ABSTRACT
The pragmatist economic grounding of Addams’s political friendship in the industrial and commercial relations of her time emerges from her accounts in Democracy and Social Ethics (Addams 1907/1964). Addams follows her narrative about the charity visitor and her host immigrant family with narratives about class hierarchies in other relations, including “filial relations” between parents and their adult daughters, relations between employers of household labor and their live-in laborers, “industrial relations” between company president and company employees, and relations between middle-class education and political reformers and their poor immigrant clientele. Each of these relations is shaped by systemic hierarchical economic relations that connect people’s daily lives in particular patterns. I argue that a basic premise of Addams’s pragmatist approach to developing cross-class political friendships is that the effectiveness of these friendships depends on observing the contours of systemic economic relations. This premise has not captured the attention of Addams scholars.
I explore the economic foundations of Addams’s cross-class collaborative friendships to show (1) how her narratives situate particular hierarchical relations in larger systemic class relations, (2) how such systemic relations link individuals from diverse class and ethnic backgrounds in ways that offer the potential for reciprocal collaboration, and (3) why the practical insights of marginalized beneficiary groups are key to political friendships.
