The Pluralist

marilyn fischer’s careful historiographical treatment of the ideas and life of Jane Addams deepens our understanding of Addams’s important work as a thinker and practitioner. The paper paints a picture of the ideological and sociological landscape of Addams’s world, paying close attention to the relationships Addams had with other prominent thinkers of the day, such as the African Americans W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, as well as the pragmatist Josiah Royce. Fischer seems to have doubled aims in the paper. On the one hand, she makes a set of claims that helps us understand Addams better as a historical thinker. On the other hand, the paper advances another set of claims about Addams’s relation to other thinkers and our relationship to judging the past, about which I am unclear.

The first half of the paper advances the claim that Addams used a notion of cultural pluralism to advocate for the inclusion of European immigrants into US society because their cultures showed their ability to self-govern, and that a cosmopolitan, social democracy would be the result of accepting the immigrants into the polity.¹ Addams argued that European immigrants’ cultures of origin included occupations and moral values that could both help the immigrant and the United States. The immigrants’ cultures of origin helped them psychologically because the adherence to past cultural forms and norms created stability in the lives of the newly immigrated, and the immigrants’ cultures of origins could help the United States realize a true social democracy because recognizing that immigrants’ forms of life were deserving of dignity and social respect could possibly check US practices that sometimes valued property over people. Addams’s praise of European immigrant cultural forms stemmed from a belief that they could provide a check for US sensibilities that hindered socially democratic processes. [End Page 66]

Yet, Fischer asserts that “Addams’s cultural pluralism is distinctive in that she does not focus on cultural identity per se, nor does she speculate on what pattern America will or should come to exhibit” (Fischer). Instead, Fischer argues that Addams’s position was not a reification of the cultures of the immigrants she advocated for; rather, “[a]s a pragmatist, she was acutely aware that people function within given environments and that there needs to be mutual adjustment of people’s ways of living with environmental conditions” (Fischer). Here, the paper transitions to a second part on Addams’s cultural pluralism and African Americans.

This part of the paper concentrates on a miasma of understanding and theorizing found in Addams’s cultural pluralism. While Addams sought to explain and interpret the cultural lives of her European immigrant neighbors in a robust way so that she could advocate for their inclusion into the US polity, she was not able to recognize culture(s) among African Americans. Fischer points out that Addams’s position—African Americans were stripped of their cultures of origin and thus had no, or, at best, broken and unbinding, cultural practices—was, at least in part, shared by Du Bois. Attempting to correct what she regards as misinterpretations of Addams’s views on race and culture, Fischer sets out to explain how Addams could have had a theory of cultural pluralism that did not extend to African Americans.

I will admit here that there are moments in this part of the paper that I have trouble following. There are at least two things that happen in this section of the paper. First, Fischer reviews Addams’s two essays on African Americans and sets them into a historical context that sheds light on the intellectual sources of Addams’s thought. Second, this part of the paper seems to argue that we ought not judge too harshly Addams’s inability to include African American culture in her theorizing, given those intellectual sources. The first is a historical claim that deepens our understanding of Addams and her day. The second thread is the more difficult to follow.

Fischer claims that, in Addams’s day, there were fewer resources for Ad-dams...