Between the Individual and Society

Jane Addams, Mary Richmond, and Social Work as Practical Philosophy

Social work developed in the tension between two fundamental questions: How can we help an individual who is struggling? And how can we change the social conditions that create or reinforce that struggle? These questions are often associated with two of the profession’s most influential pioneers: Jane Addams and Mary Richmond.

Addams is primarily remembered for Hull-House, social reform, democratic participation, and peace activism. Richmond is associated with the development of social casework, systematic assessment, and professional work with individuals and families. They have therefore sometimes been presented as representatives of two contrasting traditions: Addams turned toward society, while Richmond turned toward the individual.

This distinction contains an element of truth, but it is also too simplistic. Addams was deeply concerned with individual experience, while Richmond insisted that people had to be understood in relation to their families, communities, institutions, and living conditions. Neither of them regarded human suffering as an isolated phenomenon. Both searched for ways of connecting knowledge and action, ethics and experience, the individual and society.

Their work can therefore be read as more than a chapter in the history of social work. It can also be understood as practical philosophy: an attempt to discover, through action, what it means to live well with others and how a more democratic and socially just society might be created.

Addams and Richmond were demonstrably in written contact, participated in the same professional networks, and in all likelihood met in person. Richmond’s 1902 letter shows that they engaged in a direct and substantive professional dialogue, while her tribute to Addams in 1927 reveals an enduring respect despite their methodological differences.

They did not represent two isolated and antagonistic camps, but two traditions that met in a critical conversation about knowledge, organisation, social reform, and the relationship between the individual and society.

Two Experiences of Vulnerability

Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, a small community in northern Illinois. Her father, John Huy Addams, was a successful businessman, state senator, and admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Ideas about equality, responsibility, and civic participation were important features of the home in which she grew up.

Yet Addams’s childhood was not as uncomplicated as later heroic accounts sometimes suggest. Her mother died when Jane was two years old. She also suffered from serious health problems, including a spinal condition that affected both her body and her self-image. As a young woman, she underwent surgery and experienced periods of depression, uncertainty, and lack of direction.

Addams belonged to a privileged family and received an education that was unavailable to most women of her generation. Nevertheless, privilege did not protect her from grief, illness, and existential uncertainty. Her early experiences may have contributed to her sensitivity to the vulnerability of others and to her lifelong search for a meaningful form of social participation.

Mary Ellen Richmond was born in 1861. Her mother died when Richmond was still a small child, and her father died shortly afterward. She was raised in Baltimore by her maternal grandmother and two aunts. The household was politically and intellectually unconventional. Her grandmother was a spiritualist and an advocate of women’s suffrage, and the home was characterized by radical ideas, reading, discussion, and scepticism toward established authorities.

Claims that Richmond was raised by “two psychotic aunts” cannot be substantiated by reliable historical sources. Such a description also involves retrospectively diagnosing people for whom adequate clinical evidence does not exist. What can be said is that Richmond’s upbringing was unusual and intellectually demanding, and that she experienced loss and insecurity at an early age.

As a young adult, Richmond also went through a difficult period in New York, where she lived on a low income and experienced poverty, loneliness, and poor health. Like Addams, she knew vulnerability not only as an abstract social category but also as a personal experience.

These biographical elements should not be used to explain their later work in any simple psychological manner. Nevertheless, they remind us that theories and methods do not emerge outside life. Both women developed their social thought through encounters with dependence, uncertainty, loss, and the need to find a place in the world.

When Philosophy Moves into the Neighbourhood

After completing her education, Addams travelled in Europe over several years. During these journeys, she encountered poverty on a scale that deeply disturbed her. A visit to Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in London, helped give direction to ideas she had long struggled to formulate.

In 1889, together with Ellen Gates Starr, she established Hull-House in Chicago. It was located in an industrial neighbourhood inhabited largely by immigrants from many different countries. The surrounding population lived with overcrowding, dangerous working conditions, low wages, child labour, illness, and limited political influence.

