Well put, Jeff…except that you then need to explain the relatively extensive (in comparison to what then existed in the cities of late 19th-century/early 20th-century America) social engineering which Addams did embrace. There needn’t, I think, be a profound divide here: Addams, like the best of the Progressives (La Follette and his crowd, the people who wore their connection to the midwestern and plains Populists proudly), wanted to see the sort of planning and engineering that would result in greater liberty for families and communities–public transportation, cleaner parks, etc. She supported Roosevelt because she recognized that it was primarily the influence of corporate power which was preventing the people to use government–including, of course, the national government–to these ends. (Addams, I think, would have been among the first to start agitating on behalf of a Constitutional amendment following the recent Citizens United ruling.)

I think there’s truth in both the liberal, individualist tradition and the republican, commonwealth tradition. Jefferson embraced the value of both individual and community, and you can see in his thought some common ground with both Locke and Rousseau. It’s hard to find that balance in most people and most movements. We tend to veer off too far into libertarianism without the benefit of communitarianism, or vice versa. As A.W. Tozer put it, “Truth has two wings.”

Russell is right, of course, that Jane Addams was an important leader of the Progressive movement. But there were Progressives and there were Progressives. She was a prominent backer of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912, but before it became a vehicle for TR’s thirst for a return to power and the limelight, it was really more of a La Follette party. The political movement that began in the Republican Party and migrated into the PP was built by La Follette and his friends and was coopted by Roosevelt and his friends. The best account is Amos Pinchot’s History of the Progressive Party, 1912-1916. Even TR’s Bull Moose running mate, Governor Hiram Johnson, was a La Follette-style Progressive (personally close to Roosevelt but politically much closer to La Follette).

The disconnect between Addams and Roosevelt can be seen in their reactions to World War I. Addams was a pacifist who resisted U.S. entry. Roosevelt…was not. Addams also backed the second Progressive Party: La Follette’s vehicle in 1924 for an anti-monopoly and anti-empire coalition. It was predominately agrarian and midwestern, but also had considerable support from urban labor and eastern intellectuals (e.g., the Railway Brotherhoods, AFL-CIO, Socialist Party, Amos Pinchot, Oswald Garrison Villard).

So Addams was a Progressive, not a top-down, elitist type. She was no Herbert Croly or Walter Lippmann, just as La Follette was no Roosevelt and Bryan was no Wilson. Putting her in the company of Randolph Bourne seems about right. She was a Progressive who believed in popular sovereignty and peace, not social engineering and war.

MJQ: I know what you mean. The chapter on justice in the Nicomachean Ethics, if you read it out of context apart from Aristotle’s treatment of all the other virtues, makes no sense at all. It seems to be a mixture of obscure pronouncements on “proportion” in distribution and retribution, coupled with platitudes about “giving each his or her due.” Yet the goods that justice must secure are described in detail in his treatment of the other virtues and their constitutive role in the common good of the polis. Read in context, his account of justice makes perfect sense.

[Hauerwas]: That’s right. But political liberals assume that the primary political task is to secure cooperative agreement between people who share nothing in common other than the fear of death. And they call that cooperative agreement “justice,” which derives from the necessity of our respecting one another, for the very achievement of those kinds of cooperative agreements. I just think that such an account already envisions a social order that is less than good, because it doesn’t produce good people. Such an account becomes peculiarly problematic within a capitalist economy, in which “justice” names the pursuit of interests without any determination of the content of those interests.

The movement from the John Winthrop’s view of the polis to the very pessimistic view of James Madison is intriguing; usually, the pessimistic view of the human condition is (accurately) attributed to Protestant Calvinism, but the Puritan Winthrop was more Calvinist than Madison, who seems to have drifted away from a strongly Calvinist education and organized religion toward a Unitarianism over time. I’ve often wondered why a more positive influence from the doctrine of redemption didn’t seem to balance out the negative doctrine of original sin. Yet, perhaps it did in Winthrop’s time (1587-1649), but lost its way as the Enlightenment took hold in the next two centuries and “religious beliefs” were to be excluded from the public square. The (public) truth of redemption in Christ seems less “empirical” or universally believable by Enlightened people than the fallen nature of man. Today, even Barack Obama can publicly claim how he adheres to the “Christian realism” of Reinhold Neibuhr, who loved quoting the London Times’s quip that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”

However, if Stanley Hauerwas is right to critique the liberalism inherent in this belief:

Well that’s false. “Original Sin” is not a description of something called “the human condition.” … If we’re shits, we’re shits: that’s not the same thing as saying we’re sinners. I mean, you cannot have sin without the Christian understanding of God, or the Jewish understanding of God.

then the U. S. has never really divorced all “religious” belief from the public square, but instead accepted a deracinated conception of original sin which has no intelligibility apart from its conception of God (if Hauerwas is right) and ignored the other (more positive) truth concerning redemption and friendship in Christ.

