Andrea Sangiovanni
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Solidarity
Nature, grounds, and value

In a world where politics is becoming increasingly fragmented, unequal, and divided, solidarity is of crucial importance. But what exactly is solidarity? The concept can feel hopelessly vague and amorphous, bleeding into other related notions such as altruism, community, mutual concern, fellow-feeling, and justice. At the same time, there is a tendency to identify numerous possible kinds of solidarity, notably political, social, civic, and human. In his lead essay for this volume, Andrea Sangiovanni sets out to elaborate a unified concept of solidarity that can comprehend each of these usages while having enough structure to make it normatively and empirically fruitful in a range of other contexts. He argues that solidarity is best understood not as an emotion or kind of fellow-feeling but as a particular form of joint action characterized by a typical profile of commitments, intentions, and attitudes, and triggered by an identification with others on the basis of a shared cause, role, way of life, condition, or set of experiences. Most of the essay is dedicated to unpacking each of these aspects. But Sangiovanni also takes the time to re-elaborate, extend, and revise some of the key insights into solidarity that have emerged in recent literature.

Introduction

Many today have the sense that collective action is futile in the presence of large transnational social and economic forces. They worry about our increasingly fragmented, unequal, and divided politics. They worry, too, about the decline and stagnation of their societies and institutions. People sense the need for some form of collective resistance and mobilization that looks beyond normal electoral politics, and are hungry for forms of meaningful and transformative joint action. It is no surprise that calls for solidarity are heard everywhere. This book puts forward a critical proposal to guide our reflection on what solidarity is, and why it should move us.

How is solidarity distinct from other, related ideas, such as altruism, justice, and fellow-feeling? What value does acting in solidarity with others have? What reasons do we have to act in solidarity with others? Answering these questions is important for at least three reasons. First, less attention has been given to solidarity than to other more established values such as justice, liberty, legitimacy, equality, patriotism, dignity, and so on. Second, solidarity has had a long history of inclusion in Christian, socialist, and nationalist arguments, as well as in those social movements inspired by them (e.g., feminism, civil rights). Solidarity is, furthermore, now gaining ground again as a rallying cry in debates, for example, within bioethics, 1 human rights, 2 contemporary social movements 3 (Black Lives Matter [BLM], Occupy, MeToo), the COVID-19 pandemic, and constitutionalism 4 (consider that eighty-five polities across the world refer to solidarity in key areas of their constitution, including Albania, Algeria, Angola, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Israel, Morocco, Romania, Spain, and the European Union [EU]). Third, the study of solidarity lies within the broader class of what we might call associational ethics – the ethics of life in associations and within social relationships that extend beyond relations among intimates. Other members of the class of associational ethics include the ethics of larger social and economic collectivities, such as corporations and social movements. This area has been much less studied than the ethics of family and friendship, on one hand, and the classical concerns of political justice such as the state, human rights, and international relations, on the other.

And yet the uses to which solidarity is put and the contexts in which it arises are so many and so various that many feel the concept to be hopelessly vague and amorphous. So vague is it, it is often said, that it ends up bleeding into other related notions – such as altruism, community, mutual concern, fellow-feeling, justice – and therefore quickly becoming indistinguishable from them. The temptation is to eliminate the term and use its clearer relatives instead. Another temptation is to proliferate the possible kinds of solidarity, each of which identifies a distinct concept of solidarity. 5 The existing literature often distinguishes, for example, between political, social, civic, and human uses of the term ‘solidarity’. Political solidarity – described as central to social movements such as socialism, feminism, and civil rights – is often referred to as oppositional and goal-directed in ways that social, civic, and human solidarity are not; 6 the social solidarity deployed in the solidarist writings of, for example, Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim, is taken to be primarily descriptive and sociological in contrast to the other, more normatively oriented concepts; 7 civic solidarity is depicted as primarily institutional and narrowly defined in terms of the welfare state; 8 and human solidarity – as, for example, deployed in the social teachings of the Catholic Church – covers the whole human race in ways that other usages do not. 9

This way of characterizing the field of meanings can be useful, depending on one's theoretical aims, but it obscures whether there is anything but a very loose and abstract concept that might unite them. What makes each of these an instance of solidarity? Is there a characterization of solidarity that can show each of these different usages to be a particular specification of an overarching concept that has enough content to be meaningful? Or are they merely tied together by very loose family resemblances? 10 Or, even more starkly, do they describe entirely different concepts that share only a string of letters (in the same way as [institutional] banks share the same string of letters as [river] banks, or [sporting] bats the same letters as [flying] bats)?

The aim of this essay is to elaborate a unified concept of solidarity that can comprehend each of these usages while having enough structure to make it normatively and empirically fruitful in a range of other contexts, too. I will argue that solidarity is best understood, not as an emotion or kind of fellow-feeling, but 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. Much of the account will be dedicated to unpacking each of these aspects. Throughout I will be building on, re-elaborating, extending, and revising some of the key insights that have emerged in the recent literature. So as not to distract from the main line of argument, I will compare, where relevant, recent treatments in the footnotes.

There are five reasons why setting out a general account of the nature, grounds, and value of solidarity is a worthwhile endeavor. First, there is unclarity in the literature regarding whether and to what extent solidarity is a normative and to what extent an empirical phenomenon. Is it more like justice (i.e., a normative concept) or more like the welfare state (i.e., a descriptive concept), or is it some hybrid of the two? (If the latter, what kind of ‘hybrid’?) Closely related, what might it mean to defend a particular (normative or descriptive) conception of solidarity against other possible conceptions? What is the appropriate scope of solidarity? And what are its grounds? Identifying the relation between a higher-level, more abstract concept of solidarity and more specific concepts and conceptions of solidarity will allow us to answer these questions, and, in the process, to make conceptual room for both empirical and normative study of solidarity while clearly distinguishing them.

Second, in section 3 (‘Grounds’), distinguishing between normative and descriptive uses of the term will also allow us to discuss the value of acting in solidarity simpliciter – a topic which has been addressed only sporadically in the literature on solidarity.

Third, delineating a general concept of solidarity will give us a formula for generating more specific concepts and conceptions of solidarity without worrying about whether they fit into one of the already enumerated categories (e.g., social, civil, political, human). Indeed, it will give us a framework for developing specific empirical and normative conceptions of solidarity for any context in which people act together to accomplish significant ends.

Fourth, one might wonder whether the exercise I will be engaged in throughout this essay will be merely ‘linguistic’. What's in a name? Is the aim to trace the definition of a word in the English language? 11 Or to provide an account of ordinary usage? And, if so, what's the point? The aim of this essay is not to capture the English definition of a word; I am not a lexicographer. Rather, my interest will be in the practice that gave birth to the term (especially in section 2, ‘History’) and that sustains it as a richly normative and evaluative social phenomenon. My aim, then, is to identify the concept that best captures what is fundamental, and valuable, about the practice. This marks a key difference. It is possible, for example, for the everyday English word as it is used today (and its associated concept or concepts) to fail in tracking the practice; it is also possible that the concept picked out by any one pattern of usage prevents us from seeing clearly what is valuable, distinctive, or normatively compelling about the practice. A useful analogy is to studies on the nature of law. 12 The point of such studies is not to uncover the meaning of the word ‘law’ in, say, the English language, but to provide an interpretive account of law as a practice. Doing so successfully requires attention to why the law is valuable, and why, and under what circumstances, something's being the law gives us reasons (and in some cases obligations) to follow it. The same thing goes, I argue, for solidarity.

I will delineate, in brief, a concept that can be fruitful in thinking more carefully about the social phenomenon and that can enter into both descriptive and normative inquiries. I will lay out, that is, an account that can be used both in describing and explaining the social world in which solidarity has figured (hence ‘nature’) and in evaluating and reforming it (hence ‘grounds’ and ‘value’). This is why tracing the history of solidarity (as we do in section 2) is so important. The history both provides a testing ground for the usefulness of the concept introduced and is important for understanding the political uses and possibilities of solidarity, including what makes it relevant to social and political life today. Understanding how and when the concept of solidarity emerged – including especially what solidarity emerged as a response to – will help us appreciate the centrality and distinctiveness of certain aspects of solidarity that we might not have appreciated before. 13

The account should therefore be assessed not according to whether it tracks our linguistic intuitions but according to whether it provides a useful tool for illuminating solidarity's history and the various contexts in which it has been used, for distinguishing it from related phenomena, and for making sense of what we find valuable and normatively compelling in solidarity. 14 In some cases (as I will indicate throughout), the account I defend is revisionary of current usage; in others, it tracks such usage more closely. I will also suggest not only a framework or set of tools for further discussion but when and why we should take ourselves to have good or genuine reasons to act in solidarity, and reason to believe that acting in solidarity is good in itself.

Fifth, and relatedly, if I am successful in showing that the overarching concept I propose is an accurate representation of the practice, and that it is distinct from related notions, then it lends plausibility to the idea that solidarity, or being in solidarity with others, is an important social form in its own right, sufficiently rich to add to our social ontology, alongside other, more basic social forms, such as institutions, social groups, and social structures.

1Nature

The first step in our account is to identify what kind of thing solidarity is. Is solidarity an emotion (like joy or anger)? A propositional attitude (like a desire or belief)? Does it name some kind of action or activity (like, say, dancing the tango) or institution (like the welfare state)? Let us begin with propositional attitudes. Propositional attitudes are mental states whose content is some proposition. This is why they are often (though not always) expressible by using a that-clause to indicate the proposition being related to (I desire that [we go to dinner together]; I believe that [the sun will rise].) But solidarity is not a mental state with some object expressed by a proposition. Solidarity is, as we will see, a type of action constituted by a relation among persons. The relations, furthermore, are identified non-comparatively. If I am taller than you, I possess a non-relational property, vertical extension, to a greater extent than you do. ‘Taller than’ is therefore only comparatively relational. If I am to the left of you, by contrast, then I do not share some non-relational property to a greater extent than you. While being to the left of depends on non-relational spatiotemporal properties, it is not defined in terms of the possession of those properties to a greater extent than someone else. ‘Being to the left of’, like ‘being your uncle’, is therefore a non-comparative relation. ‘Being in solidarity with’ is relational in this non-comparative sense: it is not defined in terms of the equal or greater (lesser) possession of a further, underlying non-relational property. It is also an essentially social, interpersonal relation, constituted, as we will see, by a characteristic set of other-regarding attitudes, behaviors, norms, and dispositions.

It is also not an institution. Rather, institutions might be the product of solidarity or expressions of it; however, it would be a mistake to say that solidarity simply is an institution. There are no conventional rules or norms establishing roles and positions in an institution called ‘solidarity’ (except in derivative senses, such as the French Second Republic parliamentary grouping named ‘Solidarité Républicaine’).

It bears perhaps the most similarity to a sentiment or emotion, but unlike emotions (such as anger) it is not marked by a corresponding, typical, and often automatic somatic response, and it does not function as a direct reflection or response to an object (e.g., fear as a direct response to the wolf's ferocity; grief as a direct response to the loss of one's friend). While of course a shared identity, or experience of injustice, might be, for example, a reason to act in solidarity, solidarity is not best characterized as itself a somatically marked, typical, and automatic response to sharing an identity, or an experience. Of course, this is not to deny that acting in solidarity with others is often accompanied and underpinned by typical emotions or sentiments of fellow-feeling or community. But it is hasty to conclude that solidarity is best understood as simply naming the feeling itself. One could act in solidarity with others and feel a wide array of emotions; the fact of solidarity would not come and go as the emotions change. 15

Solidarity is, rather, best understood as a special kind of joint action constituted by a characteristic profile of interpersonal attitudes, norms, dispositions, and behaviors triggered by one's identification with another on the basis of a role, cause, way of life, condition, or set of experiences. 16 In elaborating this proposal, I will discuss the two components of this account in the following order: identification first, and then joint action. These components together define the core or paradigm concept of solidarity; there are also, as we will see, instances of solidarity that share most but not all of the features of the core. The account I will provide will help us to identify why they are borderline or penumbral cases rather than paradigmatic ones.

1.1Identification

It is often said that my identification with you as a woman or as a worker or as an African-American or as a French citizen or as an antifascist can provide me a reason, or even an obligation, to act in solidarity with you. 17 There are two questions to be answered. The first asks: What does it mean to identify with another in each of those ways? What are the relevant forms that identification takes? The second asks: Why and under what circumstances does identification give rise to genuine reasons to act in solidarity with others? Why does that appeal to what we share have normative force? In this section, I answer the former. I answer the latter in section 3.

One can identify as and one can identify with. 18 I might identify, for example, as a Norwegian. This means that I take myself to belong to a socially salient group; I will recognize that this will often affect my social interactions with others, both in the way that I present myself and in the way others perceive me. I might not, however, feel any particular attachment to that identity, or take it as in any way important to my self-conception. If I identify with my Norwegian nationality, then I do take it as important to my self-conception; I take membership to be meaningful; I feel attachment to my identity as Norwegian; I feel normative pressure to conform to the norms, attitudes, behaviors that typically define being Norwegian.

Identifying with another person takes a similar but importantly different form. One can identify with another person as such or on the basis of a role, a cause, a condition, a way of life, or a set of experiences. When I identify with someone (or, indeed, with a character in a novel), I identify with his life as he lives it. I enter his perspective; I imagine the world through his eyes. 19 Identification with a person (like identification with a social identity) also has affective and normative dimensions. Affectively, I am drawn into his world; I am attracted by it. While I may be ashamed or disapproving of my attraction, I am attracted nonetheless; identification is never repulsive tout court. At the same time, I resonate with his attitudes and emotions. When he is consumed with contempt, I become hateful and want to take revenge on his oppressor; when he rejoices in his freedom, I am unbound. Normatively, I take his perspective as describing an ideal to which I want to conform. I align myself with his standards and expectations, his goals and projects; I make them mine; I see things the same way he does; I am changed by the way I see him in me, and judge my own actions from his perspective. 20 As Richard Wollheim puts it:

In effect what we do when we identify with another is that we write a part for ourselves, based upon the other, in the hope that, when we act it to ourselves, we shall be carried away by the performance. 21

When I identify with another, my imagining and sympathizing with their life is not just a way of learning about them but a way of modifying or transforming myself in the process.