Hull-House is often described as a social institution or settlement house. It was both, but it was also something more: a practical and intellectual experiment. Addams did not begin with a finished method that was then applied to the neighbourhood. The work developed through participation, observation, dialogue, and continuous adjustment.

Hull-House offered education, childcare, cultural activities, clubs, public baths, legal assistance, and meeting places. It also became a centre for social research, trade-union activity, political reform, and public debate. Its work was not limited to providing services for people in need. The residents of Hull-House sought to understand why the needs arose and how the underlying social conditions might be changed.

This is where Addams’s pragmatism becomes especially visible. Ideas had to be tested in experience. Knowledge was not something produced at a safe distance from social life; it emerged through participation in shared problems. An idea demonstrated its value through the consequences it produced and through its capacity to improve human relationships and living conditions.

Hull-House was therefore a social laboratory, but the word laboratory must be used carefully. The people of the neighbourhood were not objects of experimentation. They were participants in a shared process of inquiry. Addams described the kind of community she sought as a sympathetic community: a community in which people attempted to understand one another by entering imaginatively into experiences different from their own.

Sympathetic understanding did not mean sentimentality or pity. It meant allowing one’s own moral judgement to be challenged by the experiences of others.

Education as Democratic Practice

Education had a central place at Hull-House, but it was not understood as a one-way transmission of knowledge from educated reformers to supposedly ignorant immigrants. Addams gradually became critical of philanthropy that assumed the benefactor already knew what other people needed.

The settlement workers brought education, professional experience, and social connections into the neighbourhood. At the same time, they had to learn from the residents’ knowledge, traditions, work experiences, family relationships, and strategies for survival. Everyone involved was capable of contributing to the shared life of the community.

In this sense, Hull-House became a place of democratic formation. Democracy was practised when people listened to one another, worked together, disagreed, changed their minds, and assumed responsibility for common problems. Concerts, theatre performances, public lectures, labour discussions, children’s activities, and neighbourhood clubs were not merely pleasant additions to social reform. They created experiences through which people who might otherwise have remained strangers could recognise themselves as participants in a common world.

For Addams, democracy was therefore not limited to elections, political institutions, or legal rights. It was a way of living together. A society could not be fully democratic if people were formally equal as citizens but separated in everyday life by poverty, exclusion, prejudice, or powerlessness.

The purpose of democracy was human flourishing. This required attention to both physical and emotional needs: food, housing, work, health, recognition, belonging, and opportunities for meaningful participation.

Knowledge as Social Action

Addams is sometimes portrayed as the morally engaged activist, in contrast to Richmond as the systematic professional. This distinction overlooks the empirical character of the work at Hull-House.

The settlement residents collected information about wages, housing, nationalities, working conditions, illness, and the distribution of poverty. Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895, combined maps, statistical material, and social analysis. It was an important contribution to early urban sociology and social research.

This collection of data was not undertaken merely to produce knowledge. The knowledge was intended to make invisible social conditions visible and to support collective action and political reform. Research became a form of democratic participation.

Addams insisted that information should be collected ethically and with respect for the integrity of those who shared their experiences. Social inquiry had to be carried out with, and not merely about, the community. Knowledge that reduced people to categories could reproduce the very forms of domination it was intended to challenge.

Her approach anticipated an enduring ethical problem in social work: How can professionals obtain knowledge about people’s lives without taking ownership of their stories? Addams’s answer was not a fixed procedure but a relational ideal. Knowledge should emerge through mutuality, attention, and shared responsibility for its consequences.

Mary Richmond and the Social Diagnosis

Mary Richmond entered charity work in Baltimore in the late 1880s and gradually became one of the most influential figures in the professionalisation of social work. She sought to replace arbitrary and moralising forms of charity with systematic investigation and informed assistance.

Her major work, Social Diagnosis, was published in 1917. The title can easily be misunderstood today. Richmond did not use diagnosis simply to locate a defect within the individual. She argued that a person’s difficulties had to be understood through a careful examination of relationships, family history, economic conditions, work, health, neighbourhood, and institutional surroundings.

