Talking With: Jean Bethke Elshtain

In honor of  Jean Bethke Elshtain  (January 6, 1941 – August 11, 2013), "a political scientist unafraid to talk to God."

“Talking With: Jean Bethke Elshtain”

Jane Addams has been on Jean Bethke Elshtain’s mind for more than 25 years. While in graduate school at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Elshtain read Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America (1965). “He has a chapter on Jane Addams,” she says. “It led me to have a glimmer of interest in her. And at some point I read [Twenty Years at Hull House] and I found it so touching in so many ways.”

     To understand Addams is to look to her writings, as Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago, does in Jane Addams. In them, Addams expresses the “expansive notion she had of citizens and would-be citizens” and her “complete devotion to civic life,” Elshtain says.

     “One thing [Addams] was so clear about is what she calls ‘the grief of things as they are’: life’s griefs and losses, things that could not be forestalled, that could not be prevented. The distinction between that and certain injustices and cruelties and violations of human life and human dignity that can be prevented and that we need, as a society, to work to prevent. She’s marvelously instructive on that.”

     Addams died of cancer at age 74. She went to her death dedicated to the “American project.”

“She believed so hopefully in what this democracy was at its best, what it had promised, and what it might yet become,” Elshtain says.

     “I think that kind of confidence absent chauvinism is an extraordinary thing. And tied to that is the deep sense of a purposeful life lived with conviction. I think that’s just a wonderful gift. And I know that’s going to mark her as a remote figure in the minds of many people.  To the extent it does, that’s sad. If we really think we can’t recapture that notion of a purposeful life lived with civic ends in mind, if we really think that’s gone, then I think a good bit of her vision of America, or any vision of America at its best, is gone, too.    

 – Amy O'Loughlin

(This interview was originally published in American History, June 2002,Vol. 37 Issue 2, p66.)