Identification with a person as such is identification with a particular: it is an attitude de re. But I can also identify with someone on the basis of something else. I might identify with you as a teacher (role) or with you as a climate change activist (cause) or with you as a mortal (condition) or with you as a Christian (way of life), or with you as a cancer survivor (set of experiences). This kind of identification is not identification with a particular: I might not even know you personally. The attitude is de dicto: I identify with you on the basis of an indefinite description that we both satisfy, that defines a socially salient group, and that significantly structures our self-conception. Identifying with a person in this way also involves epistemic, affective, and normative elements. Epistemically, when I identify as a member of the relevant group, I seek understanding of the norms, attitudes, and behaviors that define the group. This understanding becomes interpersonal – a way of knowing how others see themselves and present themselves to others – when I come to know that you are also a member of the group. As a teacher, I know what it is like to be a teacher; I understand the challenges you face and the joys you experience. Affectively, when I identify with you, I feel both empathy and sympathy with your situation as a teacher, Christian, and so on; I am moved by and concerned with the challenges you face as a teacher, Christian, and so on. My understanding is acquired not just through knowledge of a series of true propositions about you, but via the ability to see the world through your eyes and be drawn, emotionally, into your perspective. 22

Normatively, identifying with you in virtue of some cause, role, and so on has two components. First, I take your situation as giving rise to a set of normative expectations. When I identify with you as a Christian, for example, I have a structured set of beliefs about how Christians ought to behave, as Christians, in different kinds of situations. My identification is, in part, grounded in the sense that we share a normative perspective on the world governed by our special situation. There is a pressure, then, to seek a common view of the standards, norms, and expectations that govern our particular situation, or, alternatively, to bring our disagreements into the foreground, and make their characteristic shape and form definitive of who we are. Second, the flourishing of the group that forms the basis of our identification now forms a part of my individual flourishing. When the group succeeds or does well, I feel proud; when it fails, I feel shame or disappointment. 23

The normative element of identification may not be readily apparent. We can clarify it by comparing it to identification with a cause, condition, way of life, or experience directly (rather than with a person on the basis of sharing one or more items on the list). When I identify with a cause, for example, I make the cause mine. I am committed to it and conceive of it as an important element of my practical identity, and hence an important element of my life (and hence my flourishing). Pursuit of the cause organizes my reflection and deliberation, and shapes the decisions I make. It gives my life direction. 24 I align my will with it on the basis of the values and aims it seeks to realize. The same thing is true of identifying with a role. The role is structured by a set of expectations, standards, and norms that are essential to it. When I identify with the role, I take those expectations, standards, and norms as important guiding commitments in my own life – commitments that I do not merely comply with but endorse and affirm. Similar things can be said with respect to a way of life, but also with respect to identifying with a condition or experience. When I identify as a cancer survivor, I take ‘being a cancer survivor’ as bringing with it a series of expectations, standards, and norms that partially define who I am. When I identify with my mortality, or with, say, my disability, I embrace it. That does not mean I welcome it or seek it out, but it does mean that I am not ashamed by it, or denying it, or seeking to resign myself to it. I take it as part of who I am, as something which ought to structure my life and give it direction. I can even, as we will see later, identify with my condition as oppressed, even as I fight to end it.

Note that identification with a cause, way of life, and so on is therefore not the same as desiring something for its own sake. I might desire, for example, the joy of basking in the sun for its own sake, but this does not make that activity something I identify with. It does not, after all, guide my life as an enduring project or commitment. I have no ongoing emotional investment in it. And it does not structure my perspective on the world. It is also not the same as believing a cause, way of life, and so on, to be worthwhile. I might, for example, believe medicine to be a valuable pursuit, and hence worthy of identification, but not myself be invested in it in that way. 25 Indeed, identification, as we have seen, need not (although it usually does) come with the judgment that the cause, way of life, and so on, is worthy of pursuit in its own right. I can identify with my condition as oppressed, but not believe that oppression is something anyone has reason to pursue in its own right and for its own sake. While identification does require that I embrace, rather than deny, my condition as oppressed – to see it as having significant affective, normative, and epistemic bearing on my life – it does not require that I promote it.

The normative structure of identifying directly with a cause, way of life, condition, or set of experiences helps us to make sense of the normative element of identification with another person on the basis of one or more of those items. When I identify with you as a cancer survivor (experiences), or as a Christian (way of life), or as a mortal (condition) or as a teacher (role), or as an activist (cause), I take us as both identifying with each of these phenomena directly, and thus as seeking to structure our lives in important ways in relation to them. Furthermore, I desire that the group defined by our shared way of life, condition, and so on, does well, since my own interests are bound up with it. I also aim to come to a more unified and comprehensive view about what our (direct) identification with the cause, role, experience, condition, or way of life requires of us and what its meaning should be in our lives. Even if we come to accept that it has a different meaning to each one of us, we take the differences themselves to define the larger and more comprehensive perspective that the cause, role, experience, condition, or way of life gives us; the differences and disagreements, in part, define what it means to be, say, a teacher or environmental activist. Note that, unlike identification de re, this mutual role-taking and role-adjustment can take place without knowing personally the others aligned with the cause, role, experience, or condition; we can gain access to different perspectives in a much more mediated way, including through articles, literature, art, narratives, second-hand reports, and so on.

It may seem that identification and solidarity are one and the same. If I identify with you in any of the ways that I have just described, then isn't this just to say that I am in solidarity with you? No. This is clearest with respect to identification with a person as such. We can, after all, be in solidarity with strangers. We do not need the intimate knowledge of another's life that identification in the de re sense requires. But it is also true of identification with another person in the de dicto sense. As we will see, to say that I identify with you as a cancer survivor and that I am in solidarity with you as a cancer survivor are two different things. To be in solidarity is, as we will see below, to act in solidarity. But identification can provide a reason to act in solidarity with you. Indeed, I will argue below that one or more of the forms of identification I just outlined are paradigmatic grounds for acting in solidarity with others.

1.2Joint action

So far I have elaborated an account of identification and suggested that identification is not the same as solidarity; rather, we should think of it as providing a paradigmatic ground of solidarity. Understood in this way, identification is a core component of solidarity without being identical with it. I have not yet provided an argument for any of these claims. At this stage, we are merely articulating the components of the theory. The support for these claims comes later, when we contrast the account of solidarity with other, related notions, show the work that it can do in distinguishing and clarifying normative and empirical uses (including a critical assessment of reasons for acting in solidarity), explore its value, and place it in a historical context. The argument for the account, that is, emerges by showing its theoretical and practical role in elucidating the range and scope of its characteristic features, as they emerge in social and political practices, both past and present. Here, we lay out the way in which solidarity is a form of joint action.

Acting in solidarity has the following features. 26 We act in solidarity when, as a result of mutually identifying with one another on the basis of a role, cause, condition, set of experiences, or way of life,

  1. we each intend to do our part in overcoming some significant adversity, X, by pursuing, together, some more proximate shared goal, Y;
  2. we are each individually committed (a) to X and Y and (b) to not bypassing each other's will in the achievement of X and Y; 27
  3. we are committed to sharing one another's fates in ways relevant to X and Y;
  4. we trust each other to play their part in X and Y, trust each other's commitment, trust that we will not bypass each other's will, and trust each other to share one another's fate.

(1) is intended to be compatible with a variety of theories of shared intentional activity; the important idea is that our action must be a form of acting together in order for it to count as acting in solidarity. 28 John Gardner provides a useful example (drawn from a novel by Ian McEwan) to make the distinction between mutually responsive, coordinated activity and truly joint activity. 29 Imagine that there are two people holding a balloon down by separate ropes in order to save an infant from flying up into a windy sky. Their each holding down the rope is required to save the baby. If only one were to hold it down, it would not be sufficient to keep the balloon down. In one description, let us imagine that each individual treats the other as if they were an aspect of the background circumstances to which they must adjust. While they have expectations regarding what the other will do, which will inform what they do in trying to save the baby, they do not, however, ever ‘transform’ the unit of agency in which their goal is encompassed. 30 Person A aims to save the baby, and so does Person B. But their goal is only held in common. It is not shared. There is no ‘we’-perspective that rationalizes their individual actions; while they each act in ways responsive to the other, they do not act together as a ‘we’. Accounts of collective agency aim to explain what is required in the attitudes and modes of reasoning of each to make their action truly joint, truly an instance of a ‘we’ that is more than a sum of ‘I's’. My account of solidarity is meant to be ecumenical between them. 31

Another example is useful in drawing the distinction between merely coordinated activity and truly joint activity. In the wake of a train crash, everyone's rushing to the exits while coordinating on the way – for example, by avoiding tripping on each other – is not a joint action and (therefore) not a form of solidarity. While they are aware of each other's intentions, are prepared to coordinate their actions, and are each aiming to avoid death by getting out of the train, they do not share the goal that everyone (or some proper subset of individuals) get out of the train. There is no overlap in the satisfaction conditions – in the token activities or outcomes required to satisfy our goal – involved in any person's getting out: my getting out is not required to satisfy anyone else's plan to get out, and everyone else's getting out is not required for my plan to get out. If, on the other hand, those involved in the train wreck had each intended to do their part in the joint activity of everyone's getting out (or in some proper subset getting out), and if each of the other conditions (2)–(4) had been satisfied (along with an identification with others on the basis of our predicament), then it would have been an instance of acting in solidarity.

For us to share some more proximate goal, Y, required to overcome some significant adversity, X, how much agreement must there be in satisfaction conditions? There must be some overlap, but this overlap need not be extensive. This allows for solidary groups to be very loosely connected. 32 For example, if you and I both intend to do our part in overcoming current and past vestiges of racial oppression through public forms of resistance (and [2]–[4] are also satisfied), but your aim in publicly resisting government policy is to form a separate Black nation in Sub-Saharan Africa whereas my aim in publicly resisting is to pave the way to successful integration in broader American society, then there can be (let us assume) many token outcomes and/or activities that we agree would count as satisfying our more proximate goals (such as preventing the government from passing policies that undermine educational opportunity in the Black community, or that increase rates of incarceration). These more proximate goals, in turn, rationalize our cooperation in the here and now despite the fact that we have very different ideas about what the final ends of our action are. 33 If, on the other hand, we have completely non-overlapping ideas about what would count as successful forms of public resistance, then we cannot act in solidarity because we cannot be said to share a goal in the relevant sense.

Similarly, if we realize that our preferred forms of public resistance sometimes work at cross-purposes, end up undermining the pursuit of our ultimate ends, and we do nothing to coordinate so as to stop this from happening, then we are not acting in solidarity. Solidarity requires joint action, and joint action requires, at the very least, coordination based on shared intentions. But we can still act in solidarity in the case in which we each pursue our preferred courses of action despite our knowledge that our public resistance would do even better if we united forces. This will be the case if some of us believe that there are other, overriding reasons (for example, of pride or community) to pursue, say, an emigration-based policy even if our public resistance would be more effective by uniting to further an integrationist legislative agenda. As long as we are not actively undermining our shared proximate goals or each other, there is no need to sacrifice our other, non-convergent goals for the maximal realization of the proximate goals. Consider, by contrast, forms of collective irrationality. Were we, as fishermen, each committed to preventing progressive poisoning of the lake that provides our catch, yet make no effort to coordinate our individual subplans (because we continue to garner temporary profit from individual exploitation of the lake's resources), then we cannot be said to be acting either together or, a fortiori, in solidarity.

To explore the amount of overlap required for solidarity, it is useful to pause and reflect on what have been called, in the social movement literature, the ‘new social movements’ (e.g., BLM, Occupy). 34 BLM is a grassroots movement with local chapters and no (officially recognized 35 ) centralized leadership (although the founders play a prominent role in advocacy and coordination). It was formed, first as a hashtag, in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman (who was charged with second degree murder and manslaughter for the killing of Trayvon Martin). It then coalesced in as a movement in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. While its main aim, in this early period, was to rally against anti-Black police violence in the US, its agenda has expanded to include a wide range of issues in anti-racist politics. It is now, furthermore, global in reach, with local chapters in Australia, the UK, Denmark, and Japan, among others. Are the different chapters involved in the movement acting in solidarity with one another? Can they, for example, be understood to be acting jointly to overcome anti-Black racism? What would it take for us to say they are not acting in solidarity? The case of BLM Denmark seems straightforward. BLM Denmark is organized to fight for the rights of asylum-seekers and irregular migrants (the majority of whom are non-White) detained on Danish soil. 36 It is not, therefore, centered on fighting anti-Black police violence in the usual sense, let alone US police violence. And yet it seems clear that its intentions are sufficiently interlaced with US BLM movements to say that it is acting in solidarity. Both movements are, at their root, founded on a recognition of the global, interlocking, and interconnected nature of racist social structures, which have a long, interwoven history (think, for example, of the slave trade and European nineteenth-century colonialism, and its implications for more recent patterns of migration and immigration both into and from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe). 37 Both movements see themselves as involved, together, in a fight against such structures, and are prepared to support one another in doing so. When BLM Denmark takes its stand against refugee policy in Denmark, it understands itself as doing its part in a truly joint, transnational activity with BLM chapters in the US. It is evident that similar things are true with respect to all other international BLM chapters.