Her method was based on gathering information from several sources, examining the connections between different aspects of a person’s life, and developing an assessment that could guide action. In this way, she helped establish what became known as social casework.

Richmond further developed these ideas in What Is Social Case Work?, published in 1922. She described casework as processes that develop personality through adjustments, consciously effected, individual by individual, between people and their social environment. Although the language reflects its historical period, the relational insight remains important: neither the person nor the environment can be understood independently of the other.

Richmond has sometimes been criticised for individualising social problems. There are grounds for this criticism when casework is practised as though the individual alone must adapt to existing conditions. Yet Richmond’s own understanding was more complex. She recognised that people’s lives were shaped by social networks, economic resources, public institutions, family relationships, and opportunities for participation.

Her contribution was to show that careful attention to the individual need not exclude attention to society. On the contrary, a detailed understanding of one person’s life may reveal how social structures operate in concrete experience.

The War That Changed Casework

The First World War contributed to a major change in American social work. Large numbers of soldiers returned with psychological injuries that could not be adequately understood through traditional medical categories. The condition known at the time as shell shock directed attention toward trauma, emotional conflict, and mental health.

In 1918, Smith College established a training programme in psychiatric social work to prepare workers to assist traumatised veterans. In the following decades, psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories gained increasing influence within social casework. Freud’s ideas offered a language for understanding unconscious conflict, childhood experiences, defence mechanisms, and emotional suffering.

It is therefore correct to say that casework became strongly influenced by psychoanalytic theory from the 1920s onward. It is less accurate, however, to present Richmond herself as the founder of a Freudian form of social work. Her main framework was social and relational rather than psychoanalytic. The increasing emphasis on intrapsychic processes emerged more clearly in the generation that followed her.

This shift had productive consequences. Social workers gained better tools for understanding trauma, emotional distress, and the complexity of personal relationships. At the same time, the shift involved a risk: problems created by poverty, discrimination, dangerous work, or inadequate housing could be interpreted primarily as expressions of individual psychology.

The history of casework thus reveals a continuing dilemma. Psychological knowledge may deepen our understanding of suffering, but it may also conceal the social production of that suffering if the surrounding world disappears from view.

Was Social Work a Divided House?

The contrast between Addams and Richmond is often described as a division between social reform and individual treatment. Addams represents the settlement tradition; Richmond represents the charity organisation and casework tradition.

The distinction is useful, but only to a certain point. Addams did not overlook individuals. Hull-House was filled with face-to-face encounters, personal assistance, childcare, education, and practical support. Richmond, for her part, did not regard individuals as detached from society. Her social diagnosis depended precisely on understanding people within their environments.

Their differences were primarily differences of emphasis, institutional setting, and direction of attention. Addams often began with the neighbourhood and moved toward the experiences of individuals. Richmond often began with an individual or family and moved outward toward relationships and social surroundings.

The two approaches can therefore be understood as complementary movements:

from social conditions to lived experience;
from lived experience to social conditions.

Social work loses something essential when these movements are separated. Without attention to personal experience, structural analysis may become abstract. Without attention to social conditions, individual assistance may become an exercise in helping people adjust to injustice.

From Personal Morality to Social Ethics

Two episodes in Addams’s life illuminate her movement from personal moral concern toward a broader social ethics: her meeting with Leo Tolstoy and her involvement in the Pullman Strike.

The Meeting with Tolstoy

In the summer of 1896, Addams visited Leo Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula in the Russian Empire. The Soviet Union did not yet exist; it was established in 1922.

Addams admired Tolstoy’s Christian pacifism, his criticism of violence, and his attempt to live a simple life close to ordinary labour. She hoped he might help her resolve a moral difficulty: How could a privileged person work among the poor without reproducing inequality?

