Dilemmas and Politics in Chicago: The Theory and Practice of Addams, Alinsky, and Obama

This paper uses the city of Chicago as a site to explore the work of three celebrated community organizers and intellectuals:  Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, and Barack Obama.  All three faced similar challenges across one hundred years of helping people in Chicago, particularly the struggle to help others in a city controlled by powerful elites who reinforced racial, gender, and class inequality.  And all three individuals, each in their own unique way, got “stuck” and became political as a way to continue to move forward and continue to make change.  How are we to make sense of each individual’s efforts to negotiate the tensions between community and politics?  This paper draws on the work of Robert Merton and John Dewey (among others) to develop a theoretical framework for making sense of dilemmas and political action in community organizing.  It uses this framework to analyze the work of Addams, Alinsky, and Obama as they tried to help others in Chicago.  The paper also provides an element of historical sociology, showing the previously overlooked legacy of practice and ideas running from Addams, through Alinsky, to Obama.