But are there harder cases where things aren't as clear? Consider the BLM10. In 2020, they severed ties with the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN), which is sometimes seen as the standard-bearer for the movement as a whole. They do not dissent from the broader goals of the movement. Rather, their grievance is with the transparency, accountability, and remoteness of the larger organization. In a public letter signed in December 2020, they expressed their concerns, among other things, over the lack of transparency regarding how much money the organization had raised, and the procedures for deciding to whom the funds should go. 38 They also believe that the increasingly centralized character of the umbrella organization has undermined the grassroots, decentralized nature of the movement. When the BLM10 organize local protests and activism against, say, police violence, are they acting in solidarity with BLMGN? It depends. As long as they are not actively and intentionally undermining BLMGN's activism, and as long as they would be prepared, when the chips were down, to support BLMGN (for example, were it to be attacked in the press by, say, an advocate of All Lives Matter), and as long as they each conceive of themselves as doing their part in the joint activity of overcoming racism, then, despite the disagreement, they can still be understood as acting together in solidarity in the pursuit of an anti-racist agenda. Solidarity, after all, does not preclude even profound disagreement (on which more below). But if their break from the larger movement also means that they are abandoning any attempt to coordinate their activity, or any sense in which they are working together in the name of a common purpose, or any support for the work that BLMGN does as an organization, then they are no longer acting in solidarity.

Note further that an action being joint is, however, not sufficient for solidarity. Dancing the tango is a joint action but it is not (in usual cases) an instance of solidarity. Solidarity must involve significant adversity: acting in solidarity always involves overcoming weighty obstacles. 39 Moreover, in addition to not bypassing the will of other solidaries by, for example, coercing or deceiving them, (2) requires commitment, by which I mean that parties have a reflectively endorsed disposition to set aside self-interest (narrowly understood) in jointly overcoming significant adversity. This condition excludes cases where parties act together – say a group of thieves – but only out of self-interest narrowly understood, or only because they have been forced to do so via threats. 40 Acting in solidarity must therefore be a form of what Bratman calls shared cooperative activity. 41 Commitments, furthermore, are robust: unlike intentions such as closing the door or waving to someone, they are not fleeting. They set our agency on course to achieve a goal; they are resistant to temptation. 42

(3), furthermore, requires a commitment to ‘share one another's fate’. Using the previous example, if the train crash survivors are not prepared to share each other's fate by exposing themselves to significant risks to help others, but are prepared to act together, then the action might still count as joint even if not solidaristic. To share another's fate is, that is, to be prepared either to tie one's fate to another's or to take on another's ill fortune as if it were one's own. 43 Examples of the former include the international chapters of the BLM movement. But they also include the Iranian woman who, in a protest, was the second (and third, and fourth …) to take off her hijab in a public square, stand up on a telecoms box, and wave it aloft on a stick. 44 Here it is as if she were saying: ‘If you punish the first woman, you must punish me, too.’ The fate of each woman now depends on the fate of the other. An example of the latter is the London marathoner who slowed down to help another struggling athlete across the finish line. 45 Here the first marathoner, in helping the second and hence giving up his own hopes of doing well, takes on the other's ill fortune as if it were his own. 46 In both cases, the participants thereby come to share an intention – to cross the line, to protest the injustice. If they are also committed to act via each other's will and trust one another to fulfill each of these conditions, then we can say they are acting in solidarity.

(4) requires participants merely to trust, without knowing or even believing, that others will do their part, will be committed in the various ways identified, and will share our fate. 47 Trust is reliance plus a distinctive practical stance toward others’ actions and attitudes. Reliance only requires taking, in Strawson's terms, an objectivating stance toward an object. I can rely on the key to open the door just as I, the thief, can rely on the old man to leave his house every day at six. In both cases, if the key doesn't open the door, or the man doesn't leave his house, I can at most feel anger; resentment or a feeling of betrayal is entirely inappropriate. 48 Trust is different. When I trust that you will show up at ten tomorrow, I rely on you to do so, but I will also feel let down if you fail to turn up. Trust comes with a complex web of normatively grounded expectations and reactive attitudes. And so it is with solidarity. When I trust that you will do your part and are committed to sharing my fate, I do not merely rely on these things. I will also feel let down, betrayed, if you do not do your part (without good reason), if you are not committed to sharing my fate, if you are not committed to our cause, and so on. I am engaged with you and your actions as a participant in our joint struggle rather than merely as an observer trying to take into account what you will do. But notice also that trust, as a form of reliance, doesn't require belief, let alone knowledge, that you will do your part, be committed, or share my fate. I can decide to rely on the rope – given my lack of alternatives – even if I am not so sure it will hold me. 49 Similarly, I can trust my fellow solidaries to do their part, even if I am not so sure they will carry through – if, for example, our common action is very dangerous and there is a good chance that they will abandon both me and the cause when the going gets tough.

The commitment to share others’ fates is also a feature of other complex attitudes and associated motivational states. But the way it functions in solidarity is distinct. To see how, it is worth comparing the way the commitment to share another's fate functions in love. There are two relevant differences. First, the lover has a broad and encompassing concern for the beloved's welfare. They take a full view of it and are therefore committed to sharing in the other's fate across the whole range of their life. The solidarist is permitted to take a narrower view of things: they can be committed to sharing the other's fate in what will often be deep and demanding ways, but that sacrifice can be focused on the other's fate only insofar as it bears on jointly overcoming significant adversity. I may, for example, risk life and limb for those participating in the protest as we challenge the oppressors, but I need not take, merely qua solidary, any particular view or make any particular sacrifice with respect to their attempts to reconcile with their distanced children.

The second difference with love is perhaps even more important. The lover, we say, doesn't just love the beloved as the bearer of some number of valued qualities, attributes, or even general properties. While of course we love our beloved in part because of their qualities, we do not love them only as the bearer of those qualities. Put another way, we love the person themselves rather than their qualities. If a twin showed up who bore the qualities to exactly the same extent and in exactly the same way as our beloved, we would not remain, like Buridan's ass, indifferent between them. Love is a de re attitude. 50 Therefore, when we share another's fate because we love them, we do so because of them rather than because they happen to be picked out by a definite description (‘the woman who is intelligent, impetuous, mischievous, …’).

When we act in solidarity with others and are committed to sharing their fate, this kind of de re attachment is not required. In most cases, we are committed to sharing another's fate not because of her, as it were, in particular, but because she is ‘one of us’, because she counts, that is, as someone who fits the indefinite description identifying the relevant social group. For example, we can be committed to sharing her fate because she is a worker (identification based on condition) or because she is a fully participating member of the societal division of labor (identification based on role) or because she is a member of Extinction Rebellion (identification based on cause) or because she is a fellow national (identification based on way of life) or because she suffers because of and with me as a child of God (identification based on set of experiences). This also explains why it is permissible to be committed to sharing her fate only in ways that are related to jointly overcoming significant adversity (by overthrowing capitalism, protecting the nation, alleviating suffering, and so on). Unlike in love, our commitment to sharing another's fate is therefore (most often) de dicto rather than de re. Our commitment need only be impersonal and general, rather than personal and particular.

This is not to say that there cannot be solidarity grounded on identification de re. Some of the most profound forms of solidarity are found between lovers, friends, and family, who are prepared to sacrifice in innumerable ways in overcoming significant forms of adversity together. But such deep forms of attachment are not necessary; it is sufficient for solidarity to be grounded in forms of identification that are merely de dicto. 51

This account of the relation between love and solidarity also allows us to highlight the special sense that solidarity embodies a form of equality among participants. As we have seen, solidarity requires a commitment to sharing one another's fate in ways relevant to our overcoming adversity. We can go further: When we act in solidarity with one another, we take the ground of our solidarity as structuring each of our lives in important ways. This pushes us, as I mentioned above, to seek common understandings – and recognition of common differences among us – regarding what being a worker, being a woman, being a citizen, and so on, ought to mean for us. It also leads us into common action against adversity, in which we are prepared to share one another's fate. When we deliberate and act together, deference and servility is considered inappropriate. When we interact, what matters is that we are workers, not that you are an engineer and I am a factory worker; what matters is that we are fellow nationals, not that I am a poet and you are a banker; what matters is that we are reciprocally dependent on the societal division of labor, not that I am a doctor and you are a janitor; what matters is that we are cancer survivors, not that you are Black and I am White; what matters is that we are members of Extinction Rebellion, not that you are South African and I am Chinese. Societally accepted distinctions in rank or esteem or privilege among us are exposed as arbitrary; it would be a form of disrespect to fellow solidaries to take them as relevant. This may take work; it may be all too easy for familiar patterns of hierarchy to reassert themselves in our common action. But solidarity requires us to resist them. 52 This will have, then, important implications for how we are to conceive of the demands of solidarity: we ought, in our joint action, to conceive of any hierarchy between us as merely an instrument for pursuing our goal, and to be judged on that basis, rather than as reflecting some independent criterion of social status, rank, privilege, or esteem. 53

It is important to note that the egalitarian structure of solidarity need not deny intersectionality. When we focus on what unites, rather than what divides us, this could be mere commitment to a cause; it need not bring any sense of our essential identity as, say, women. And even if given instances of solidarity among women – continuing with the example – do emphasize what brings women together as addressees of particular forms of oppression, this can be against a background of a deep and genuine recognition that the structure of this oppression will be inflected differently according to one's other identities and commitments (for more on this point, see section 3).

1.3Distinguishing empirical from normative uses

We are now in a position to distinguish empirical from normative concepts of solidarity, on one hand, and concepts and conceptions of solidarity, on the other. So far, the concept of solidarity I have outlined is purely descriptive. 54 As long as the profile of commitments, intentions, and other attitudes I have outlined is satisfied, even members of the Mafia or a terrorist cell can be acting in solidarity. Solidarity can, that is, exist among groups that we believe should not exist because they pursue immoral ends. The concept of solidarity outlined can therefore serve as a basis for empirical study of whether and what kind of solidarity exists among members of any group.

It is at this point that we can introduce a further nuance. 55 Several components of my schema are best understood as variables that range over different kinds of significant adversity, ways of sharing others’ fate, and types of identification (I leave it open whether other components of the schema – say, commitment to overcoming adversity, or trust – are best understood as variables or left as constants). 56 This opens the possibility of defending more specific concepts of solidarity – each of which fixes the values of each of these variables in different ways. For example, an empirical study of nationalist solidarity might assign way of life to the variable identification, combatting the oppressors/preserving the nation by public resistance/language policy to the variable significant adversity, obligations of mutual aid and support to the variable sharing others’ fate, and so on. With such a more specific concept of solidarity in hand, the researcher could then verify whether and to what extent solidarity exists among members of a given nation. A study of socialist solidarity in the workers’ movement would, of course, proceed very differently, assigning different values to each variable. In this way, we can also generate novel concepts for new contexts of collective action (as we will do when we consider the five main traditions in which solidarity has developed as a key concept).

This structure can also explain the possibility of more local disagreements 57 among different interpretations of the general concept for a specific group or set of similar groups. In a study of French nationalism, for example, two empirical researchers might disagree regarding whether way of life is in fact the basis of French national solidarity, or whether, say, shared participation in national institutions (and hence identification based on role) provides a better characterization. Here the disagreement might be explained as a response to the fact that both researchers are, let us assume, aiming to capture the specific character of French national solidarity. The overarching concept of solidarity can provide additional structure to their disagreement; it can, for example, aid them in specifying exactly which variable or set of variables is the focus of their disagreement. If there is substantive disagreement over specifications of two different concepts to be used in empirical study of a particular case, then we say that researchers have two different (empirical) conceptions of solidarity for that group. 58 If the two are non-competing, then we say that they are simply using two (non-competing) concepts of solidarity. In the latter case, there would be no point to the disagreement, as might be the case if one researcher were testing an empirical hypothesis about the relationship between solidarity and levels of support for the welfare state, and France was only one case among many, whereas the other was a historian aiming to explore the changing character of French national solidarity over time. The disagreement becomes substantive and meaningful, that is, only in light of the theoretical aims of the researchers, the object of study, and with respect to one or more of the variables isolated in the overarching formula defining the concept. Note that this leaves open the possibility that two researchers in a dispute might not really be disagreeing even though they believe they are; what matters is whether their theoretical aims and object of study really do only leave space for at most one of the concepts in dispute.

The account also gives structure to the development of normative accounts of solidarity. Note that the main variables mentioned in the formula for the overarching concept of solidarity refer to operative reasons. 59 Fellow solidaries take themselves to have reasons, grounded in identification, to join together to overcome significant adversity; they also take themselves to have reasons to be committed to the cause, not to bypass each other's will, to share one another's fates, and to trust one another. A normative account of solidarity for a given group or set of groups seeks to identify when actors really do have reasons grounded in identification to join together, really do have reasons to be committed, to trust, to share one another's fate, and so on. A normative conception of solidarity for the EU, for example, would aim to specify what kind of identification (if any) gives EU citizens and residents reasons to join together to accomplish various ends, what kinds of reasons (or perhaps obligations) citizens and residents have to share one another's fates in the accomplishment of those ends, what reasons people have to trust one another, what level of commitment is required, and so on. The overarching concept of solidarity provides a framework for articulating such a normative account, and helps to identify possible sources of disagreement, and to diagnose when disagreement is merely verbal or otherwise illusory.

The distinction between concepts and conceptions can do the same work as it did when we were comparing different empirical accounts of solidarity. 60 Suppose that two political theorists are developing accounts of solidarity for the EU, but one is looking at what solidarity requires in the area of external policy and the other in the area of economic and monetary union. While there will undoubtedly be overlap in the values they assign to each variable in the general definition of solidarity, it is unlikely that there will be real disagreement, given the different focus of each account. Here it would be appropriate, therefore, to speak of two different, non-competing (normative) concepts of solidarity. It would be otherwise if it were two theorists developing accounts of solidarity for the same context, say, solidarity in refugee and asylum policy. In this case, assuming disagreement regarding the specification of one or more of the variables, we would speak of a divergence in conceptions of solidarity. Should one argue, for example, that member states must share each other's fate by accepting a fair allocation of refugees because they share a Christian way of life, and the other because they each identify with their role in reproducing common institutions, they would be disagreeing substantively regarding the variable, reasons arising from mutual identification but not necessarily sharing others’ fates or overcoming significant adversity. Similar things, of course, could be said for normative accounts of solidarity that seek to specify the obligations of workers to participate in strikes, or men to participate in the feminist movement, or citizens and residents to come to each other's aid in the wake of a natural disaster.

