Abstract
The theoretical tools bequeathed to us by classical and revival pragmatism offer the potential for informing robust empirical work in sociology. But this potential has yet to be adequately demonstrated. There are a number of strands of pragmatism; this article draws primarily upon Dewey’s theory of action to examine Hull-House in its early years. Of particular interest are the practices of Jane Addams and other Hull-House residents. What were they doing to help people and why? An attempt to answer these questions in non-teleological terms forms the empirical basis of the article. This article should provide some support to those historical sociologists who might consider (or already are) taking a pragmatist turn in their work. And, it should strengthen the empirical foundations of pragmatism as an alternative (non-teleological) way to understand social action.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is worth noting that, as Anne Firor Scott (2000, pp. xiv–xv) points out, Addams “had read and commented on the first eight chapters of Linn’s manuscript and discussed his plans for the next three.”
For example, Voss (1993) draws on the case of the Knights of Labor in New Jersey to rethink elements of the political process model. Tackett (1996) looks at the diaries of Third Estate members in eighteenth century France to make sense of why they became revolutionaries. Padgett and Ansell (1993) draw on the network structure of the Medici family in Florence to help inform our understanding of the process of state building. Vaughan (2006) uses the case of NASA’s Columbia accident to, among other things, illuminate the process of idea diffusion and expand our thinking on social boundaries.
For more on the Metaphysical Club, see the eponymous title by Louis Menand (2001).
The reader should not conflate the theoretical framework I deploy with the actual relations Addams had with others. For example, just because Addams had a collegial relationship with Mead does not necessarily mean that Mead’s theory is a requisite part of the theoretical frame deployed in this article.
See pp. 124–141 of Houser and Kloesel (1992).
In particular, Emirbayer heavily relies on Knowing and the Known by Dewey and Bentley (1949).
For a discussion of the origins of the CRAS, see Nelson (1966).
This is not to say that the CRAS was the only game in town. There were a number of other civic and religious organizations doing charity at this time but the CRAS was the best funded and most influential.
See Schneiderhan (2008) for a discussion of the CRAS and its relations with Jane Addams, Hull-House, and charity organization in Chicago.
Scholars have exhaustively studied the emergence of the settlement house in the United States (Carson 1990; Crocker 1992; Davis 1984, 2000 [1973]). Neighborhood Guild, the first American settlement, was established in 1886 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Including Addams’s Hull-House, founded in 1889, only four settlements were founded in America before 1890. By 1900 there were approximately 100 in operation and by 1910 there were about 400 (Trattner 1999, p. 175). Chicago was home to 16 at its peak, most notably Hull-House and Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons. The American settlement had a strong religious foundation, yet remained decidedly non-sectarian. However, it is important to be cautious with such general descriptions, as settlement houses were not all the same. Similarly, it would be easy to romanticize the settlement movement and provide it with more uniformity than it actually possessed; some operated more as religious convents, particularly in smaller cities, while others were closer to the Hull-House “model” (if we can speak of such a thing), pursuing social provision in the spirit of the Gospels.
Jane Addams, “Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall,” December 3, 1891, [address delivered to the Chicago Woman’s Club], reel 46-0480-0496, the Jane Addams Memorial Collection (JAMC), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, June 14, 1888, Haldeman-Julius Family Papers, JAMC (reel 2-0968-0973), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Toynbee, who lived among the poor in East London for a time, was the inspiration for the name and general location of the settlement. The naming was prompted in part by Toynbee’s death in 1883. See Briggs and Macartney (1984) Chapter One (“The Victorian Prelude”) for a more in-depth discussion of the intellectual foundations of Toynbee Hall.
In a reverse of Jane Addams’s story, the catalyst for Barnett’s career in helping others seems to have been a trip to America, where he saw the influence of education on freed African-Americans. See Meacham (1987), Ch. 2 for more detail.
Nora Marks, “Two Women’s Work: The Misses Addams and Starr Astonish the West Siders,” Chicago Daily Tribune (May 19, 1890): 1–2. This is one of the first substantive journalistic accounts of practice at Hull-House.
The reader may notice that what follows privileges the role of Addams over that of her friend Ellen Gates Starr in the founding and subsequent expansion of Hull-House. This is in keeping with nearly all accounts of Hull-House, which portray Starr as someone who, while intimate with Addams, faded into the background as Hull-House (and Addams) gained prominence.
One of the ways in which they seem to have made connections with other social provision organizations was through the Chicago Women’s Club, of which Addams and Starr became members in April 1889. For an example of their early press, see D. Swing 1889 (June 8). “A New Social Movement.” p. 4 in the Chicago Evening Journal.
Letter from Jane Addams to Mary Catherine Addams Linn, April 1, 1889, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, JAMC (reel 2-1050-1061), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Swing, D. 1889 (June 8). “A New Social Movement.” p. 4 in the Chicago Evening Journal.
