Democracy and Social Ethics

Democracy and Social Ethics is one of the major works by Jane Addams, the American social reformer who lived from 1860 to 1935 and who co founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr. The book was first published in 1902 and reflects Addams’s first decade of practical work in the Chicago settlement house movement that she helped establish as a model for American urban social reform.

The book argues that the older individualist ethical framework that nineteenth century America had inherited from its Protestant and republican traditions was no longer adequate to the conditions of urban industrial life. The new circumstances created by immigration, factory work, dense urban housing, and the various inequalities of wealth that the new economy had produced required a fundamentally new ethical understanding, one that started from the recognition that human beings live in genuine community with each other and that the moral life cannot be reduced to the private virtues of the individual.

Addams develops the argument through a series of chapters on specific social relationships where the older individualist ethics had broken down. There are chapters on charitable relief, on family obligations, on household labour, on industrial work, on educational relationships, on political life. In each case Addams shows through specific examples drawn from her actual experience at Hull House how the older ethics produced confusion and damage when applied to the new conditions, and she sketches the kind of more genuinely democratic ethical thinking that the new situation required.

The book was widely influential in early twentieth century American Progressive thought. It contributed to the developing intellectual case for the various social reform measures that the Progressive movement was pushing during the years before the First World War, and it helped legitimate the settlement house movement and the broader social work profession that grew out of it.

Democracy and Social Ethics runs about three hundred pages and is accessible to general readers. Addams wrote in clear unornamented prose and grounded her arguments in concrete examples rather than in abstract philosophical reasoning. For readers interested in American social and political thought, in the history of social work, or in the broader Progressive era reform movement, the book is essential reading. Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.