Andrea Sangiovanni
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Series editor’s foreword

Series editor's foreword

Andrea Sangiovanni has established himself as one of the most innovative and important political philosophers of his generation through a series of conceptual and theoretical works that range from his path-breaking articles on practice-dependence1 and the sites of justice2 in political philosophy to his continuing normative engagement with the institutional structure of the European Union.3 In his powerfully argued book Humanity without Dignity he grounds human rights not on an appeal to the concept of dignity but in the moral right of each person not to be treated as inferior to other persons. He defends this argument through a substantive account of being treated as an inferior manifest in dehumanization, instrumentalization, infantilization, objectification, and stigmatization. Sangiovanni's concern with moral equality construed in these terms offers one route through which an interest in solidarity naturally arises, since an important site of solidarity is that of groups who are treated as inferior and engage in political struggle against their being so treated. But a second route arises directly from his work on the European Union and its commitment (at least in principle) to solidarity between member states. The fact that his work raises the issue of solidarity from these two different directions is a reason why Sangiovanni finds himself confronting the general question of whether the use of the word ‘solidarity’ in both contexts can be seen as particular specifications of the same concept or not, and hence the question with which he begins the lead essay of this volume concerning the nature of solidarity, its grounds, and its value. The ambitious aim of this essay is to offer a general account of solidarity that has sufficient structure to be empirically and normatively valuable, to distinguish solidarity from other normative concepts, and to encompass an important range of standard uses.

At the heart of Sangiovanni's account is an understanding of solidarity as ‘a particular form of joint action characterized by a typical profile of commitments, intentions, and attitudes, and triggered by, inter alia, an identification with others on the basis of a shared cause, role, way of life, condition, or set of experiences’. There are reasons to favor such a general concept of solidarity if it helps us make sense of the history of solidarity and the diversity encompassed by that history, as well as the normative attractiveness of practices of solidarity as egalitarian and mutualistic forms of cooperation among strangers directed to overcoming significant adversity. Sangiovanni's engagement with the history of solidarity is a way both of supporting his conceptual account and of fleshing out the kind of practices which that account would encompass. The third part of Sangiovanni's account turns from the history of the concept of solidarity to the normative grounds of the practice of solidarity and to making the claim that identification is paradigmatic of solidarity. Finally, Sangiovanni addresses the value of the practice of solidarity. Here he is concerned to argue that solidarity has non-instrumental value and to differentiate solidarity from a value that it is often identified with, or reduced to, namely, justice.

That Sangiovanni has produced an original, substantive account of solidarity is amply demonstrated by the range of arguments and objections which his interlocutors raise in their critical essays. His response to these essays should be seen as just the start of the dialogue that this innovative contribution to the debate on solidarity will provoke.

David Owen

1 See, for example, ‘Normative Political Theory: A Flight from Reality?’ in Political Thought and International Relations, ed. D. Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 219–40; ‘Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality’, Journal of Political Philosophy 36(2) (2008): 137–64; ‘How Practices Matter’, Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (2016): 3–23.
2 See, for example, ‘Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35(1) (2007): 2–39; ‘The Irrelevance of Coercion, Imposition, and Framing to Distributive Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 40(2) (2012): 79–110.
3 See, for example, ‘Solidarity in the European Union: Problems and Prospects’, in The Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law, eds. Julie Dickson and Pavlos Eleftheriadis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 384–412; ‘Solidarity in the European Union’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 33 (2013): 213–41; ‘Non-Discrimination, Free Movement, and In-Work Benefits in the European Union’, European Journal of Political Theory 16 (2017): 143–63; ‘Debating the EU's raison d’être: On the Relation between Justice and Legitimacy’, Journal of Common Market Studies 57 (2019): 13–27.
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Solidarity – Nature, grounds, and value

Andrea Sangiovanni in dialogue

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