Seeking only justice in a sinful world rather than friendship by grace would be very problematic, as you indicated: “We pray not for justice from God – for surely we would all burn eternally in Hell if justice was the measure – but for mercy, for love.” Though, I’d argue that one doesn’t have to throw out or minimize justice to give grace; Jesus did both simultaneously, and I think he expect us to as well.

The Reticulator, I think your disagreement with Mr. Salyer is a mere semantic one concerning the word “utilitarian.” I think he is criticizing “utilitarian” relationships that are merely concerning material exchange (kind of like the Anglo relationships you criticize), while you use describe “utilitarian” relationships as involving material benefit and exchange, but not being limited to it, i.e. not merely material benefit. You’re both right in my eyes.

I’ve also gone back and re-read Patrick Deneen’s reference to Aristotle more closely, as well as yours. That has convinced me that I need to read what he had to say about friendship, too.

Actually yes, I think so — you’ve made points worth chewing on. Real community does indeed tend to involve some measure of material interdependence.

But I think something is missing in your account of friendship, too; unfortunately it would take a prohibitive amount of time & energy for me to engage your points, coming as I do from a very different reference frame. (Please don’t take it as a brush-off; I’m juggling about 20 different bowling pins on my end, and my time for writing, leisure intellectual activity, Internet commenting, etc., must be carefully rationed.)

In any event you’d undoubtedly get more out of dipping into Aristotle — or C.S. Lewis’ “Friendship” chapter in *The Four Loves* — than anything I might write.

Because being predictable is that what makes blog discussions worth having, Patrick, I feel obliged to protest your slipping Jane Addams into your list of “opponents to the Progressives.” Addams was fully committed to the Progressive movement, going so far as to hit the campaign trail in full support of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. She was, I think, fully cognizant of the degree to which social reform often invites and even depends upon a condescending distance, and she argued with herself over that fact (consider her struggle over dealing with Catholic immigrants and alcohol consumption as Hull house). Yet that never slowed her commitment to reform legislation, because she was also fully cognizant of the equally important fact (at least, it is if one wishes to take the actual, material living conditions of persons into consideration along with broader, more conceptual concerns about the nature and telos of one’s life) that “local forms” of corruption–corruption that kept jobs unsafe, neighborhoods unclean, and children unwell–were those which the poor of America’s new cities found most harsh, and therefore those most in need of higher powers to combat. The result is, of course, a continual balancing act, a set of one compromise following another, trying to establish public goods so as to protect and promote the dignity and freedom of ordinary individuals on the one hand, while similarly trying to prevent the provision of the public goods from becoming enervating in their bureaucratic invasiveness. I’ll happily grant that the balance is in most ways significantly out of whack today, and is in need of serious correction; that’s why I like hanging around here. But writing as though the Progressives themselves were ignorant of the need of such balance (even if, obviously, the terms of such were expressed quite differently a century ago) does an unfairness to the breadth of their work.

I’ve written a couple of blog articles about Ben Franklin’s observation, including one that gives an example of how the relationships of dependency were relationships that were especially intense: Keeping them down on the farm once they’ve seen Ohio”

I don’t think you should put down the willingness to engage in commerce as a basis for relationship. Nor do I think you should put down friendships that are utilitarian. (Yes, I’m contradicting something I wrote earlier.)

I have probably not read the Aristotle writings you refer to, because I don’t remember ever being annoyed by anything he wrote on that subject.

Let me refer to different example. Native Americans of 2-3 centuries ago tended to view commerce differently than Europeans did — especially differently than Ango-Europeans did. NA’s viewed it as a relationship, while Anglo-Europeans viewed it as market transactions. NA’s expected their trading partners to be loyal because they were family. They didn’t just switch trading partners because a new one offered better goods at a lower price. Well, actually they did, but it was a big deal to break off an old relationship to do that. Anglos generally couldn’t expect to trade with Indians just by offering good prices and high quality. They had to marry into the families and establish what anthropologists call “fictive kinship.”

It may be hard for us to understand what “relationships”, including the friendship variety, meant in those societies. But some Anglos did. Benjamin Franklin had some famous observations on the subject:

“When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

Franklin thought this was because life was easier as an Indian. And although in some ways I suppose it was, in the literal sense it was most assuredly not an easier, carefree life. He was wrong about that.

