social relationships, and from the great moral life springing from our common experiences. This is sure to happen when he is good “to” people rather than “with” them, when he allows himself to decide what is best for them instead of consulting them. He thus misses the rectifying influence of that fellowship which is so big that it leaves no room for sensitiveness or gratitude. Without this fellowship we may never know how great the divergence between ourselves and others may become, nor how cruel the misunderstandings. What a child finds thrilling is a map of the world it lives in.
In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents took fifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by their apathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with an omnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to find them galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by. Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning: “Was it a man or a woman?” “How many policemen inside?” and eager little tongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes had witnessed. Jane Addams.Addams won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman to do so, and gave much of the prize money to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Democracy and Social Ethics for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy ethical argument grounded in everyday city life and are willing to follow Addams's formal, example-heavy reasoning. The prose is from 1902 and often assumes familiarity with its reform-era cases, so it can feel slow or distant.
- What is Democracy and Social Ethics like?
- A plain, earnest voice presses you into unease about shared responsibility, then leaves room for hope. Feels like unease and hope. About power, solitude and memory.
- What should I read after Democracy and Social Ethics?
- If you liked Democracy and Social Ethics, try North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell), The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) and Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Peter Kropotkin).
A taste of the feed
The cost, in someone else's bread, of a life of the mind.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Peter Kropotkin
The moment a poet admits that language has finally run out.
Whereat to turn mine eyes on Beatrice My seeing nothing and my love constrained me. If what has hitherto been said of her Were all concluded in a single praise, Scant would it be to serve the present turn. Not only does the beauty I beheld Transcend ourselves, but truly I believe Its Maker only may enjoy it all. Vanquished do I confess me by this passage More than by problem of his theme was ever O’ercome the comic or the tragic poet; For as the sun the sight that trembles most, Even so the memory of that sweet smile My mind depriveth of its very self.
The Divine Comedy · Dante Alighieri
The moment a wife becomes a stranger in her own kitchen.
Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist-bone of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.
Ethan Frome · Edith Wharton
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