In section 3, I will develop a normative conception of identification, in each of its guises, as a basis for solidarity; this will, among other things, allow us to put the distinction between empirical and normative conceptions into use. But, before we do so, I will seek to employ the general account to make sense of solidarity's history. This is important since, as I mentioned in the introduction, the historical, political, and social uses of solidarity have formed the concept into a practice – a lived system of norms, rules, and expectations that gives rise to new self-understandings, new concepts, and new possibilities for collective action and social relation within complex, modern societies.

2History

I ended the previous section by saying that our twofold concept of solidarity – identification plus a special, more demanding form of committed joint action – can aid us in making sense of solidarity's history. But what do I intend by making sense? The uses and meanings of solidarity throughout its history are multiple and varied. As I mentioned in the introduction, so varied are they that many often wonder whether there is anything distinctive or worth preserving in the term, or whether it can simply be reduced to some other notion, such as sympathy, charity, support, justice, or fellow-feeling. Others worry that it is merely an empty bit of rhetoric piped in to give a noble caste to one's political or social program. This is too hasty. While the history of the term and its corresponding practices are rich in diversity and heterogeneity, there is also, I want to claim, an underlying unity that explains why the term and the practices it drives, are so resilient; why, that is, they resonate with us as both distinctive and normatively compelling. The aim of the present section, then, is to capture that underlying unity while also giving the tools to allow for variation across time. If the account is successful, it should strengthen our confidence that solidarity is the normatively rich, descriptively powerful, and politically salient practice that many today take it to be. In this section, we focus on the term's historical uses; and in the final two, on its normative ones.

There is also another reason to explore the history of the concept. As I mentioned in the introduction, it could be that current usage fails to track both the underlying phenomenon and what is valuable and normatively compelling about the practice. It could also be that current usage, under the warm hue cast by the term, has incorporated related notions that do not fit well under its rubric. By excavating the original concept and its role during its emergence and early development, we will be able to reflect more clearly on whether we should treat the new usages as suggesting a new and revised concept that we should adopt, or whether they muddy the phenomena that make solidarity into the valuable social kind it was and continues to be.

In brief, I will argue that solidarity names an egalitarian, mutualistic, and cooperative practice among strangers, whose aim is to overcome significant forms of adversity in an era when traditional social ties – of, for example, kinship, guild, and church – have weakened. Solidarity is, as we have already seen, omnilateral and symmetrical as well as transformative and critical. Even in the context of the welfare state, solidarity requires a recognition that collective action is necessary to overcome adversity. Solidarity always aims, that is, to change the order of things. 61 If we run together various forms of humanitarianism and charity with solidarity, it becomes easy to miss the distinctive normative character of our guiding notion.

Solidarity is, furthermore, a peculiarly modern concern. 62 While one can trace the term to its roots in Roman law – where an obligation in solidum was a joint contractual obligation in which each signatory declared himself liable for the debts of all together – its use as a term denoting a type of broadly social (rather than narrowly legal) relation becomes prevalent only in Europe – and especially in France – during the early nineteenth century. 63 Why then? As any cursory glance at the major early texts (e.g., Saint-Simon, Fourier, Renaud, Leroux, Comte) would reveal, the language of solidarity emerges as a response to growing anxiety regarding the expansion of commercial society, large-scale industry, and the perceived collapse of traditional communities. 64 From this perspective, it is no surprise that language of solidarity emerges in France, where the upheavals of the Revolution and its aftermath had first placed the ideal of republican fraternité firmly on the map. If societies are to hold together in the presence of emerging class conflict and the centrifugal, individualistic pull of markets, then something must replace the old ties of rank, guild, family, and traditional religious practice. 65 That something was thought to require a social bond between strangers, a form of identification strong enough to give individuals the sense of being connected to a larger whole on which they depend, and which in turn disposes each to share in the good and bad fate of all the rest. For this early French context, I will focus on Léon Bourgeois – where the term becomes a basis for an entire political program – and Émile Durkheim – where the term ‘solidarity’ becomes a central category of his sociology.

Earlier calls to solidarity – in ‘mutual aid’ societies, the first industrial strikes, myriad pamphlets, and the early socialists and sociologists – were synthesized and given a more systematic cast with the emergence of ‘solidarism’, the movement that gave the early French Third Republic its ‘official philosophy’. 66 In 1896, Léon Bourgeois – prime minister of France from 1895 to 1896 – published what would become the programmatic manifesto of the movement in a pamphlet entitled Solidarité. 67 Steering a course between the laisser-faire, individualist ‘economism’ of Herbert Spencer and the oppositional, revolutionary politics of socialism, Bourgeois invoked solidarity to characterize the bond that ought to tie together all citizens of a modern industrial republic. Bourgeois begins his pamphlet with the unity that characterizes more sophisticated organisms in nature. Every such organism has specialized parts – each performing different but complementary functions – that work together to maintain and reproduce life. The more differentiated the parts, the more complex the system that unites them, and hence the ‘higher’ they are in the order of nature. Bourgeois calls the bonds that make the separate parts in any organism into a unified system natural solidarity.

But, Bourgeois continues, the reciprocal, specialized dependence implicit in the natural division of labor also exists, in a different form, in the life of all modern societies. There are two essential differences. The first difference is that societies are made up of individuals possessed of reason and will, and so the laws of nature are not sufficient to ensure that the parts will coordinate to sustain and reproduce the life of the whole. The second difference follows directly from the first. Because the coordination necessary to maintain and reproduce a society depends on the reason and will of individuals, the laws that govern that reproduction must also work via those very same faculties. The laws governing social solidarity are, therefore, necessarily moral.

What mores ought to govern the division of labor understood in its widest sense as the division of roles in any society, and so, ultimately, the distribution of the benefits and burdens of joint production (la répartition des profits et des charges)? Bourgeois writes that we must look for an answer, not at human beings as isolated monads (as the laisser-faire economists do), but at the moral implications of the very reciprocal dependence that constitutes society in the first place. Once we do so, we will see that every individual within the societal division of labor owes the vast preponderance of what they are able to obtain from that society – for example, through their talents and abilities, or through the knowledge they acquire from that society – to two sources. They owe a debt, first, to past generations and, second, to contemporaries who, in the present, reproduce and advance the institutions, knowledge, resources, and societal conventions from which they gain (almost) all that is theirs.

[Because of man's dependence on the societal division of labor] a necessary exchange of services exists between each and all. The free development of his faculties, of his activities, in short, of his very being, can only be realized, for each individual, as a result of the concurrent contributions of other men's faculties and activities. This free development can, furthermore, only reach its full extent as a result of the accumulated contributions of the past.

There is therefore a debt owed by each to all the rest, in virtue of the contributions and services rendered by all to each. 68

To make the notion of a social debt more precise, Bourgeois points to the idea of a ‘quasi-contract’ that is prior to all contracts, and prior to all social association. It is not, however, a social contract understood as a historical contract between isolated individuals to create a government or state. It is, rather, an explicitly justificatory device intended to model the fact that each individual, whatever their role in society, is ultimately a being of equal moral status. 69

The idea of a quasi-contract is then used to determine the distribution of benefits and burdens in society, and hence to specify the social debt that each owes to all. What distribution of benefits and advantages would individuals choose, in an initial position of equality in which they didn't know their place in that society, to govern their life together? 70 Against the laisser-faire economists, Bourgeois concludes that the chosen distribution would ensure greater protection for the needy. And against the socialists, he concludes that it must protect private property and advancement by merit. Only if such a distribution is realized through common institutions can true, moral solidarity be realized. According to Bourgeois,

There where necessity has placed individuals in relationships whose terms men have had no prior chance to discuss, the only law that can fix these terms must be an interpretation and representation of the accord that would have been agreed had the parties been freely and equally consulted prior to their relationship. […] The quasi-contract is nothing but the contract that each party would have consented to prior to their association. […] The resulting distribution of benefits of this double debt [debt to contemporaries and to the past] will be fair only if all the parties are considered equal, that is, equal as persons who have a right to deliberate and consent. Reasons to favor or disfavor any particular person as anything other than a free and equal party to the contract will be banned. […] Without this prior equality of worth and right, the quasi-contract could not be considered a contract that each party would have agreed to as free and equal. 71

The use of the ‘quasi-contract’ as a way of modelling underlying equality has an important upshot for our account. What makes the quasi-contract binding, given that there was never an original consent to the terms, are the facts of interdependence – of cooperative contribution and benefit – that underlie political and social association. But Bourgeois is clear that, to realize the moral demands of interdependence in institutional life, individuals must also recognize themselves in their role as cooperative producers. Citizens must perceive the basis of their natural solidarity as the foundation for a moral solidarity. Solidarity therefore requires that citizens identify with one another on the basis of their role in sustaining and reproducing the division of labor. The object of social education, Bourgeois writes, should be

to place each individual in that frame of mind in which he sees that he is an associate, to create in every one of us a social being, to give us the habit to behave socially, that is, to be mindful, to whatever extent is possible, of our debt to others in every one of our actions, and especially in every transaction in which what we produce is exchanged with what others produce. 72

The recognition of the quasi-contract as binding is meant to follow, that is, from a recognition of how much each person's ability to benefit from use of their talents relies on the contributions of myriad others in a vast formal and informal division of labor. If they receive much less than they are owed (once everyone's basic dependence on the entire system is taken into account), they are correct in feeling exploited; if they receive more than they are due, they should feel the weight of a debt that they are not repaying.

This brief reconstruction of Bourgeois's view already gives us two sets of distinctions that will be useful as we move on. First, social solidarity refers to the unified character of a society bound together by two characteristics. It is bound together, via its division of labor, by the reciprocal dependence of its constituent elements (similar to the unity of a sophisticated natural organism bound together by the reciprocal dependence between its specialized organs). But social solidarity requires more than the mere existence of a functioning division of labor. It also requires a particular set of attitudes towards its constituent division of labor and a particular way of organizing that division. The bonds that make unity possible are, as we have seen, moral rather than natural. A society that has a complex division of labor but where individuals fail to identify with one another as contributors and beneficiaries of cooperative production fails to exhibit the solidarity that is latent in its structure and organization. So on this reading, solidarity refers, at the most basic level, both to the differentiated unity that exists between those who depend on one another to achieve a set of important common ends, and to the unity of those who identify with one another on the basis of their respective roles and are committed to sharing one another's fate as participants in that joint project.

Second, solidarism suggests a threefold distinction between the grounds of solidarity, namely the complex division of societal labor and the reasons of identification and reciprocity it generates, the object of solidarity, namely the discharge of the ‘social debt’ through institutional reform, and the scope of solidarity, namely the members of the interdependent society. Put in terms of our formula from section 1, the solidarist concept of solidarity assigns role interdependence to the variable identification, interest-based conflict, individualism, and class struggle to the variable significant adversity, a progressive tax system and social insurance to the variable shared goals, and discharging the social debt to the variable sharing others’ fate.

The connection between the division of labor and solidarity is associated by us today – though it was not at the time – with Émile Durkheim's 1893 doctoral thesis, The Division of Labor in Society. Though Bourgeois does not appear to have read it, 73 there is a great deal of convergence between Durkheim's conception of (organic) solidarity and Bourgeois's pamphlet. The ideas contained in both, as Marie-Claude Blais discusses in her history of solidarity in France, reflect the current of enthusiasm for solidarism and for new advances in cellular biology in the late nineteenth century. 74 In that early work, Durkheim draws a distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. Characteristic of premodern societies with a limited division of labor, mechanical solidarity is realized when people identify with one another on the basis of a ‘collective consciousness’ constituted by shared norms, rules, and sentiments. 75 In our terms, mechanical solidarity requires identification with others on the basis of a way of life. Durkheim writes:

In fact we all know that a social cohesion exists whose cause can be traced to a certain conformity of each individual consciousness to a common type. […] Indeed under these conditions all members of the group are not only individually attracted to one another because they resemble one another, but they are also linked to what is the condition for the existence of this collective type, that is, to the society that they form by coming together. Not only do fellow-citizens like one another, seeking one another out in preference to foreigners, but they love their country. They wish for it what they would wish for themselves, they care that it should be lasting and prosperous, because without it a whole area of their psychological life would fail to function smoothly. 76

In these passages, it is clear that solidarity is not, for Durkheim, merely another name for social cohesion; it refers, rather, to one of its important causes. Solidarity refers, moreover, not just to a set of attitudes – including ‘attraction’ to others based on a shared way of life – but also to the collective action required to sustain and reproduce the shared way of life and the collective consciousness that defines it. The collective consciousness is reinforced and maintained, Durkheim argues, through the ritual and repeated collective punishment of norm violators. Without such punishment, society would fall apart. 77 This is why, as Durkheim often emphasizes, repressive law is the fundamental expression of mechanical solidarity. Repressive law institutionalizes the collective punishment needed to reproduce and sustain the collective consciousness, and hence the social cohesion of the group. In our terms, the ground of solidarity is identification with others on the basis of a shared way of life; the object of solidarity is the reproduction of the collective consciousness; the joint action that is constitutive of solidarity is collective punishment, whose aim is to overcome the significant adversity threatened by crime, betrayal, dissent, revolt, and opposition; 78 and the willingness to share another's fate is represented by the lack of differentiation between members (who are as prepared to die for one another as they would be to die for their near and dear 79 ).