Jane Addams’s Diary, 1889–1890. Swarthmore College Peace Collection, JAMC (reel 29–0101), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
[Rev.] David Swing, “A New Social Movement,” Chicago Evening Journal (June 8, 1889): 4.
In particular, see Addams’s letter to her sister of 10/8/1889 and Starr’s lengthy letters to her family in November 1889. JAMC (reel 2, 1085–1109).
Jenny Dow, “The Chicago Toynbee Hall,” Unity (March 15, 1890), Hull-House Scrapbook I, JAMC, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jane Addams, “Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall,” December 3, 1891, [address delivered to the Chicago Woman’s Club], p. 15, JAMC (reel 46-0480-0496), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Nora Marks, “Two Women’s Work: The Misses Addams and Starr Astonish the West Siders,” in Chicago Tribune May 19, 1890.
Ibid.
Jane Addams, “Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall,” p. 13. Toynbee Hall, which had its own Social Science Club, might have had a strong influence on the development of the Hull-House version. For more on this, see Knight (2005, p. 204).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for help with the writing in this section of the article.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 12.
April 10, 1893 Chicago Relief and Aid Society Meeting Minutes Volume 2, 1887–1909, p. 184, Chicago Historical Society, United Charities of Chicago Collection (UCCC).
May 8, 1893 CRAS Board Meeting. Chicago Relief and Aid Society Meeting Minutes Volume 2, 1887–1909, UCCC.
Just 2 years later, in 1892, Addams would join a group that was extremely critical of the CRAS practice of closing its doors during the summer. On the CRAS summer closings, see (for example) the 4/5/1890 CRAS Board of Directors meeting, UCCC. On Addams’s criticism of the CRAS, see the March 7, 1892 CRAS Board Meeting, UCCC.
“Hull House Kitchen Opened,” Chicago Record (August 24, 1893).
See Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), p. 229.
Hull House Collection, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago, 32–295: Residents’ Meetings Records Book (beginning January 1893), pp. 29–82. For a microfilm copy, see JAMC (reel 50).
While Lindblom is an economist and political scientist but not a pragmatist (although these things are not necessarily mutually exclusive), his “science of ‘muddling through’” resonates with the main argument that we should be skeptical of tidy, parsimonious means-ends explanations of social action.
References
Adams, J., Clemens, E. S., & Orloff, A. S. (Eds.). (2005). Remaking modernity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Addams, J. (1893a). The objective value of a social settlement. In Philanthropy and social progress (pp. 27–56). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Addams, J. (1893b). The subjective necessity for social settlements. In Philanthropy and social progress (pp. 1–26). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Addams, J. (1894). Hull house as a type of college settlement. In Wisconsin state conference of charities and correction, proceedings (pp. 97–115).
Addams, J. (1961 [1910]). Twenty years at Hull-House. New York: Signet Classic.
Addams, J. 2002 ([1902]). Democracy and social ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ansell, C. (2009). Mary Parker Follett and pragmatist organization. In P. S. Adler (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of sociology and organization studies (pp. 464–485). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berk, G. (2009). Louis D. Brandeis and the making of regulated competition (pp. 1900–1932). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berk, G., & Galvan, D. (2009). How people experience and change institutions: A field guide to creative syncretism. Theory and Society, 39, 543–580.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Briggs, A., & Macartney, A. (1984). Toynbee hall: The first hundred years. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Brown, J. (1941). The history of public assistance in Chicago, 1833 to 1893. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Brown, V. B. (2004). The education of Jane Addams. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Brown, V. B. (2009). The sermon of the deed: Jane Addams’s spiritual evolution. In M. Fischer, C. Nackenhoff, & W. Chmielewski (Eds.), Jane Addams and the practice of democracy (pp. 21–39). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Carson, M. (1990). Settlement folk: Social thought and the American settlement movement, 1885–1930. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Commager, H. S. (1961). Foreword. In J. Addams (Ed.), Twenty years at Hull-House (pp. ix–xix). New York: Signet Classic.
Conway, J. (1967). Jane Addams: An American heroine. In R. J. Lifton (Ed.), The woman in America (pp. 247–266). Boston: Beacon.
Crocker, R. H. (1992). Social work and social order: The settlement movement in two industrial cities, 1889–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Davis, A. F. (1984). Spearheads for reform: The social settlements and the progressive movement, 1890–1914. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Davis, A. F. (2000 [1973]). American heroine: The life and legend of Jane Addams. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Deegan, M. J. (1988). Jane Addams and the men of the Chicago school, 1892–1918. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.
Deegan, M. J. (2002). Race, Hull-House, and the University of Chicago: A new conscience against ancient evils. Westport: Praeger.
