What We Owe the People We Did Not Choose

I spent the better part of my life living among people I had not chosen and was not related to, in a large house on Halsted Street in Chicago, because I had come to believe that this — and not the ballot box alone, and not charity, and not sentiment — was where democracy was actually decided. I would like to explain why, because I think your generation has mislaid the idea, and I think the mislaying of it accounts for a great deal of your unhappiness.

You have come to speak of democracy almost entirely as a matter of voting. Who may vote, how they may vote, whether their vote is counted fairly — these are serious questions, and I do not wave them away. But they describe democracy as an event that happens to you a few times a year in a curtained booth. I came to understand democracy as something else entirely: a way of living, practiced daily, mostly without ceremony, in the unglamorous business of sharing a country with people whose lives are nothing like your own.

"We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens."

I wrote that, and I meant it as a practical instruction, not a poem. The thronged and common road is the actual location of democratic life. Not the byway, where the comfortable arrange to encounter only one another. The road, where you are obliged to make way for the immigrant, the laborer, the elderly, the poor, the person whose politics you find absurd and whose burdens you have never once had to carry. Democracy is the agreement to stay on that road together. Everything else — the voting, the laws, the institutions — is scaffolding built to protect the road. The scaffolding matters only because the road matters.

Here is the difficulty I watched in my own time and watch again in yours: it is entirely possible to be a person of high private morality and a poor democratic citizen. A man may be honest in his dealings, faithful to his family, generous to his church, and still understand nothing of his obligations to the stranger across the city whose factory conditions he has never inquired into, whose children he has never imagined, whose vote he would prefer not be cast. He has a personal code. He has no social ethic. And in a democracy, the personal code is not enough.

"In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many."

This is the hard saying, and I will not soften it. Democracy asks you to surrender a certain pleasure — the pleasure of your own separate excellence, your own correctness, your own carefully tended virtue — and to find your meaning instead in what you build together with people you would never have selected as companions. It asks you to be less impressed with being right and more concerned with being in relation. I am aware this runs against the grain of your age, which has refined the cultivation of personal righteousness into something like a sport, complete with scorekeeping. But righteousness kept to oneself, or shared only among the like-minded, is not a democratic virtue. It is a private comfort wearing democratic clothes.

I ran a settlement house, and people sometimes assumed its purpose was charity — that we were there to give things to the poor. They misunderstood entirely. We lived at Hull House because we had concluded that you cannot govern a country alongside people you have arranged never to meet. The factory girl and the professor's daughter, the Italian grandmother and the social reformer, the striking worker and the man who owned the works — these people had been made strangers to one another by the very structure of the modern city, and a democracy of strangers is a contradiction that cannot hold. So we put ourselves in the way of one another. We made encounter unavoidable. That, and not the donation, was the radical act.

"Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people."

I have come to think this is the whole of it, very nearly. Not malice — most of the hardness of the world is not malice. It is failure of imagination. It is the simple inability, or unwillingness, to picture with any vividness the inner life of a person unlike oneself, and to grant that life the same weight one grants one's own. Cruelty is downstream of this failure. So is most bad policy. So is the curious modern conviction that the people on the other side of our disagreements are not quite real, not quite owed the things we are owed. Repair the imagination and you repair a great deal else. But the imagination is not repaired by argument. It is repaired by proximity — by the thronged and common road.

And so, on the occasion of whatever anniversary or crisis has prompted you to think again about what democracy requires, I offer the one thing I learned that I am most certain of:

"Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics."

Your convictions about democracy are worth precisely nothing until they are enacted in your relations with actual people — and most especially with the people you did not choose, do not resemble, and would, left to your own preferences, avoid. The vote is one such action, and a vital one. But it is the smallest and easiest. The larger action is the daily one: to stay on the common road, to turn out for one another, to insist on imagining the burdens you do not personally carry, and to find your purpose not in your own achievement but in the slow, unfinished, frequently disappointing work of building a common life with strangers.

That is what we owe the people we did not choose. It is, as far as I was ever able to determine, the entire assignment.

Jane Addams
Cedarville, Illinois; Hull House, Chicago; and the long road that is held in common
July 6, 2026