ABSTRACT
To create a life … is to interpret the materials that history has given you.Kwane Anthony Appiah (2005, 163) Addams was always attentive to the “evolutionary process by which an individual or a social condition came to be,” one of her most perceptive biographers-Victoria Bissell Brown (2004, 8)—points out. If Addams could know the genesis of a situation, she thought, more likely it was that she could devise interventions precisely appropriate to its resolution. “By tracing the evolution of Addams’ own approach from arrogant heroics to democratic process,” Brown (2004, 8) writes, “we can appreciate why her lived experience convinced her that we learn best about life from life itself.” While I think Brown draws too sharp a line between Addams’s early embrace of a heroic individualism and her later apparently selfless service, her point about learning from life itself specifies the source of Jane Addams’s worldliness.7When the self-centered ego-what Addams called “the great I”—shatters, the specific subjectivity that is oneself hardly disappears. That subjectivity structures as it animates one’s engagement with the world, as it is stimulated and reconstructed by that engagement. When, in Christopher Lasch’s (1984) terms, the “minimal self ” (contracted, he argues, by self-protective, survivalist retreat from the world) “expands” into one’s lived-and civic-space, it risks dissolution by engaging with the world. Such experience-lived experience, informed by academic study, self-reflectively reconstructed-is primary in the production of worldliness.8The two tours of Europe gave Addams a taste for what experience could yield, but her postgraduation period of fidelity to the “family claim” upon her she would later depict as “the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment” (quoted in Brown 2004, 148) seemed to her a suspension of educational experience. Brown, however, emphasizes this period as also one of education. It was during this period, for instance, that Addams began reading Leo Tolstoy’s religious and social criticism, affirming her focus on the historical Jesus. Reading Tolstoy confirmed Addams’s sense that true Christianity demanded faith in Jesus’ message about human salvation on earth, not faith in a supernatural Jesus or promises of life after death (Brown 2004, 164). It was Christianity’s meaning for this world that preoccupied Jane Addams.9