Where mechanical solidarity is based on similarity, organic solidarity is based on differentiation. The more complex a society becomes, the more its division of labor grows. At the same time, and as a result, the collective consciousness slackens, and individuality expands. In its place, a new solidarity is required to maintain social cohesion. This solidarity, too, is expressed in the law. But it is not repressive, or penal, law that predominates, but what Durkheim refers to as restitutive, or cooperative, law. As the division of labor grows, so does the law required to coordinate it: this is why we witness an impressive expansion of civil law in the administrative, contractual, property, tort, family, corporation, and labor domains. With expanding differentiation of roles comes rising individuality: the collective consciousness is no longer able to provide a stable ground of solidarity. Solidarity, Durkheim claims, must follow from the very interdependence that constitutes the division of labor itself. Solidarity must be based, that is, on the essential interdependence of our roles just like the interdependence of functions in an organism. The whole panoply of civil law, however, only serves to integrate and coordinate the system; it is solely a source of ‘negative’ solidarity. Durkheim writes:

[T]he rules relating to ‘real’ rights and personal relationships that are established by virtue of them form a definite system whose function is not to link together the different parts of society, but on the contrary to detach them from one another, and mark out clearly the barriers separating them. Thus they do not correspond to any positive social tie. The very expression ‘negative solidarity’ that we have employed is not absolutely exact. It is not a true solidarity, having its own existence and specific nature, but rather the negative aspects of every type of solidarity. The first condition for an entity to become coherent is for the parts that form it not to clash discordantly. But such an external harmony does not bring about cohesion. On the contrary, it presumes it. Negative solidarity is only possible where another kind is present, positive in nature, of which it is both the result and the condition.

What is this positive component? What is the ground, object, and nature of this new, organic solidarity?

The answer lies in the public morality that must develop alongside the division of labor in order to stabilize and reproduce society. Durkheim writes:

Men cannot live together without agreeing, and consequently without making mutual sacrifices, joining themselves to one another in a strong and enduring fashion. Every society is a moral society. In certain respects this feature is even more pronounced in organized societies. Because no individual is sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives all that is needful, just as it is for society that he labors. Thus there is formed a very strong feeling of the state of dependence in which he finds himself: he grows accustomed to valuing himself at his true worth, viz., to look upon himself only as a part of the whole, the organ of an organism. Such sentiments are of a kind not only to inspire those daily sacrifices that ensure the regular development of everyday social life but even on occasion acts of utter renunciation and unbounded abnegation. For its part society learns to look upon its constituent members no longer as things over which it has rights, but as co-operating members whom it cannot do without and towards whom it has duties. 80

At the heart of this morality, as it was for Bourgeois, is a recognition that the benefits one derives from exercise of one's specialized role depend on the contributions of myriad others to an overall system of which one is a part. This recognition, Durkheim tells us, is often sufficient to inspire ‘acts of utter renunciation’ as a way of honoring one's debt to society.

The morality that governs organic solidarity is clarified when Durkheim turns to describe what can go wrong – what, that is, leads to deficits in solidarity (and what to do about them). One way in which things can go wrong – the predominant way, especially if we consider the labor conflicts which came to a head with the Paris Commune (1871) and the Long Depression (1873–92) in France – is through class conflict. This conflict upsets the smooth integration of the differentiated parts required for society to function. Durkheim notes three causes of such conflict – each one of which requires a similar solution. The first cause is anomie, the loss of direction and orientation that can accompany specialization. Anomie is the primary social danger accompanying the growing depth and extent of the division of labor, and threatens the sense in which we are essential contributors to the success of society as a whole:

Every day [the worker] repeats the same movements with monotonous regularity, but without having any interest or understanding of them. He is no longer the living cell of a living organism, moved continually by contact with neighboring cells, which acts upon them and responds in turn to their action, extends itself, contracts, yields and is transformed according to the needs and circumstances. He is no more than a lifeless cog, which an external force sets in motion and impels always in the same direction and in the same fashion. 81

The second cause is force, the sense of injustice that arises from a feeling that one's work is not valued according to its worth and one's own merits – the sense, in short, that one is exploited. Such grievances, Durkheim notes, are especially strong when premodern elements of caste persist in modern conditions. The third cause is disuse, or the aimlessness, resentment, and lack of focus that comes from not having enough work. In each case, Durkheim argues, the citizen comes to lose a grip on his larger place in reproducing the whole; as he turns inwards, his grievances seem to him larger and his duties to others less pressing; he is less fulfilled by his labor, seeing it no longer as a reflection of his nature; mistrust takes root; he no longer sees his potential employers as cooperative partners, but begins to see them as enemies.

Durkheim's proposed solution is clearest in the Second Preface to the Division of Labor, added in 1902. He argues there that the state alone cannot guarantee the conditions necessary for maintaining organic solidarity against the threats we have just discussed to its survival. The state is ‘too remote’ and ‘general’ in its operation. 82 Instead, he argues that only the

professional grouping is a moral force capable of curbing individual egoism, nurturing among workers a more invigorated feeling of their common solidarity, and preventing the law of the strongest from being applied too brutally in industrial and commercial relationships. 83

By ‘professional grouping’, Durkheim means that the various industrial branches of an economy would be grouped into corporations (modelled on the feudal corporation). Unlike unions, corporations would be constituted by both employers and employees, and would have the power to regulate wages, conditions of work, appointments, and promotions; they would also have the authority to coordinate with other branches and with government. The effect of such groupings would be to recreate organic solidarity where it was most under pressure:

Within a political society [e.g., a corporation], as soon as a certain number of individuals find they hold in common ideas, interests, sentiments and occupations which the rest of the population does not share in, it is inevitable that, under the influence of these similarities, they should be attracted to one another. They will seek one another out, enter into relationships and associate together. Thus a restricted group is gradually formed within society as a whole, with its own special features. Once such a group is formed, a moral life emanates from it which naturally bears the distinguishing mark of the special conditions in which it has developed. It is impossible for men to live together and be in regular contact with one another without their acquiring some feeling for the totality which they constitute through having united together, without their becoming attached to it, concerning themselves with its interests and taking it into account in their behaviour. 84

The idea is that, in grouping together in smaller, functionally organized units – tradesmen with tradesmen, bankers with bankers, and so on – individuals would regain their sense of contributing to society while, at the same time, giving everyone a felt stake in the justice and fairness required to reproduce it. In our terms then, the ground of organic solidarity is identification based on professional role within the division of labor; joint action requires organizing society into corporations, running each corporation, and regulating the division of labor justly; the object of joint action is the peaceful reproduction and maintenance of society in the face of the significant adversity represented by class conflict and division; the scope of solidarity is all those involved in the division of labor (Durkheim is keen, here, to emphasize that this division of labor is increasingly international 85 ); and the disposition to share one another's fate is represented by the willingness to sacrifice self-interest (‘egoism’) for the good of the whole, which includes securing just conditions of work for each organ of society.

The second main context in which the language of solidarity develops is socialism. 86 This tradition, reproduced in workers’ movements throughout the past two centuries, is more familiar to us, so I will spend less time discussing it. The socialist tradition grows out of the same post-revolutionary soil as solidarism, including most importantly the early utopian socialists (chief among them Saint-Simon and Fourier). 87 However, unlike solidarism, socialism called for class-based action against the bourgeois owners and organizers of capital. It was, that is, oppositional. Solidarity is the name of the unity between those who recognize one another as the objects of pervasive exploitation, who together create the essential conditions in which modern societies flourish, and who have a common enemy against whom the struggle must be waged, namely the capitalist. Ralph Chaplin's ‘Solidarity Forever’ – often sung at union meetings and socialist gatherings – evokes this sensibility well:

It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade,

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;

Now, we stand outcast and starving, 'mid the wonders we have made.

The shared experience of exploitation and the shared action necessary for joint social production (as in ploughing the prairies and building the cities), in turn, provide the grounds for obligations of mutual aid and sacrifice. As Karl Kautsky, one of the most influential Marxists in the late nineteenth century, writes in the Class Struggle, which was the German Social Democratic Party's official commentary on the proposed Erfurt program of 1891:

But as soon as the workers discover that their interests are common, that they are all opposed to the exploiter, it takes the form of great organizations and open battles against the exploiting class. […] And when [these elevating tendencies] have once wakened full class-consciousness in any group of workers, the consciousness of solidarity with all the members of the working-class, the consciousness of the strength that is born of union; as soon as any group has recognized that it is essential to society and that it dare hope for better things in the future, – then it is well nigh impossible to shove that group back into the degenerate mass of beings whose opposition to the system under which they suffer takes no other form than that of unreasoned hate. 88

It is important, as we will see later on, that unity among workers is grounded in the structural position of the worker in society; it is not, therefore, tied to his or her particular occupation, or indeed, nationality (hence the labor movement's internationalism). In 1871, in a speech given in Amsterdam after a congress of the First International, Marx says:

Citizens, let us think of the basic principle of the International: Solidarity. Only when we have established this life-giving principle on a sound basis among the numerous workers of all countries will we attain the great final goal which we have set ourselves. The revolution must be carried out with solidarity; this is the great lesson of the French Commune, which fell because none of the other centers – Berlin, Madrid, etc. – developed great revolutionary movements comparable to the mighty uprising of the Paris proletariat. 89

Once again, it is useful to distinguish the grounds, scope, object, and content of solidarity. The ground of solidarity in the socialist tradition is, depending on one's interpretation, identification with one another either on the basis of the role shared by workers in joint production (as in the Chaplin quote) or on the basis of a condition they share as exploited. 90 The joint action required of the worker is participation in the workers’ movement, including the union and party; the object of solidarity is, in the final instance, the overthrow of capitalism, which is intended to overcome the significant adversity posed by poverty, coercion, and exploitation. And the willingness to share another's fate is contained in the obligations of loyalty and reciprocity involved in the struggle against the oppressors (for example, not breaking the picket line).

The third school of thought is liberal nationalism, where references to solidarity flourish in the wake of 1848. For the nationalist, solidarity is anchored in shared identification with an ‘imagined community’ where membership is defined not in terms of class or social position, but in terms of an underlying way of life characterized by common folkways, mores, and a shared history of struggle. In 1882, Ernest Renan gave a seminal lecture in which he claimed that the nation is an expression of a ‘great solidarity (une grande solidarité), constituted by a sense of the common sacrifices that have been made and that one is disposed to make again’. 91 And Giuseppe Mazzini, whose version of liberal-republican nationalism was to have such a great influence on nationalist movements across the world, writes in 1871:

The individual's means and his thirty or forty years of adult life are but a tiny drop in the vast Ocean of existence. As soon as he becomes aware of this, he ends up discouraged and abandons the entire undertaking. If he is a good man, he will now and again engage in simple charity. If he is evil, he will isolate himself in complete selfishness. But give this man a Country [patria] and establish a link of solidarity [solidarietà] between his individual efforts and the efforts of all subsequent generations; place him in association with the labors of 25 to 30 million men who speak the same language, have similar habits and beliefs, profess faith in the same goal, and have developed specific tools for their work as required by the general conditions of their land, and the problem will change for him at once: his strengths will be greatly multiplied, allowing him to feel up to the task. 92

On this understanding, the nation is understood primarily as a project in which each participates over time and across generations. Charles Taylor gives a similar reading:

The difference is that patriotism is based on an identification with others in a particular common enterprise. I am not dedicated to defending the liberty of just anyone, but I feel the bond of solidarity with my compatriots in our common enterprise, the common expression of our respective dignity. Patriotism is somewhere between friendship, or family feeling, on one side, and altruistic dedication on the other. […] But particularity enters in because my bond to these people passes through our participation in a common political entity. Functioning republics are like families in this crucial respect, that part of what binds people together is their common history. Family ties or old friendships are deep because of what we have lived through together, and republics are bonded by time and climactic transitions. 93

Patriotism (or nationalism – I am not here drawing a distinction) is therefore not simply a passive belonging, but a belonging that requires joint action both to defend and to reproduce it. 94 For the liberal nationalist, in short, identification with fellow nationals on the basis of a shared way of life is the ground of solidarity; the object of solidarity is the defense and reproduction of the nation understood as a patria, which requires a standing commitment to overcoming the significant adversity posed by (mostly) external threats. The joint action that is constitutive of nationalist solidarity, in turn, is the continuous contribution, through one's daily social, political, and cultural activities, to the group project understood as a common good. And, finally, the willingness to share one another's fate is represented by the disposition to stand by one's fellow nationals and to aid them when in difficulty, even to be willing to die for them when necessary.