Deegan, M. J. (2010). Jane Addams on citizenship in a democracy. Journal of Classical Sociology, 10, 217–238.
Dewey, J. (1988 [1920]). Reconstruction in philosophy. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey, The middle works, 1899–1924: Reconstruction in philosophy and essays (pp. 77–201). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1988 [1922]). Human nature and Conduct. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey, The middle works, 1899–1924: Human nature and conduct. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1988 [1926]). Individuality and experience. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, volume 2, 1925–1953 (pp. 55–61). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1991 [1939]). Theory of valuation. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, volume 13, 1925–1953 (pp. 189–251). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (2007 [1916]). Democracy and education. Middlesex: The Echo Library.
Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Boston: Beacon.
Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a relational sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 103, 281–317.
Emirbayer, M., & Goldberg, C. A. (2005). Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and collective emotions in contentious politics. Theory and Society, 34, 469–518.
Emirbayer, M., & Maynard, D. (2011). Pragmatism and ethnomethodology. Qualitative Sociology, 34, 221–261.
Emirbayer, M. & Schneiderhan, E. (2011 [in press]). Dewey and Bourdieu on democracy. In P. S. Gorski (Ed.), Bourdieuian theory and historical analysis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Feffer, A. (1993). The Chicago pragmatists and American progressivism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fischer, M., Nackenhoff, C., & Chmielewski, W. (Eds.). (2009). Jane Addams and the practice of democracy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Flanagan, M. (2002). Chicago women and the visions of the good city, 1871–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Follett, M. P. (1924). Creative experience. Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co.
Glaude, E. S., Jr. (2007). In a shade of blue. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gordon, L. (1995). Putting children first: Women, paternalism, and welfare in the early twentieth century. In L. K. Kerber, A. Kessler-Harris, & K. K. Sklar (Eds.), U.S. history as women’s history (pp. 63–86). Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Green, J. M. (2006). Pluralism and deliberative democracy: A pragmatist approach. In J. R. Shook & J. Margolis (Eds.), A companion to pragmatism (pp. 301–316). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Gross, N. (2009). A pragmatist theory of social mechanisms. American Sociological Review, 74, 358–379.
Hacking, I. (2007). On not being a pragmatist: Eight reasons and a cause. In C. Misak (Ed.), New pragmatists (pp. 32–49). Oxford: Clarendon.
Herndon, E. (1892). Hull house: A swept-out corner of Chicago. In The Christian union (pp. 351–52), 351.
Herrigel, G. (2010). Creative action and industrial recomposition in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Houser, N., & Kloesel, C. (Eds.). (1992). The essential peirce, Volume 1 (1867–1893). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jackson, S. (2001). Lines of activity: Performance, historiography, Hull-House domesticity. Ann Arbor: The University of MIchigan Press.
James, W. (1981 [1907]). Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Joas, H. (1996). Situation—Corporeality—Sociality: The fundamentals of a theory of the creativity of action. In The creativity of action (pp. 145–195). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kelley, F. (1986). The autobiography of Florence Kelley. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.
Knight, L. W. (2005). Citizen: Jane Addams and the struggle for democracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Knight, L. W. (2009). Jane Addams’s theory of cooperation. In M. Fischer, C. Nackenhoff, & W. Chmielewski (Eds.), Jane Addams and the practice of democracy (pp. 65–86). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Knight, L. W. (2010). Spirit in action: Jane Addams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Koven, S., & Michel, S. (1993). Introduction: “Mother worlds”. In K. Seth & M. Sonya (Eds.), Mothers of a new world: Maternalist politics and the origins of welfare states (pp. 1–42). New York: Routledge.
Lasch, C. (1965). The new radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The intellectual as a social type. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lasch-Quinn, E. (1993). Black neighbors: Race and the limits of reform in the American settlement house movement, 1890–1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Lengermann, P., & Niebrugge, G. (1998). The women founders: Sociology and sociological theory, 1830–1930. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Lengermann, P., & Niebrugge, G. (2007). Thrice told: Narratives of sociology’s relation to social work. In C. Calhoun (Ed.), Sociology in America: A history (pp. 63–114). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Levine, D. (1962). Jane Addams: Romantic radical, 1889–1912. Mid-America, 44, 195–210.
Lindblom, C. E. (1959). The science of “muddling through”. Public Administration Review, 19, 79–88.
Linn, J. W. (2000 [1935]). Jane Addams: a biography. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Lissak, R. S. (1989). Pluralism & progressives: Hull house and the new immigrants, 1890–1919. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Margolis, J. (2004). The first pragmatists. In A. T. Marsoobian & J. Ryder (Eds.), The Blackwell guide to American philosophy (pp. 35–51). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Margolis, J. (2006). Introduction: Pragmatism, retrospective, and prospective. In J. R. Shook & J. Margolis (Eds.), A companion to pragmatism (pp. 1–10). Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Mayer, J. A. (1978). Private charities in Chicago from 1871 to 1915. Dissertation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
McCarthy, K. D. (1982). Noblesse oblige: Charity & cultural philanthropy in Chicago 1849–1929. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
McCree, M. L. (1970). The first year of Hull-House, 1889–1890, in letters by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Chicago History, 1, 101–114.
