A Working Democracy: Jane Addams on the Meaning of Work

Abstract

By exploring Addams's lifelong fascination with work, this essay analyzes the ways in which her understanding of work fundamentally shaped her wider political vision. For Addams, work was the foundation of not only a personal sense of identity, but also a collective democratic character. The workplace had the potential to be the model of a cooperative community, providing a venue for social solidarity and civic reciprocity. By working together, Americans would develop a more cosmopolitan and inclusive politics. In short, the essay argues that Addams's political thought was an attempt to revitalize democracy by giving meaning to work. It concludes by suggesting that her arguments can be applied to many contemporary political problems, and that today's democratic theory and practice would be enlivened by a renewed attention to work. Joel Winkelman is Lecturer in the

There Is No Rawlsian Theory of Corporate Governance

“…In an important article in the American Political Science Review titled “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation,” David Ciepley (2013) presents a rare project that engages explicitly in questions about the legal and political nature of the corporation. Other political theorists have examined the related topics of work and production (Stanczyk 2012; Arnold 2012; Moriarty 2009; Winkelman 2013). Although the aforementioned approaches hardly constitute a common or comprehensive research program, one common theme appears to have emerged: liberal political theories like Rawls’s that presuppose a fairly clear distinction between the private and the public or the political and the nonpolitical cannot be applied to questions of work, organizational hierarchies, and governance.…”