The fourth school of thought is Christianity. The Christian tradition, most prominent in Catholic social thought but also in some forms of Protestantism, is grounded as an ideal of human fellowship in which each human being is considered as imago dei and hence as deserving of the same love that joins God and man. Pope John Paul II, who in many ways has done the most to secure a place for solidarity in the Catholic tradition, writes

Solidarity is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. […] In the light of faith, solidarity seeks to go beyond itself, to take on the specifically Christian dimension of total gratuity, forgiveness and reconciliation. One's neighbor is then not only a human being with his or her own rights and a fundamental equality with everyone else, but becomes the living image of God the Father, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and placed under the permanent action of the Holy Spirit. One's neighbor must therefore be loved, even if an enemy, with the same love with which the Lord loves him or her; and for that person's sake one must be ready for sacrifice, even the ultimate one: to lay down one's life for the brethren. 95

Solidarity, for the Catholic, is grounded in universal love. The basis for this love flows from identification with others on the basis of a shared experience of human suffering, which is a necessary result of a condition that we all share, namely that we are mortal products of original sin. The focus of Christian love is therefore the relief of suffering in all its forms – a sacrifice which, modelled on the life of Christ, aspires to a reconciliation with God. In a sermon delivered on Wawel Hill in Krakow on October 19, 1980, Józef Tischner, who was influential in Poland's solidarity movement, said:

With whom, therefore, is our solidarity? It is, above all, with those who have been wounded by other people, with those who suffer pain that could be avoided – accidental, needless pain. This does not preclude solidarity with others, with all who suffer. However, the solidarity with those who suffer at the hands of others is particularly vital, strong, spontaneous. 96

On this reading, solidarity is a commitment to aid the suffering grounded in identification with other human beings, who are viewed as engaged in a common struggle against sin and vulnerability. We commit to helping others because they share with us a common condition and experience. This understanding of solidarity is also at the heart of the Christian Democratic political tradition, especially those aspects that emphasized the social responsibilities of the Christian. 97

There is, however, another strand within the Christian tradition that emphasizes a different form of identification: Christian solidarism. In Ethics and the National Economy (1917), its founder and most prominent advocate, Heinrich Pesch (1854–1926), writes:

Christianity teaches us that people, despite all individual and also social differences in occupation and ownership, are nevertheless socii, i.e., comrades, precisely by virtue of those differences. They are dependent on each other and bound together by a solidaristic community of interests in all of their industrial relationships as masters and journeymen, as employers and workers, and in the human race overall, which is the great universal family of nations. 98

On this corporatist understanding, it is not just the shared experience of human suffering, or the understanding of the human being as imago dei, but a recognition of the interdependence of human beings in society that grounds a demand to share one another's fate. On this picture, we are meant to recognize how both our flourishing and our suffering are a result of mutual influence and mutual reliance in and through the multiple associations to which we belong; in response, we have obligations to share others’ fates by coming to others’ aid and by limiting the harm we do. In the 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio, on global development and the inequality between rich and poor nations, Pope Paul VI writes:

We are the heirs of earlier generations, and we reap benefits from the efforts of our contemporaries; we are under obligation to all men. Therefore we cannot disregard the welfare of those who will come after us to increase the human family. The reality of human solidarity brings us not only benefits but also obligations. 99

The passage unmistakably resonates with the French solidarist tradition discussed above. As is widely recognized, John Paul II was also deeply influenced by this strand of Catholic social thought (and its realization in Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum). 100 In Sollicitudo rei socialis, he writes:

It is above all a question of interdependence, sensed as a system determining relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious elements, and accepted as a moral category. When interdependence becomes recognized in this way, the correlative response as a moral and social attitude, as a ‘virtue,’ is solidarity. This then is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. 101

On this reading, the ground of solidarity is, as in Bourgeois and Durkheim, an identification based on our role in the division of labor, which includes a recognition that our participation in an unjust social order perpetuates suffering, and makes us accomplices. The doctrine goes hand in hand with the Church's teaching on subsidiarity, in which local associations – including perhaps most importantly the family – have ethical priority to more general, encompassing associations, such as the state. 102 More general and encompassing associations should intervene in the affairs of the lower only to help or aid them in the accomplishment of their tasks. On this understanding, the response to individual suffering must be collective; it cannot be done by individuals acting alone, but by each body, at each level of generality, working together as a unit to preserve the common good. As Pope Francis noted in a follow-up catechism to his COVID-19 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, ‘there is no true solidarity without social participation, without the contribution of intermediary bodies: families, associations, cooperatives, small businesses, and other expressions of society. Everyone needs to contribute, everyone.’  103

The emphasis on a commitment to collective action in response to identification with others as vulnerable, interdependent, and imago dei is most evident in the Catholic liberation theology that developed in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America. 104 According to the Salvadoran Jon Sobrino, for example:

Those who enter into solidarity with the poor … recover their human dignity by becoming integrated into the pain and suffering of the poor. From the poor they receive, in a way hardly expected, new eyes for seeing the ultimate truth of things and new energies for exploring unknown and dangerous paths. 105

The non-poor must fight alongside rather than for the poor; this requires the non-poor to divest themselves of privilege and join the struggle by first winning the trust and reliance of the least well-off. According to Paulo Freire, whose influence on liberation theology was vast, a pedagogy

must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade. 106

The liberation theologists are at one in the belief that oppression cannot be overcome, as it were, from the top down. As Gustavo Gutiérrez writes in the seminal text Theology of Liberation,

The process of liberation requires the active participation of the oppressed; this certainly is one of the most important themes running through the writings of the Latin American Church. 107

Oppression must be overcome through an awareness among the poor that their situation is a result of social organization, rather than as a result of the natural order of things, and can be overcome by collective action. From this point of view, the most dangerous obstacles in the way of liberation are ignorance and silence.

Once again, we can use our set of distinctions to make sense of the overall Christian doctrine. The object of Christian solidarity is reconciliation with Christ; the grounds are identification with other human beings on the basis of a shared experience of human suffering, of our condition as imago dei, or of our interdependent causal role in reproducing suffering. These grounds give us reason to act together to overcome the significant adversity of human suffering in all its forms. The scope of solidarity extends across all of humanity. And, finally, we ought to be prepared to ‘shoulder one another's burden’, through works of aid, succor, and communication, which together constitute a willingness to share another's fate in our terms.

The fifth school of thought is associated with more recent social movements such as the civil rights movement, feminism, disability, and LGBTQ movements. Each of these movements shares the oppositional character of socialism, but each has a different understanding of what the grounds and object of solidaristic action are. According to bell hooks, for example,

We understood that political solidarity between females expressed in sisterhood goes beyond positive recognition of the experiences of women and even shared sympathy for common suffering. Feminist sisterhood is rooted in shared commitment to struggle against patriarchal injustice, no matter the form that injustice takes. Political solidarity between women always undermines sexism and sets the stage for the overthrow of patriarchy. Significantly, sisterhood could never have been possible across the boundaries of race and class if individual women had not been willing to divest of their power to dominate and exploit subordinated groups. 108

The usage is clearly oppositional, but instead of aiming to overthrow capitalism, the feminist movement aims to overthrow patriarchy. And just as the socialist requires the worker to divest themselves of the power and privilege of their particular position among workers, hooks calls on all women to forgo forms of class, racial, and status privilege and power that might divide them. And just as the socialist invokes the injustice of workers’ domination and exploitation by the capitalist as a basis for identification, hooks invokes the injustice of women's subordination and subjugation by men.

Other social movements, such as Black nationalism, are also oppositional, but the basis of identification is distinct. For the Black nationalist, the basis of identification that provides the ground of solidarity is not merely sharing a condition, namely oppression; it also includes sharing a way of life centered on shared history, mores, and folkways. An important strand (though not the only strand) of Black nationalism – one that was especially prominent in the1960s and 1970s – holds that high-sounding appeals to the possibility of integration in the name of a universal fight against injustice cannot ground a robust solidarity among Blacks. 109 A deeper, widespread engagement with a distinct culture is also needed. According to this form of nationalism, Blacks (in America) constitute a distinct, and distinctly cultural, nation-within-a-nation whose origins lie in Africa. Enriched and shaped through decades of opposition to and struggle against slavery, Jim Crow, and post-Reconstruction betrayal, Black experience in the US provides a ‘residuum of ethnic group consciousness’ that defines the contours of African-American culture. 110 Nationalists argue that, though at the moment inchoate and marginalized, Black culture calls for development and expression (for example, in the arts, music, literature, and theatre); without it, and the sense of collective identity and pride it secures, Blacks cannot securely win their freedom in a fundamentally hostile American society. In a speech announcing the establishment of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (1964), Malcolm X quoted from its charter (which he had penned along with a group of others):

‘Afro Americans must unite and work together. We must take pride in the Afro American community, for it is our home and it is our power, the base of our power …’ Lastly, concerning culture and the cultural aspect of the Organization of Afro American Unity. ‘A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself. Our history and our culture were completely destroyed when we were forcibly brought to America in chains. And now it is important for us to know that our history did not begin with slavery. We came from Africa, a great continent, wherein live a proud and varied people, a land which is the new world and was the cradle of civilization.’  111

Some Black nationalists have not only fought for social, cultural, and economic autonomy from White America 112 but also fought for political-territorial separation. With respect to the latter, some have advocated a separate Black state within the US, while others have supported the founding of an autonomous nation on the African continent. 113 Like the (European) nationalisms discussed above, a uniting feature of Black nationalism, despite these differences, is that a distinct identification based on a shared culture is required to foster and sustain Black solidarity in the face of oppression.

And, finally, someone like Martin Luther King, for example, appeals to forms of solidarity whose essential features resonate with elements of socialism, in its oppositional character and widespread support for the labor movement, and Christianity. In the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, for example, Martin Luther King invokes a universalist and Christian form of mutualism and interdependence:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. 114

And, in a speech to the Illinois American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1965, King invoked the Christian idea of a ‘brotherhood of man’ to call for a coalition between the civil rights and labor movements:

The two most dynamic movements that reshaped the nation during the past three decades are the labor and civil rights movements. Our combined strength is potentially enormous. […] If our two movements unite their social pioneering initiative, thirty years from now people will look back on this day and honor those who had the vision to see the full possibilities of modern society and the courage to fight for their realization. On that day, the brotherhood of man, undergirded by economic security, will be a thrilling and creative reality. 115

But, once again, in all such social movements and in spite of significant differences in their characterization of each of the central aspects of solidarity, solidarity refers to the mutual sacrifice and joint action demanded by an identification with one another on the basis of a way of life, condition, role, set of experiences, or cause.

Note that each of the five traditions I have considered also bears the other features of solidarity discussed in section 1. In each case, solidarity is understood to embody a commitment among equals. 116 In each case, those acting in solidarity take themselves 117 to have an equal standing with respect to one another, whatever their other roles, positions, backgrounds, beliefs, interests, or values. In a solidary action, everyone is meant to count equally. Attitudes of servility and submissiveness are considered out of place. 118 This does not preclude the existence of authority, or leadership, within a solidaristic group. Those who wield power and authority are considered delegates or representatives of the group; deference is due because of their special epistemic position or practical abilities, or because they have been selected through a fair procedure, not because they are of higher rank.

Furthermore, according to each of our traditions of thought on solidarity, relations among solidaries are symmetrical. As a committed form of joint action grounded in identification, solidarity is omni- rather than unilateral. Each stands for all, and all stand for each. At the heart of solidarity is therefore reciprocity (I return to this below, in sections 3 and 4). This does not mean that every act of concern and aid must be reciprocated, that everyone be in a position to reciprocate, or that all contribute in the same way; all that is required for a given instance of collective action to be a form of acting in solidarity is that participants identify with one another on one or more of the bases we have discussed, are mutually committed to overcoming adversity together, have a standing disposition to share one another's fate, and trust one another to meet the expectations embedded in their solidary activity. 119 To what degree each ought to contribute, given the circumstances and the more general background, is a separate, normative issue (see next two sections for the normative evaluation of different grounds of solidarity).

In an important and illuminating account of solidarity, Avery Kolers characterizes solidarity as both asymmetrical and deferential, rather than symmetrical and egalitarian. 120 Kolers argues that paradigmatic cases of solidarity involve one group, S, deferring to an object group, G, but not vice versa. According to Kolers,

[solidary action] is not principally justified by appeal to goals, nor do we choose sides on the basis of shared goals. To the contrary, when S is in solidarity with G, it is G, not G's ends, that S endorses or values. S is disposed to adopt whatever goal G sets for the action or as a political aim. For instance, insofar as they are in solidarity, heterosexual persons who support the right of same-sex couples to marry do so not because they individually want same-sex marriages to be possible, but because the LGBTQ community treats that as an important goal. 121

Paradigmatic instances of solidarity involve members of (out)groups (e.g., heterosexuals) committing themselves to do whatever members of a disadvantaged (in)group (e.g., homosexuals) require to overcome injustice. Importantly, on this picture outgroup members commit to the group, rather than to any aim pursued by the group. As a heterosexual, I do not act in solidarity by committing directly to fighting heterosexism alongside members of the LGBTQ community; rather, to act in solidarity, I must commit to the LGBTQ community as such, and so to whatever members tell me I need to do to promote their cause, whatever cause that is.

One advantage of this view is that it captures an important moral aspect of coalitional social movements in which more privileged (out)groups act as allies of less privileged (in)groups who are fighting injustice. As has often been noted, the trouble with such coalitions is that members of privileged groups often tend to be blind to the way in which privilege colors and sometimes distorts their efforts to support the aims of the movement. 122 Outgroup allies can sometimes reproduce, unconsciously, wider structural patterns of power and exclusion as they fight alongside ingroup members; they can perpetrate, for example, forms of epistemic injustice in seeking to impose their own agenda or ideals onto the wider movement. 123 Kolers’ work reminds his readers that genuine solidarity requires that members of outgroups put aside their particular concerns, ideals, prejudices, and so on, and listen. 124 They must be prepared, in turn, to accept their relative epistemic limitations vis-à-vis members of ingroups who have not only ‘skin in the game’ but also a vivid lived experience of the forms of injustice they are fighting. And they must also be prepared to defer out of respect for the disadvantaged: whether or not the disadvantaged have better epistemic access to truths about the struggle, etc., the privileged ought to defer out of respect for what is at stake for the disadvantaged. 125

There are, however, three main problems. First, once deference of an outgroup member to an ingroup is made paradigmatic of solidarity in general, it becomes difficult to account for the idea of solidarity among Blacks as Black, or among women as women. Kolers attempts to include ingroup solidarity by saying that each member in such cases defers to the group's aims. 126 So there is still deference of individuals to a group, only in this case, the individuals defer to the very group of which they are members. This, however, looks misleading. What members of ingroups are doing is deferring to each other, symmetrically, in deciding together what to do as a group, not deferring to a tertium quid – ‘the group’ – from which they take their marching orders. Putting the attitudes of outgroup members at the core of solidarity as a phenomenon, furthermore, has the odd effect of foregrounding, in any discussion of solidarity, the structure of relations between outgroup and ingroup members, rather than ingroup members among themselves.