Meacham, S. (1987). Toynbee hall and social reform, 1880–1914. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mead, G. H. (1907). The social settlement: Its basis and function. University of Chicago Record, 12, 108–110.
Menand, L. (2001). The metaphysical club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review, 5, 904–913.
Mink, G. (1995). The wages of motherhood. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Misak, C. (Ed.). (2007). New pragmatists. Oxford: Clarendon.
Moore, D. (1897). A day at hull house. The American Journal of Sociology, 2, 629–642.
Muncy, R. (1991). Creating a female dominion in American reform, 1890–1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Naples, N. A. (1992). Activist mothering: Cross-generational continuity in the community work of women from low-income urban neighborhoods. Gender and Society, 6, 441–463.
Naples, N. A. (1998). Grassroots warriors: Activist mothering, community work, and the war on poverty. New York: Routledge.
Nelson, O. M. (1966). The Chicago relief and aid society, 1850–1874. The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 59, 48–66.
O’Riain, S. (2004). The politics of high-tech-growth: Developmental network states in the global economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Padgett, J. F., & Ansell, C. K. (1993). Robust action and the rise of the medici, 1400–1434. The American Journal of Sociology, 98, 1259–1319.
Peirce, C. S. (1992 [1878]). How to make our ideas clear. In N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Eds.), The essential Peirce. Selected philosophical writings, volume 1 (1867–1893) (pp. 124–41). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hull-House maps and papers: A presentation of nationalities and wages in a congested district of Chicago. (1895). New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
Sabel, C. F. (2005). Globalisation, new public services, local democracy: What’s the connection? In OECD (Ed.), Local governance and the drivers of Growth. OECD Publishing.
Sawislak, K. (1995). Smoldering city: Chicagoans and the great fire, 1871–1874. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Schneiderhan, E. (2008). Jane Addams and charity organization. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 100, 299–327.
Scott, A. F. (2000). Introduction to Jane Addams: A biography. In Jane Addams: A biography (pp. ix-xxiii). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Scott, W. R. (2001). Organizations, overview. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 10910–10917). Amsterdam: Pergamon/Elsevier Sci.
Seigfried, C. H. (1996). Pragmatism and feminism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Seigfried, C. H. (2002). Introduction to the Illinois edition. In Democracy and social ethics (pp. ix–xxxviii). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Seigfried, C. H. (2004). Jane Addams. In A. T. Marsoobian & J. Ryder (Eds.), The Blackwell guide to American philosophy (pp. 186–198). Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Seigfried, C. H. (2009). The courage of one’s convictions or the conviction of one’s courage? Jane Addams’s principled compromises. In M. Fischer, C. Nackenhoff, & W. Chmielewski (Eds.), Jane Addams and the practice of democracy (pp. 40–62). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Silver, D. (2011). The moodiness of action. Sociological Theory, 29.
Sklar, K. K. (1985). Hull-House in the 1890s: A community of women reformers. Signs, 10, 658–677.
Skocpol, T. (1992). Protecting soldiers and mothers: The political origins of social policy in the United States. Cambridge: Belknap.
Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985). Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stebner, E. J. (1997). The women of Hull-House. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sunderland, E. R. (1893). Hull house, Chicago: Its work and workers. In The unitarian.
Tackett, T. (1996). Becoming a revolutionary: The deputies of the French national assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture (1789–1790). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Trattner, W. (1999). From poor law to welfare state: A history of social welfare in America. New York: The Free Press.
Vaughan, D. (2006). NASA revisited: Theory, analogy and public sociology. The American Journal of Sociology, 112, 353–393.
Voss, K. (1993). The making of American exceptionalism: The knights of labor and class formation in the nineteenth century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Westhoff, L. M. (2007). A fatal drifting apart: Democratic social knowledge and Chicago reform. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31, 325–363.
Woods, R.A. (1892). The social awakening in London. In Scribner’s (pp. 401–24).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mustafa Emirbayer, Chas Camic, Marie-Laure Djelic, Ivan Ermakoff, Myra Marx Ferree, Phil Gorski, Pamela Herd, Joel Rogers, and the Editors and anonymous reviewers from Theory and Society for advice and encouragement with this article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schneiderhan, E. Pragmatism and empirical sociology: the case of Jane Addams and Hull-House, 1889–1895. Theor Soc 40, 589–617 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9156-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9156-2