On War as Waste: Jane Addams's Pragmatic Pacifism

Abstract

This essay continues the process, initiated by feminist scholars such as Mary Jo Deegan (1988), Mary Mahowald (1997), Linda Schott (1993), and Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1991, 1996) of recovering the contributions [End Page 86] made by Jane Addams to American pragmatism and political philosophy. While most work on Jane Addams examines her struggles for women's rights, child health and safety, and immigrant rights, I will consider the less studied matter of her unyielding pacifism during the First World War. In looking at Addams's pacifism and trying to gain a posit on why she held this position with such steadfastness when it cost her the widespread respect she earned as an advocate for social justice, I will suggest a reexamination of common assumptions about the theoretical grounding of Addams's pacifism. Ultimately, a careful assessment of her engaged pacifism reveals that she pioneered positions on war and democracy later adopted by dominant figures in American philosophy, and that her work radically challenged dominant assumptions about the proper relationship between war and politics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.