ABSTRACT
The problem that motivated Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull House settlement in 1889, in a poor, multi-ethnic immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side was the relationship between philanthropist and beneficiary “classes” in the Progressive Era industrial world. That was one of the most “incredibly painful difficulties” that confronted Addams and the many other democratic-minded young people of her generation who flocked to the settlement house movement (Addams 2002c, 63). They “revolted” against this “assumption of two classes” (62) and wanted to bring the classes to a shared purpose that would transform their unequal economic relation into a more egalitarian relation. The puzzle was, and still is, how?
Addams’s solution was to facilitate cross-class, goal-oriented collaborations, or political friendships, understood in the Aristotelian sense of association that is just because the parties make commensurable contributions to a shared utilitarian purpose. These friendships responded to exploitative working conditions, poor sanitation, lack of education, and other problems related to poverty and systemic class hierarchy. Addams suggests that her collaborations at Hull House offer a model for collaborations between diverse, unequal parties that is useful for transnational as well as local urban relations. I examine Addams’s experiential accounts to show why she is a first-rate practitioner and theorist of political friendship worthy of imitation today. Her approach makes an important but neglected contribution to contemporary democratic theory, which has associated political friendship and justice only with relations among equal parties, to the neglect of proliferating unequal relations.
