Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing "democracy and Social Ethics"

Marilyn Fischer

ISBN 10: 022663132X / ISBN 13: 9780226631325

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2019

About this Item

2019. Hardcover. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780226631325

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing: Constructing "democracy and Social Ethics"
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022663132X
• ISBN 13: 9780226631325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing, Marilyn Fischer advances the bold and original claim that Addams’s reasoning in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics, is thoroughly evolutionary. While Democracy and Social Ethics, a foundational text of classical American pragmatism, is praised for advancing a sensitive and sophisticated method of ethical deliberation, Fischer is the first to explore its intellectual roots.
 
Examining essays Addams wrote in the 1890s and showing how they were revised for Democracy and Social Ethics, Fischer draws from philosophy, history, literature, rhetoric, and more to uncover the array of social evolutionary thought Addams engaged with in her texts—from British socialist writings on the evolution of democracy to British and German anthropological accounts of the evolution of morality. By excavating Addams’s evolutionary reasoning and rhetorical strategies, Fischer reveals the depth, subtlety, and richness of Addams’s thought.

About the Author

Marilyn Fischer is professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Dayton. She is the author of On Addams and Ethical Decision Making in Fund Raising as well as coeditor of Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy and Jane Addams’s Writings on Peace.