Second, while deference is often required, especially when outgroup members participate in a collective struggle alongside ingroup members, why make deference a conceptually necessary condition for being in solidarity in the first place? This seems to rule out forms of solidarity in which participants act together in more loosely and democratically organized ways. Third, the account of deference seems too strong. It might be true that one may defer to certain members within a movement, but this will be because there are independent reasons for giving them authority to decide (including reasons of respect for what they have at stake), not because one is committed to them whatever they may decide to do. 127 It seems more plausible, for example, that heterosexuals supporting the LGBTQ community do so because they value the ends that the community seeks to pursue (e.g., ending gender-based oppression), not – except in very special cases involving LGBTQ friends or family – because they value the individuals as such (‘whatever ends they may pursue’) who constitute the community. And it seems more plausible, then, to say that we defer to certain members of a group (e.g., the leaders) because such deference is more likely to advance the cause against gender-based oppression, because we will be more successful in coordinating our ends, because the individuals are in a better epistemic position to know the struggles they face and what is required to overcome them, or because of respect for what they have at stake, than because we are committed to the leaders as individuals. 128

Christianity can also be read as rejecting the idea that solidarity must be symmetrical. The Catholic tradition, in particular, has often been unclear whether there is a difference between charity, caritas – understood as love of one's neighbor on the basis of our common, fallen humanity – and solidarity. This is evident in the Tischner citation from above, where he goes on to cite the Good Samaritan as an example of solidarity. And it is even evident in Pope John Paul II, who, in the very same encyclical (Sollicitudo rei socialis) in which he expounds his solidarity of interdependence, writes ‘Those who are more influential, because they have a greater share of goods and common services, should feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess.’  129 Charity (caritas) and mercy (misericordia) are prototypically unilateral: there is the giver of aid, forgiveness, succor, and support, and the receiver who is suffering and in need. The relation is asymmetrical. Above I provided an interpretation of the Catholic texts – influenced by Christian solidarism – that insists instead on a distinction between charity and solidarity. Solidarity, on this understanding, is necessarily egalitarian, social, collective, and grounded in an awareness of interdependence. Charity is not. On this alternative interpretation, the Christian identifies with those in need as engaged in a joint struggle – where human beings (both oppressed and non-oppressed) are conceived of as fighting together to overcome the suffering of the human condition. She sees a fundamental symmetry between those who are in a position to aid and those in need – those in need identify with the struggle, and with other participants on the basis of their mutual commitment. According to this alternative reading, there is a key distinction between charity and solidarity even within the Christian tradition. 130

There are some further theoretical and evaluative reasons that support this reading. First, even from within a solely Christian perspective, if solidarity is just the same as charity, then why use the term at all? Making it the same as charity drains it of its distinctive meaning. 131 But, second, it also disconnects solidarity from its history. As we have seen, the reading of solidarity as a public, symmetrical, and egalitarian form of acting together against significant adversity – a form of acting that is, in turn, grounded in diverse forms of de dicto identification – unifies its history, and makes sense to us as diverse and anonymous inhabitants of modern, industrial cities, states, and regions. This understanding also makes better sense of the value of solidarity for us, which is deeply bound up with the history of egalitarianism as a collective struggle. Recall that at the heart of solidarity is both an outward demand – as we face the public – and an inward expectation – as we look on one another – to be treated as equals. Charity, even understood as grounded in a form of identification with the human rather than merely in a general moral duty, does not capture the cooperative nature of this value or fit with its historical importance to us. 132 (I return to a fuller explication of the value of solidarity below, which will serve to complete this argument.)

One may still want to object. Surely, one might say, we can stand in solidarity with prisoners by protesting on their behalf, whatever their attitudes toward us happen to be. But is it so obvious? If the prisoners believe, say, that our protest is pointless, do not want our support, are not committed to acting together, and are not disposed to share our fate (were, say, the roles to be reversed or we to need their aid in our action on their behalf), then we cannot be acting in solidarity with them. To believe otherwise is to mistake support for a cause or resistance to an injustice or humanitarian aid as solidarity. We already have concepts to express what we are doing; what does calling such support ‘solidarity’ add? On the other hand, if the prisoners are prepared to coordinate with us in resisting their condition, have a standing disposition to share our fate as protesters ‘on the outside’, and trust us to do our part as we trust them to do theirs, then we are acting in solidarity because and insofar as we are acting together (on the basis of identification with a cause) to better their conditions. 133

There are, of course, more borderline cases. Suppose that we are protesting on the outside, and the prisoners on the inside, but neither of us knows that the others are so doing. And suppose that all our other conditions were satisfied such that, if we were to know of their protest and they of ours, then we would be acting in solidarity. In this case, we would, if we could, organize together with them and be prepared to share their fate, and they would, if they could, organize with us and be prepared to share our fate. Our solidarity here is latent. We are acting in solidarity on the outside, and they are acting in solidarity on the inside, but our actions have not yet joined up. 134 We can say that our action, in these circumstances, is organized not just to support the prisoners, but in their name: we recognize that their chances of organizing and mobilizing are slim, given their conditions, but we would organize collectively if we could and we do what we can to make such collective agency possible; on the other side, they also would welcome our support and do what they could to organize and coordinate with us. For these reasons, our action still counts as in solidarity with the prisoners, even though the solidarity remains only latent. It becomes actual when our actions join up in a single joint action, and we are each disposed in all the relevant ways.

The same analysis is relevant when we speak, for example, of solidarity with refugees. 135 Refugees, in most cases, are not an organized social movement or group pursuing a shared goal to fight their condition. 136 Is there a sense, then, in which we act in solidarity with refugees when we protest our governments’ policies? Just as in the case of the prisoners, our protest is a latent form of solidarity if it is undertaken in the name of the refugees, as a result of the fact that refugees, that is, are not able, given their circumstances, to organize and mobilize against our governments’ policies. As a form of latent solidarity, our action (just as in the case of the prisoners) has to be geared toward and make room for the participation of refugees where and when this is possible. It must be designed to enable their participation in a truly collective agency. 137 On this understanding, we do not act for the refugees but always aim to act with them. At the same time, they must welcome our action and do what they can, within their constrained conditions, to organize and coordinate with us. Once again, if our action does not take this form – if, for example, we merely act to fight the injustice but make no effort to act together with the refugees, or if the refugees only take a distant interest in what we are doing – then it is not even a latent form of solidarity, but merely support for a noble cause.

We can say similar things with more straightforward cases of charity. Merely sending money to earthquake survivors is not solidarity, for all the same reasons. Once again, why not call such actions humanitarian? What does calling them instances of solidarity add? 138 I concede that much of our contemporary usage – which does allow for such unilateralism – parts ways here; 139 considering the history of solidarity, I believe this usage is a vestige of the Christian elision between charity and solidarity. If I am right, then there is a case for abandoning it. Doing so would help to keep in clear view the distinctive value of solidarity – recall its essentially cooperative and egalitarian character – and maintain a connection to its history – recall, for example, that solidarity resonates in an age where the centrifugal forces of markets grow and traditional sources of social connection wane. In these conditions, solidarity names a practice of collective agency and transformative mobilization. Unilateral, humanitarian aid does not capture either element.

One might wonder, relatedly, whether recognition of mutual responsibility to others on the basis of belonging to a real or imagined community is sufficient for solidarity. 140 On this view, joint action against adversity is not part of the core concept of solidarity. But, as I have argued, this is too broad. My picking up my brother at the airport – and hence discharging a mutual responsibility based on belonging to the same family – would count as an instance of solidarity. And so would returning a lost wallet to its owner. 141 Conceiving of solidarity in this way would make it indistinguishable from the general class of responsibilities that flow from special relationships like family, friends, and communities. It would therefore make it less useful in illuminating the social phenomenon underlying the distinctively modern, omnilateral, and transformational character of solidarity over the past two centuries.

So far, we have used the formula defended in section 1 to make sense of solidarity's history. We have used the term, for the most part, in its interpretive guise rather than its normative one. We have yet, that is, to evaluate any of these instances of solidarity, or to assess whether any of the grounds evinced provide genuine reasons to act together in the first place. This is the aim of the next two sections.

3Grounds

I have argued that solidarity is a form of acting together to overcome significant adversity grounded in identification. We act solidaristically when, that is, (a) we identify with one another on the basis of a shared way of life, cause, set of experiences, condition, or role, (b) we are, as a result, committed to doing our part in overcoming significant adversity and to setting aside, in a range of cases, narrow self-interest in its pursuit, (c) we have a settled, reliable disposition to come to others’ aid in support of our goal, and are disposed not to bypass one another's wills in that pursuit, and (d) we trust one another with respect to (b) and (c) (where trust is reliance plus a normative expectation that others will indeed be committed and come to our aid when necessary). In section 2, we saw that this characterization can make sense of the paradigmatic cases of solidarity (viz. solidarism, socialism, nationalism, Christianity, and social movements such as feminism and civil rights). On this reading, solidarity does not name an emotion, such as fellow-feeling, and it cannot be reduced to mere support for a noble cause (e.g., donating money to Oxfam). It is also omni- rather unilateral: acts of charity, altruism, or humanitarian aid do not, as such, count as instances of solidarity. Solidarity, furthermore, cannot be merely passive: the dispositions and commitments mentioned above must be dispositions and commitments displayed in a form of irreducibly joint action. We cannot be in solidarity unless we act in solidarity.

In this section, I want to ask: What counts as right reasons for acting in solidarity with others in the sense described? My focus will be on the role of identification in giving us grounds for acting in solidarity with others. It is often said that my identification with you as a woman or as a worker or as an African-American or as a French citizen or as an antifascist can provide me a reason, or even an obligation, to act in solidarity with you. But why? And under what conditions? I am not interested in the empirical question about whether people are, or are not, motivated to act in solidarity by appealing to their identification with others under one or more of such descriptions. I am interested in whether this appeal has normative force, and why. In this section, therefore, we turn from the interpretive and descriptive to the more explicitly normative. In the penultimate subsection, I indicate some reasons to think that identification is, in fact, not just a commonly avowed ground for acting in solidarity but also paradigmatic of it. 142 Once again, if the argument regarding possible grounds of identification gives us a useful framework for thinking through some of the normative issues that arise in reflection about solidarity, it should also serve to support the overall argument.

3.1Way of life

Let us begin with sharing a way of life. 143 The paradigmatic form of solidarity that emerges from identification with others based on a shared way of life is nationalism. The nationalist believes that there is a territorially defined public culture that binds together a group of people across generations. 144 The public culture defines a readily identifiable set of commonplaces and fixed points of historical reference, is often based on a common language and linguistic tradition (in literature and music, for example), and gives rise to a set of mores and folkways that are reproduced in everyday life. The nationalist, on this reading, need not seek statehood, but they do seek to govern and determine themselves. 145 Suppose that I identify both with being Sioux and with other Sioux in the epistemic, affective, and normative senses outlined above. When and why should this fact give me reasons to act in solidarity together?

The most obvious reasons would apply in circumstances where our way of life – which we value as an important part of practical identity – is under threat. This threat could come from many quarters. To illustrate: One of the most important for Native American peoples, including the Sioux, is the threat posed by unlawful expropriation of ancestral lands by colonial governments. We should, we say, join together in solidarity to fight the threat. 146 At the very least, this is a prudential reason to act in solidarity: joining together allows us to preserve something that each of us values and that none of us could defend alone. There is also an important sense in which, because we identify our well-being with the well-being of the group, failing to act in solidarity is also a failure of integrity. The way of life defines who we are; not to show up is a form of self-betrayal. But the normative force of the reason is not merely prudential. We would also be right in feeling let down or even betrayed should one of our number not join the struggle. Why? What is the basis of the normative expectation that other members should join the struggle?

One might appeal here to a general duty to fight injustice. The problem is that this doesn't pick out those with whom one identifies. Everyone has such a duty. Everyone, on that basis, has a reason to join or, at any rate, help in the struggle. If someone did join for that reason alone, then one would be joining others on the basis of identification with a cause rather than on the basis of identification with a way of life. Non-Sioux could join for those reasons (I will return to identification with a cause and its relation to what Lawrence Blum calls outgroup solidarity 147 below).

One might appeal instead to the way of life itself – to what, in our example, it means to be Sioux in the first place. 148 The idea here is that a mutual readiness to come to each other's aid against an oppressor, mutual trust, and a willingness to set aside self-interest in overcoming significant adversity are among the core values constitutive of the Sioux nation – which include, in addition, the special character of our attachment to land and earth, the bonds of community and loyalty, our distinctive sense of shared history and ancestry, the feeling of at-homeness that belonging brings, and the pride and honor attached to membership. To identify as Sioux then requires you also to join in solidarity when necessary. Otherwise, you are not an authentic Sioux. There are two main problems with this view. First, it makes solidarity a requirement of membership without explaining to us why it is such a requirement. 149 Without further argument, this makes the solidarity that is claimed as constitutive of Sioux identity look arbitrary and unmotivated. Second, it rests the case on appeal to authenticity. But why is being more authentic a reason to feel betrayed? At most, it can motivate the charge that the individual is betraying themselves, but it cannot serve to show that they are betraying other Sioux.

A more nuanced argument is the following. Let us suppose that the special character of our attachment to land and earth, our bonds of community and loyalty, our distinctive sense of shared history and ancestry, the feeling of at-homeness that belonging brings, and our pride and honor in membership are values that both you and I recognize are realized by membership in the Sioux nation. We can then say that, without a mutual readiness to come to each other's aid against an oppressor, without mutual trust, and without a willingness to set aside self-interest in overcoming significant adversity, we will never be able to sustain those values. Solidarity is here conceived of as an instrument necessary to protect what we value. But what is the normative force of this argument? It is tempting to say that it is simply the force of the requirement that if you will the end, you are under a rational requirement to will the necessary means. 150 There are two problems. First, on this reading, your refusal to join should be understood as an instance of narrow irrationality – like willingly failing to take your ticket to board the plane – rather than an instance of letting down others. This seems to miss the moral import of the demand to commit. Second, the failure to commit doesn't seem like a failure of means–ends rationality. To see this, consider that it is open for someone to respond: ‘As long as you join in solidarity with others in fighting the oppressors, I don't need to; so failing to join is not an instance of narrow irrationality at all – indeed, it strikes me as the eminently prudent thing to do.’

