The year is 1901. Two minor celebrities from opposite corners of the globe share an evening meal in Chicago. Both are politically left-leaning, both are evolutionists of a sort, both are concerned with the plight of the poor in the face of the escalation of the Industrial Revolution. The Russian man has been giving a series of lectures to the people of Chicago; he is staying at the American woman's settlement house-Hull House. They are Jane Addams, Chicago's activist social worker (...) and Petr Kropotkin, Russian nobleman by birth, anarchist in politics, and naturalist by inclination. Each awaits publication of their first full-length book concerning politics and moral development: Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) on .. (shrink)

The doctrine of Democracy, like any other of the living faiths of men, is so essentially mystical that it continually demands new formulation. In a 1914 report to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Jane Addams remembered how Chicago’s clubs came together two decades earlier around social issues that had been in the air for some time but which took on sudden immediacy amidst the women’s new collective “feeling and thought” and, with that key happening, called the groups to deliberate (...) action. “The newly moralized issue, almost as if by accident,” as Addams described the phenomenon, “suddenly takes fire and sets whole communities in a blaze, lighting up human relationships and public duty with new .. (shrink)