To trumpet the virtues of political friendship in 2020 is to risk being accused, at best, of a soft-headed naiveté. It is more likely to be dismissed as a malign desire to silence dissent behind the veneer of false comity. To some, the call for political friendship sounds too much like a call for civility. In short, its radicalism is in doubt. But as Wynne Walker Moskop shows, Jane Addams turns this potentially conservative concept into a disruptive practice. Moskop argues that Addams developed a model of friendship that highlights rather than hides inequality. Moskop pursues her argument through a sensitive and systemic reading of three of Addams's books spanning the whole of her public concerns, describing a model of political friendship that points the way to effective transnational political collaboration. From Addams, Moskop derives lessons that theorists, social reformers, and community organizers in the twenty-first century would do well to remember.
Moskop's book comprises a conceptual introduction, four text-centered chapters, and a substantive conclusion. The introduction presents the concept of friendship in the history of political thought, tracing its roots to Aristotle. Moskop then distinguishes Addams's view of political friendship from the classical and neo-Aristotelian accounts. A pair of chapters follow that engage with Addams's writings on industrial capitalism in the city. The first of these constructs a systematic account of Addams's practices of political friendship grounded in a reading of her early political essays. The next chapter traces this account of political friendship through the areas of social reform described in Democracy and Social Ethics: charity, family relationships, domestic labor, public education, industrial labor, and urban politics. A second pair of text-based chapters demonstrate how the concept of friendship synthesizes Addams's writing on industrial capitalism with her later pacifist writings. The first of this pair provides a careful reading of Newer Ideals of Peace, while the second derives from Peace and Bread in Time of War a number of principles and lessons for community organizers and social reformers. The conclusion provides a summary of the argument and applies Addams's thought to the contemporary problem of transnational migration of care workers.
What is Addams's conception of political friendship? And what makes it unique? According to Moskop, it owes much to the pragmatist political theory that she shares with John Dewey. It begins when “strangers pursue a common utilitarian purpose” because they “are affected by a specific problem” (5). But Addams infuses this Deweyan conception with her situated, protofeminist epistemology, which sees attention to inequality and hierarchy as the only way to discover a common purpose. Political friendship is thus a deliberate use of inequality and difference to address common problems. Or, as Moskop puts it, political friendship happens when collaborators “examine and clarify the systemic relational links so that unequal persons and groups who are affected by the same particular circumstances or actions can recognize what they have in common” (12). The explicit and sustained attention to inequality is what makes Addams's conception different from other models of civic friendship. Such an “unequal friendship” can become democratic through “the epistemological process, the give-and-take through which [people] gradually integrate their different knowledges” to devise solutions to common problems (30).
Moskop then uses political friendship as an interpretive lens through which to read Addams's Democracy and Social Ethics. Her reading provides new insights to readers familiar with the text. Taking the chapter “Charitable Effort” as the key to interpreting subsequent chapters, Moskop shows why Addams thought that the reform-minded middle class needed the experiential resources of the industrial poor as much as the poor needed the material resources of the middle class. The middle-class reformers themselves must confront “the depth of the difficult change they must make” in their own lives (68). In short, democratic political friendship implies transformation of all who are party to it. Moskop's chapter on Addams's 1907 New Ideals of Peace explains how that text extends Addams's commitment to political collaborations that cross national boundaries in addition to economic ones. The critical insight that Moskop identifies in this text is that transnational political friendships must include “noncitizens on equal terms with citizens” (93). Taken together, these two texts make the case for a political friendship that does not respect conventional social boundaries. As anyone who has tried to engage in collaborative political activity can attest, the kinds of political friendships Addams proposes are difficult to form and maintain, let alone put to work. That is why Moskop's chapter on Addams's later pacifist writings and her conclusion is so welcome. Moskop shows how Addams's later work reveals principles and concepts for transnational collaboration that can replace the “propinquity of classes” that made political friendship in the industrial city so successful.
The interpretive contribution of this book is that it shows how Addams's writings on industrial urban reform and international peace emerge from the same commitments to democratic relationships, what Moskop calls a “feminist phronesis.” On the other hand, the attempt to place Addams in an Aristotelian context highlights an interpretive shortcoming of the book. Friendship does not seem to be the most frequent way that Addams herself describes collaborative relationships between unequals. In much of her writing, Addams talks not about friends, but about Hull House “residents” who engaged in projects with “neighbors.” Addams's most prominent use of the language of friendship appeared in My Friend, Julia Lathrop, her 1935 biography of one of Hull House's most active and consequential residents. Her biography described precisely the sort of personal, intimate friendship that Moskop insists readers must think beyond. As a result, the concept seems at times to be a term of convenience rather than a clear organizing thread for the textual interpretation. Likewise, Moskop's book does not explain whether conceptualizing some political collaborations as friendships has any strengths or weaknesses against alternative conceptual frameworks such as Fraser and Honneth's “subaltern counterpublics.” What is gained and what is lost in calling public, political collaborators “friends”? Addams might help us think through this question, but the book does not show us how.
Of course, given the current pressures on our social fabric, learning how to engage in political collaboration is more important than what we call it. And in that regard, the book succeeds. The readings of Democracy and Social Ethics and Newer Ideals of Peace are especially strong interpretive work. For these chapters alone, anyone teaching or writing on Jane Addams should consult this work. Not only does it show readers how to incorporate Addams's thought into conversations about transnational migration, social inequality, and democratic theory; it also helps them practice solidarity, philanthropy, and grassroots democracy with more care and generosity.
