"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life"
About this Quote
“The good we secure for ourselves” lands like a modest claim, then Jane Addams pulls the floor out from under it. She’s not disputing ambition; she’s disputing its durability. “Precarious and uncertain” is the operative warning: private comfort, in her view, is a temporary truce with a society you still share. If the conditions around you stay desperate, your safety is always on loan.
Addams’s intent is both moral and practical, which is why the sentence works. She frames justice not as charity but as infrastructure. The subtext is a rebuke to the era’s rising gospel of self-made success: you can’t wall off your well-being from the consequences of everyone else’s exclusion. The line implies that what looks like individual achievement is often quietly subsidized by public systems - labor, sanitation, schools, laws - and those systems either bind people into “common life” or fracture into resentment, illness, and instability that eventually reaches the protected.
Context matters. Addams was building Hull House in Chicago, watching industrial capitalism concentrate wealth while immigrant neighborhoods absorbed overcrowding, exploitative work, and political neglect. Her social work wasn’t sentimental; it was diagnostic. Cities were proving that inequality is not contained. Disease travels. Unrest travels. So does civic distrust.
“Incorporated into our common life” is her real demand: bake equity into the everyday, not into occasional acts of benevolence. It’s an argument for solidarity as risk management - and for democracy as something you don’t get to enjoy alone.
Addams’s intent is both moral and practical, which is why the sentence works. She frames justice not as charity but as infrastructure. The subtext is a rebuke to the era’s rising gospel of self-made success: you can’t wall off your well-being from the consequences of everyone else’s exclusion. The line implies that what looks like individual achievement is often quietly subsidized by public systems - labor, sanitation, schools, laws - and those systems either bind people into “common life” or fracture into resentment, illness, and instability that eventually reaches the protected.
Context matters. Addams was building Hull House in Chicago, watching industrial capitalism concentrate wealth while immigrant neighborhoods absorbed overcrowding, exploitative work, and political neglect. Her social work wasn’t sentimental; it was diagnostic. Cities were proving that inequality is not contained. Disease travels. Unrest travels. So does civic distrust.
“Incorporated into our common life” is her real demand: bake equity into the everyday, not into occasional acts of benevolence. It’s an argument for solidarity as risk management - and for democracy as something you don’t get to enjoy alone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|
More Quotes by Jane
Add to List