My own hypothesis as to what was happening is summarized in the word “relationships”. Anglos who lived with the Indians found that they developed intense personal relationships that just didn’t happen in the communities into which they had been born. They were relationships of life and death — people could not survive on their own. They didn’t want to go back to their white parents because there just weren’t the same type of interpersonal relationships in those societies. Some people did eventually go back, sometimes more than willingly, but the interpersonal relationships of life in Native American communities exerted an extremely strong pull. People living as Indians were alive in a way that they never could be in the Anglo-American communities.

However, these relationships were very much utilitarian relationships — they were relationships of dependence. I guess I now wish I knew what Aristotle said about friendship, because I think the most intense friendships people have are those that are based on utility — on absolute dependence on each other.

Take family relationships, for another example. A strong family bond is developed when family members depend on each other for life and health. When they don’t really need each other because the government will come in and provide if the parent messes up and makes a stupid choice, then there isn’t such a strong family relationship. When everything is an entitlement from the government, none of our choices really matter to each other, and you end up with the social pathologies you now see in the U.K.

I hope I’m making a little bit of sense. This is something I should learn to explain better if I’m not. But it’s late at night and it’s hard for me to tell right now if I’m explaining myself very well.

“where the methods impact the means”

should read something like, “where the ends and the means cannot be separated.”

Those who join together in fellowship to resist totalitarian systems are bound to one another by their own vision of the common good.

In any event, perhaps I didn’t express myself well. I hardly meant to imply government propagandizing everybody into goodness. Even if those in power had anything approaching an accurate grasp of justice and the good — unlikely at any point in the near future — there are many cases where the methods impact the means. The common good cannot be promoted by top-down, despotic fiat.

I would say, rather, that one cannot commune with another soul without, in fact, sharing something in common with him/her. One cannot achieve spiritual community without the people of the neighborhood in question possessing something in common other than mere geographic proximity and the willingness to engage in commerce.

In an absolutely relativistic and consumerist society, there is simply nothing to share — or at least nothing deeper & stronger than a hobby. (Incidentally, this is, I think, the true weak spot of the American Empire. Its success parasitically undermines the very civic virtues that are a precondition of its continued solvency.)

You may have already read it, of course — but if not, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Books VIII & IX) might give a better idea of where I’m coming from, in terms of various kinds of friendship — and also a better idea, I suspect, of what Dr. Deneen is driving at in the 4rth paragraph.

J.D. Salyer, you seem to imply that friendship in a society that isn’t based on a common good is not really friendship but instead consists of utilitarian relationships. Seems to me that in the real world of the last century it was if anything, very much the other way around. Societies which made the common good the top priority did not treat private, individual friendships with much favor unless they were completely subordinated to the common good. Loyalty to friends was impossible in those societies, but it was possible to “use” individual relationships.

(I spend a lot of time watching Russian movies, both from the Soviet era and after. The contrast between these two types of relationships often is very important to the films.)

Of course Aristotle’s conception of friendship highlights just how difficult it will be “to restore friendship to its rightful place,” since Americans have largely lost the concept of friendship. As our culture increasingly rejects the notion that the term “common good” has any positive content, the possibility of finding filia in the Aristotelian sense becomes impossible. The only “common good” of American culture seems to be “freedom” — i.e., the common good of having no common good.

Hence most modern “friendships” are of utility, or at best of pleasure — start talking about true friendship (and the shared vision of a capital “g” Good that true friendship requires) and you’re liable to be condemned for being exclusivist.

I doubt it’s likely at this juncture because the Technocrats, in their lust for efficiency and some nebulous idea called “progress” have forgotten that we all exist for the immediacy of community and if there is one primary sacrifice in the rush to globalism, it is community . Great conurbations are being created and distances shortened and markets unified but the individual is being put at increasing distance from both their own identity and the traditions and emollients of local life. In reaction, the erection of popular Fort Apaches are just now being rolled out, last ditch defenses against things we know we’ve lost but can’t quite put our finger upon. Monsters are going to be made in the confused conceits of such resentment.

Locales, aside from the virtual locale of our debt suburbs and their financial centers, but the many and diverse locales in this country…… as well as across the world….. are finding themselves arrayed upon a continuum that starts at moribund and ends in the obliteration of “replacement”. Skills are declining, traditions eroding, fulfillment is cheapening and wages…that fully insufficient barometer for a people professing soul…are stagnant. Purchase power , we are told, is declining and yet we wonder why our voluble “leadership” cannot gain any purchase upon getting us out of the deepening rut.

The Revolutionary Society has outsmarted itself and outsourced life to the winds of a siren called “Change”. Modernism is a swooning attachment to the Mind expressed quixotically in anti-mind physicality. No wonder somebody left the soul at the bus station.

Satire however, never sleeps.

1. Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
2. No good deed goes unpunished.
3. “What have you done for me…lately?”