Affect and emotion in Jane Addams’s thought

Critical theorists, especially feminists, have long been concerned with the affective dimension of our lives and have highlighted its centrality to political analyses. More recently, there has been a renewed interest in affect and emotion, often referred to as an “affective turn,” which has seen contemporary theorists across the disciplines focusing on affect in political, as well as ontological, settings. In light of such recent, renewed interest in affect and emotion, this chapter examines what resources, if any, Jane Addams’s work offers theorists for the present context. The chapter also positions Addams in relation to Dewey’s and James’s theories of emotion and identifies two prominent themes or roles for emotion in Addams’s thought: emotion as the basis of an ethical standard, and emotion as the basis of “perplexity.”