The meeting became uncomfortable. Tolstoy looked critically at the large, fashionable sleeves of Addams’s travelling dress. He took hold of the fabric and remarked that there was enough material in one sleeve to make a dress for a small child. His criticism confronted her with the contradiction between her social ideals and her material privilege.

Addams was shaken, but she did not simply accept Tolstoy’s solution. Dressing like a Russian peasant in Chicago would have been artificial. She briefly decided that she would bake bread for two hours every day as a form of morally meaningful labour. Once back at Hull-House, however, she encountered demands that could not be postponed. Was the neighbourhood supposed to wait while she saved her own soul?

The episode helped clarify an important distinction. Moral seriousness could not be reduced to personal purity or self-denial. The question was not merely how the individual reformer should live, but what consequences her actions had for others. Addams’s answer was pragmatic: responsibility had to be realised through sustained participation in social life.

Pullman and the Insufficiency of Goodness

The Pullman Strike of 1894 presented a related moral problem on a larger scale. George Pullman regarded himself as a benevolent employer. He had created a company town with housing and services for his workers. Yet when wages were reduced during an economic depression, rents and other expenses remained high. Workers could no longer maintain decent lives.

Pullman expected gratitude, loyalty, and obedience. He interpreted the conflict through the lens of his own intentions. Because he regarded himself as generous, he struggled to understand the workers’ resistance.

For Addams, the strike demonstrated that individual virtues such as honesty, generosity, and personal decency were insufficient in a complex industrial society. A person might think of himself as good while participating in structures that deprived others of dignity and influence.

Personal morality therefore had to be expanded into social ethics. The ethical question was not only whether an employer had good intentions, but whether workers had fair wages, secure conditions, and a genuine voice in decisions that governed their lives.

Addams criticised both industrial capitalism and a naïve philanthropy that attempted to relieve suffering without changing the relationships that created it. Charity could become a substitute for justice. A democratic workplace required representation, mutuality, and recognition of workers as participants rather than dependants.

Democracy as a Way of Life

Addams’s life project was to make society more democratic by bringing social, educational, and economic life into relation with democratic principles. Two attitudes were especially important: mutuality and solidarity.

Mutuality implied equality. People should meet one another not primarily as benefactors and recipients, experts and cases, or rulers and dependants, but as persons whose lives were interconnected. Mutuality did not erase differences in knowledge or responsibility, but it prevented these differences from becoming a justification for domination.

Solidarity meant recognising that the good of the individual depends upon goods that must be available to everyone. Health, education, dignity, safety, and participation cannot be treated as private possessions. Their existence depends on social arrangements.

Addams’s understanding of solidarity was influenced by Tolstoy, although she did not follow him in every respect. She admired his interpretation of early Christianity as a practice of love expressed through concrete action. Love was not merely an emotion but a creative social force that connected people through their dependence on one another.

From this perspective, anger that turns other people into enemies and resistance that denies their humanity become destructive forces. They isolate people and undermine the movement toward democracy. This did not mean that Addams rejected conflict or protest. She repeatedly took controversial public positions. Her point was that lasting change could not be built upon dehumanisation.

Democracy required a sympathetic understanding capable of holding disagreement and relationship together.

From the Neighbourhood to World Peace

Addams’s peace activism developed directly from her experiences at Hull-House. The neighbourhood contained people from national and cultural groups with histories of conflict and mutual hostility. Yet in Chicago they worked in the same factories, attended meetings together, watched their children perform in concerts and plays, and participated in shared institutions.

Such experiences did not automatically remove prejudice. They did, however, create possibilities for new relationships. People encountered one another not only as representatives of hostile nations, religions, or ethnic groups, but as neighbours, workers, parents, and participants in common projects.

For Addams, peace was therefore more than the absence of war. It was the development of social processes through which people could create a common life. Peace, democracy, and social justice were inseparable.

When the First World War began, she attempted to bring the lessons of Hull-House into the international arena. She helped establish the Woman’s Peace Party and presided over the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915. Women from neutral countries and nations at war met to formulate proposals for mediation and peace.

