The transformative public of Jane Addams

Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

doi:10.1177/1464884920958583

Abstract

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The author uses methods of intellectual history to construct the concept of the public from Addams’s books: Democracy and Social Ethics and The Newer Ideals of Peace, showing that all three authors, Lippmann, Dewey and Addams, discuss the same topic of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life. Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism. Her argument regarding the public, as constructed by the author, consists of two premises. First, public engagement is a method of democratic inclusion as well as social and political inquiry for Addams. She sees the extension of relationality across social divisions as a necessary method to understand society and materialise democracy. Second, Addams emphasises cooperative and reflexive involvement especially in the characteristic developments of a time. She considers industrialisation and cosmopolitanism as characteristic developments of her own era. Addams suggests an in-principle cosmopolitan concept of the public that includes marginalised persons and groups. Compared to Lippmann’s and Dewey’s accounts of the public, Jane Addams’s argument is more radical and far more sensitive to the social inequality and plurality of a drastically morphing society.

Highlights

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey
Jane Addams departs from Lippmann and Dewey in setting out from the standpoints of exclusion and cosmopolitanism
I have constructed the concept of the public from the writings of Jane Addams by showing first that her books (Addams, 1964, 2007) address the same question of individuals’ changed engagement with public political life as the public-related books by Walter Lippmann (1922, 1927) and Dewey (1927)

Summary

Introduction

This article provides an alternative contribution to journalism studies on a foundational concept by analysing texts of Jane Addams, a public intellectual contemporary with the seminal scholars Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. While Addams elaborates on the same topics as her contemporaries Lippmann and Dewey, who are seminal scholars in journalism studies, I find her conceptualisation to be more radical and sensitive to the increasing plurality and inequality of their drastically morphing society than either Dewey’s or Lippmann’s concepts. All three discuss American democracy as founded on the idea of self-government in a rural society (Addams, 1964, 2007; Dewey, 1927; Lippmann, 1927) and observe that American society had changed dramatically beyond what the Founders could have foreseen, with a profoundly changed relation of the individual to public and political life In her extensive authorship, which comprises 11 books and hundreds of published speeches and articles (Hajo, 2017), Jane Addams’s focus is neither the conceptualisation nor an explicit definition of the public. Her concept of the public is my construction, resulting from the methodology I will introduce

Methods

Findings

Conclusion