Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace by James Cracraft (review)

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 876 heraldry and with granting privileged social and political roles to professors, while politicians continued to sabotage learning by underfunding primary schools. The intellectuals and writers of the time also had a responsibility for this situation. The literary polemics of the 1880s showed their concern for their profession’s autonomy and their social compassion, but failed to make the two concerns meet, a failure that may have had considerable effects for at least decades. Admirably balanced in its critical use of sources, perfectly mature in discussing a difficult topic, Drace-Francis’s book is an exceptionally insightful and stimulating analysis of emergent Romanian modernity and a model for future approaches to the early period of South-East European modern culture. Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi Doris Mironescu Cracraft, James. Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto and Plymouth, 2012. xvi + 179 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.99: £37.95. In Two Shining Souls: Jane Addams, Leo Tolstoy, and the Quest for Global Peace, James Cracraft, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Chicago, uses a meeting between two international figures in 1896 as the organizing principle to address their comparative philosophies and histories. Today, the Nobel Peace Prize winning Addams is little remembered outside of academic circles, while Tolstoi remains a beloved and widely recognized literary giant. At the end of the nineteenth century, Addams was one of Tolstoi’s many adoring fans. She travelled to Russia to visit one of her inspirations, which she recounts in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Tolstoi maintained an absolute position on pacifism as well as extreme solidarity with manual labourers. Similarly, Addams was a pacifist who lived among the poor in Chicago. However, the meeting was not one of mutual admiration. Tolstoi criticized Addams’s absentee land ownership and her dress as excessive in light of the needs of the poor. Addams left the exchange determined to take Tolstoi’s call for bread labour seriously. For Tolstoi, the meeting was not noteworthy enough to mention in his biography. Cracraft situates the meeting at the intersection of two kindred but methodologically different approaches to social philosophy. Tolstoi was a brilliant uncompromising Russian idealist in his late sixties. Addams was an American pragmatic activist in her mid thirties. Intriguingly, Cracraft introduces the reader to an interlocutor present at the meeting, Aylmer Maude, who was Tolstoi’s biographer, editor and translator. Maude helped make the meeting possible and subsequently published an article describing the events. After being a staunch defender of Tolstoyism, Maude was affected by the REVIEWS 877 meeting, recognizing that Addams’s approach integrated a care for individuals that moved beyond ideological rules of action. He describes Tolstoi’s version of non-resistance as ‘a rule of conduct forbidding the use of physical force, and involving a variety of wide-reaching conclusions: disapproval of all governments, police, voting, property, public law, etc. Non-resistance, as practiced by Miss Addams, is something else. It is an attitude of mind, and not a rigid rule’ (p. 64). Skilfully crafted, Two Shining Souls brings the events surrounding the meeting alive — providing the right balance between sufficient detail to give the events texture and tangibility and offering the sweep of history to present context and meaning. The work is accessible to the non-historian but also engages in scholarly analysis of Addams and Tolstoi. I strongly recommend the work to anyone interested in these figures or the on-going struggle for world peace. The following critiques are in the realm of nuance and do not diminish this reviewer’s overall enthusiasm for the book. Cracraft’s appraisal of Addams comes in the form consistent with biographers prior to the 1990s. For example, Cracraft praises her activism but diminishes her intellectual contribution: ‘Nor was she a thinker to be ranked with such American contemporaries as William James or John Dewey, despite tentative efforts to the contrary’ (p. 149). This statement overlooks the scholarship of the last twenty years that has demonstrated how Addams’s thinking influenced both James and Dewey and how it makes an independent...

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