The organisation that emerged from this work later became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Addams remained one of its leading figures.

She argued that war was fundamentally destructive of democracy because it strengthened militarism, obedience, censorship, nationalism, and the division of humanity into friends and enemies. She opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s claim that American participation in the war was necessary to defend democracy. To wage war in order to protect democracy appeared to her as a profound contradiction.

The consequences of war were not confined to the battlefield. Militarisation transformed homes, institutions, public debate, and social priorities. Resources were redirected away from children, older people, the sick, and those living in poverty. War damaged both bodies and the moral relationships upon which democratic society depended.

When Peace Activism Became Dangerous

Addams’s opposition to the war came at a high personal and political cost. Before the war, she had often been celebrated as “Saint Jane,” a symbol of civic virtue and compassionate reform. During and after the war, she was denounced as disloyal, naïve, radical, and dangerous.

She has often been described as having been called “the most dangerous woman in America” by J. Edgar Hoover. The historical record requires a more cautious formulation. The phrase was used in public attacks on Addams, and later accounts have frequently attributed it directly to Hoover. Firm primary evidence that Hoover himself coined or used the exact words is difficult to establish.

What is documented is that the Bureau of Investigation opened a treason investigation into Addams in 1924. Hoover became director of the Bureau that same year; the organisation was not officially named the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 1935. Addams was monitored in a political climate shaped by the Red Scare, anti-radical campaigns, and suspicion of pacifists, labour organisers, and internationalists.

The political branding of Addams as dangerous reveals an important paradox. A woman committed to nonviolence, democratic participation, social justice, and humanitarian relief could be treated as a threat precisely because she challenged the claim that military power and national loyalty were beyond moral criticism.

Her award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, shared with Nicholas Murray Butler, did not constitute a formal political rehabilitation. It nevertheless symbolised a profound change in recognition. The woman denounced for opposing war became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Addams continued her peace work until her death on May 21, 1935. She also supported humanitarian relief for European populations suffering from hunger after the First World War. Throughout these years, she remained associated with Hull-House and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

An Example to Follow?

To describe Jane Addams as an example to follow does not mean that today’s social workers should copy Hull-House or repeat the methods of the settlement movement. Historical conditions have changed, and some aspects of early social reform were marked by paternalism and assumptions that must be critically examined.

The question is instead what kind of professional and moral orientation her life represents.

The Greek concept of aretē may be useful here. It is commonly translated as virtue or excellence, but it can also refer to the quality with which a person performs an activity. Addams’s significance lies not only in what she accomplished, but in the manner in which she worked: attentively, experimentally, courageously, and in cooperation with others.

Her example consists in a willingness to enter situations without possessing all the answers in advance. She tested ideas against experience, allowed encounters to change her understanding, and connected personal assistance with institutional and political reform. She also accepted that democratic commitment might require her to take unpopular positions.

Richmond offers a related example. She insisted that help must be based on careful knowledge rather than impulse, moral judgement, or arbitrary charity. She sought to understand the complexity of each person’s situation and to develop a professional practice capable of responding to that complexity.

Social work needs both orientations. From Addams, it can learn that suffering often requires collective action and social change. From Richmond, it can learn that no individual life should disappear into a general theory of society.

Their work also raises a question that remains urgent: What has happened to the social in social work?

If social work becomes primarily administration, diagnosis, documentation, or the regulation of individual behaviour, it risks losing sight of the relationships and conditions that shape people’s lives. Yet if it speaks only about structures and systems, it may fail to encounter the unique person who needs help here and now.

The lasting contribution of Addams and Richmond lies in their refusal—despite their different starting points—to choose completely between the individual and society. Human beings become who they are through relationships, institutions, histories, and shared environments. To help a person is therefore also to examine the world in which that person is expected to live.

Perhaps this is also the most precise description of social work as practical philosophy: the attempt to understand the human being while simultaneously changing the world in which human beings must live their lives.

References

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