This possible response makes evident what the moral force of the demand to join really is. When you, as an identifying Sioux, decline to join, you free ride on the attempts of others to salvage what is of value to all of us. Your failure is a failure of reciprocity for what others have sacrificed, or propose to sacrifice, to maintain the way of life that you also value. Suppose you join but then persistently fail to come to other solidaries’ aid in the pursuit of the struggle; here, too, we can say that your failure constitutes a form of free-riding. When others are disposed to come to each other's aid, this not only makes our overcoming mutual adversity more likely to succeed, but it also increases mutual trust (which includes, recall, reliance), which, in turn, makes cooperation more likely to endure in the face of hardship. 151 These are public goods that benefit you as an identifying and participating member of the Sioux; in failing to be similarly disposed, you accept the benefits without providing a fair return.

The account, I believe, generalizes beyond nationalism to other ways of life. Sharing a way of life as Catholics, or even as, say, mountain climbers, can, when adversity threatens, create both prudential and moral reasons for joining together in solidarity. It is important, however, that the moral pressure to join in solidarity stems only indirectly from sharing a way of life as such: the main source of moral pressure comes from considerations of fairness, from, that is, the benefits that fighting against adversity brings to those who share the way of life. This does not imply that identification is unimportant. Identification explains the investment one has in the way of life, and hence a good part of the benefits one derives from it; without those benefits, the argument from fairness would cease to apply. If one, for example, is a fellow national but does not identify with others on that basis, and one does not otherwise benefit from the way of life that national belonging realizes, 152 then the argument from fairness will cut little ice. 153 Identification is, then, best understood as an enabling (though not necessary) condition for the argument from fairness to apply, but does not by itself generate the moral pressure to join in solidarity with others. I return to this point below, when comparing different grounds of solidarity, and when discussing whether there are reasons for identification in the first place.

3.2Role

In this subsection, I turn to reasons for solidarity grounded in sharing a role. A role is a position defined by social or legal convention to accomplish a task or set of tasks within a larger, often institutional, division of labor. Husband, teacher, worker, and machinist are examples of roles. Appeals to solidarity on the basis of role are common, especially within the workers’ movement (though, as we will see, the basis for solidarity in the workers’ movement can also be understood as grounded in shared condition rather than merely a shared role). Take Ralph Chaplin's ‘Solidarity Forever’, a union classic:

It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade,

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;

Now, we stand outcast and starving, 'mid the wonders we have made. 154

The identification with each other as workers is grounded, on this understanding, in the role we play with respect to the product of capitalism: we make what is essential to our civilization; the capitalist is but a parasite, who exploits our labor and leaves us destitute. We ought, then, to band together in solidarity to fight against the system that oppresses us. Note that the basis is not sharing a cultural identity or way of life: there is little that, say, the hairdresser and the waste collector need to have in common by way of culture or way of life to be in solidarity. It is also not experience: again, hairdressers and waste collectors may experience their roles (or the oppressive hand of capitalism) in very different ways. And, while workers may come to share a cause if they band together, the basis of identification is simply being a worker, prior to joining together in solidarity.

It is helpful to introduce, at this point, the distinction between sharing a role and sharing a condition. This is because it is possible to interpret the worker's movement in either way. If identification is based on workers as producers, then the grounds for mutual sympathy, understanding, and shared normative orientation typical of de dicto identification is the role. If, on the other hand (or in addition), identification is based on workers as oppressed or exploited, then the grounds for sympathy, affirmation, understanding, and shared normative orientation is the condition shared by workers. This is important, since there will be variation in the way in which different categories of workers are oppressed, and variation in their role vis-à-vis the reproduction of capitalism. 155 The character of the reasons for joining together will also be subtly different, depending on which type of identification is emphasized. It is unclear, in particular, how the role of worker as such within socialism can provide grounds for joining together. Workers are not joining together in the name of their role as producers or to protect a shared project they are engaged in (what would the project be – the reproduction of capitalism?); the role understood in this way is, after all, the cause of their oppression. The ground for joining together in solidarity is better understood as the condition that workers find themselves in, namely, the condition of labor-based exploitation. This also makes better sense of the grounds of their mutual sympathy, affirmation, and understanding, and makes it clear that the pressure to generate a shared normative orientation will come from a need to understand the sources and character of their oppression, rather than a shared understanding of their role as producers (independently of their oppression). We will return to oppression as a source of identification below.

Clearer examples of identification based on role, and of the solidarity that might emerge from them, are sectoral roles. The basis of identification, in such cases, is the role understood as the basis of joint project that is valued and affirmed by its participants (contrast the role of worker in the socialist movement, which is often not valued and affirmed as such). Take medicine, for example. Medicine is a profession that has a long history and a rich structure of shared norms and standards. 156 Most doctors think of themselves as playing a part in a larger practice that serves to promote health and fight illness. They think of themselves as contributing in a vast division of labor that, when viewed as a single profession, serves those final ends. The final ends of medicine, in turn, structure doctors’ everyday deliberation and collaboration with other doctors. Doctors are not only responsive to what other doctors are doing, but seek to ensure that their efforts are coherent across smaller-scale pursuits, say, within a hospital. And the administrators of a hospital, in turn, seek to coordinate their activity with other hospitals within a health system, and that health system in turn is part of a larger, global pursuit of the same ends. The shared orientation to such final ends is the basis for the mutual sympathy, affirmation, understanding, and normative deliberation among doctors.

Identification, as we have said, is not yet solidarity. Among doctors, identification can become solidarity when there is some form of adversity that threatens the shared project animating doctors. A good example is the series of junior doctor strikes in the UK in 2016. Junior doctors were offered a new contract by the Conservative government that, among other things, would have the effect of increasing the number of weekends that doctors would be forced to work (at a lower net pay) and would have an adverse impact on those more likely to work part time, and hence on women. Doctors worried that such long hours were not only unfair, but also likely to diminish the quality of service due to fatigue; the adverse effect on part-time workers was also said to make the gender pay gap worse. What reasons did doctors in general – not just junior doctors – have for joining and supporting the strikes, and hence for acting in solidarity?

Again, one source of reasons is the injustice borne by junior doctors. But, as before, this is a general reason flowing from a natural duty, and applies to anyone in a position to contribute (including non-doctors). Among doctors – including senior doctors – who identify with the project that unites them, there is an important prudential reason: to protect the project from being undermined by a hostile and misguided government. The reason is prudential because the success of the project of the whole, and of doctors as participants in the project, contributes to doctors’ well-being. If we are senior doctors, identification with medicine as a profession, and with other doctors on that basis, guides and structures an important part of our life, and defines not only who we are but also how we want others to perceive us. When we fight on behalf of the junior doctors, we therefore also fight for ourselves (even if, as senior doctors, we have no direct personal stake in their success). If we fail to turn up, then, there is an important sense in which we betray ourselves; there is an important sense in which we can be criticized, as a result, for lacking integrity.

But morally, just as was the case for way of life, the mutual sympathy, affirmation, understanding, and normative orientation that are constitutive of identification do not, on their own, provide any reasons for joining in solidarity. The strongest reasons come, rather, from considerations of fairness: should a junior doctor (or, indeed, any doctor who identifies with the project) fail to support their colleagues, they would be free-riding on the efforts of others to protect what is of value to them. Only a doctor that, as a matter of justice, correctly supports the government's proposed contract – or has independent, overriding reasons for not striking – would be justified in not acting in solidarity with her colleagues. 157 If she nonculpably (but falsely) believes that the government's contract is worth supporting, then, though a free-rider, she has an excuse: her failure to support the strike, though mistaken, makes her a wrongdoer but not blameworthy.

Another important source of identification grounded in project-based roles is citizenship. Understanding the sense in which citizens can identify with one another on a basis other than cultural belonging or way of life is key, I believe, to the idea of, as it is often called, civic or social solidarity. It is often said that welfare state institutions, for example, are products of solidarity, or governed by a principle of solidarity, but it is just as often unclear what is meant. 158 If solidarity is understood as simply a willingness to share resources, or a commitment to social justice, then it is too unspecific. There are many instances of sharing resources that do not count as instances of solidarity, and identifying solidarity with social justice dissipates the theoretical and practical interest of solidarity as a value distinct from social justice. The distinctive nature of civic solidarity, however, can be preserved if we understand it as grounded in the identification of citizens with one another. But on what basis? The nationalist will say that the identification that binds citizens together is an identification based on a shared way of life. But there is another way that I want to defend here, that does not ground civic solidarity in identification rooted in sharing a culture but in sharing authorship of a set of institutions. 159 As in our other examples, the moral pressure to act in solidarity will depend on the presence of identification, but be ultimately derived from demands of fairness. On this view, solidarity supports demands of justice by grounding such demands in the nature of civic identification, rather than in general, natural duties to support just institutions. (I return to the relationship between justice and solidarity in the next section.)

Citizens who identify with their role as citizens conceive of their joint participation in reproducing, reforming, and authoring common institutions as providing normative orientation. The argument is an analogue of Bourgeois's case for solidarity as interdependence. Where Bourgeois emphasizes our myriad contributions, through work, to the joint social product, this account emphasizes a more fundamental contribution to the basic structure that makes our contribution through work to the joint social product possible in the first place. We recognize, as citizens, that it is not only through our state's official political acts – its legislative, executive, and adjudicative output – but also through our support of informal conventions and norms that we collectively author the basic institutions that both constrain and enable individuals’ pursuit of the good life. When citizens identify with one another as citizens in this sense, they recognize that their ability to generate a marginal product of labor, or to invest in productive resources, and thereby to gain, depends on the contributions of millions of others in a complex division of labor that is backed by a set of basic social and political institutions. 160 They therefore recognize that their public, civic, economic, cultural, and political activity has a cumulative effect on the prosperity of the state as a whole, and are disposed to seek an understanding of how their coordinated actions impact on the prospects of other citizens. When things go well, their collective achievements as authors contribute to their own sense of well-being; when things go poorly, they perceive their own lives as less flourishing as a result.

While there is, of course, profound disagreement about the character and requirements of the values and ideals that underlie common institutions, citizens who identify share a readiness to define them through deliberation (and sometimes more open conflict); this process of reflection, deliberation, and conflict reflects a disposition to see common institutions as their own, as reflecting their collective deliberation and disagreement. Indeed, it is more often than not the characteristic lines and modes of disagreementrather than areas of consensus – that form the focus of identification among citizens. This is a direct result of the fact that identification is not, on this understanding, grounded in a shared culture or in a shared set of values, but in the exercise of shared agency as a people. 161 Citizens recognize that their peers come from multiple, sometimes only thinly overlapping cultural backgrounds. 162 Their attachment to common institutions is founded on what they do together, which defines, in part, who they are. (Note that nationalists have it the other way around: who we are should define what we do together.)

Solidarity becomes a demand of citizenship, then, when citizens recognize that sustaining and reproducing common social and political institutions requires commitment to overcoming, together, the adversity created by imperfect markets; legacies of racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of arbitrary exclusion and oppression; poverty and (especially work-related) illness; vulnerability to foreign interference, disruption, and economic dependence; pandemics; and so on. Solidarity also requires mutual trust, which, in this context, implies a tolerance for difference and a recognition that sustaining a common life requires respect for (sometimes foundational) disagreement, and a willingness to meet others halfway. 163 Solidarity, finally, demands a disposition to come to each other's aid in overcoming adversity, which, in this case, can be interpreted as a willingness to divide the joint social product fairly and in a way that recognizes the contributions of each to the functioning of the whole. 164 As before, there are two sources of rational pressure at work here. First, there is prudential pressure from our identification with the project; to fail to act in solidarity with others with whom we identify is then a failure of integrity. But there is also moral pressure from a sense of fairness: should citizens who identify fail to act in solidarity with others – by failing, say, to support policies that divide the social product fairly, or to be disposed to engage others with tolerance and respect, or to do their part in maintaining, reproducing, and reforming common institutions that are just or nearly just – they would not only be contributing to injustice but also free-riding on the efforts of others to maintain the public good. 165

One might think my rendering of civic solidarity bears some similarity to constitutional patriotism. 166 There is a crucial difference. According to the constitutional patriot, what binds individual citizens into a people is a shared commitment to constitutional principles and values, such as justice and liberty – where, importantly, this commitment takes particular historical forms in different polities according to their specific histories and political cultures. By contrast, on my account, civic solidarity is based not on a shared affirmation of principles and values, but on the basis of a horizontal identification with other citizens (and, indeed, residents) for the role they play in authoring and reproducing common institutions. Often such shared authorship will involve a shared commitment to values and principles but it need not. As I mentioned previously, it is possible for there to be deep disagreement about which such principles and values ought to govern our cooperation; as long as there is a shared intention to continue political and social life together, and there continues to be horizontal role-based identification, commitment to overcoming significant adversity, dispositions to share one another's fate, and trust, then there is enough for civic solidarity. 167

So far I have focused on project-based roles like medicine and citizenship. But there are also non-project-based roles that can provide a basis for identification and also, ultimately, solidarity. 168 I will focus on two. The first are activity-based groups like fraternities and sororities (such as the Alpha Kappa Alpha's), social and sporting clubs (such as a rowing club), and communal organizations (such as a masonic lodge). Most clubs and societies are not organized around a project but around an activity or set of activities. Membership in the society brings with it an organizing set of norms, expectations, rituals, and values that govern interaction within the society. I classify such groups as grounded, ultimately, in a role because the basis of identification is participation in the activities of the group. This is why identification – and by extension solidarity – is generally stronger among more active members. A good example of solidarity involving such groups is the mobilization of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorors on behalf of a fellow sister, Kamala Harris. The AKAs (along with other Black sororities and fraternities) did an enormous amount of background work to get out the vote in the 2020 US presidential election. While Black (and feminist) solidarity undoubtedly played a large motivating role, so did sisterhood 169 (and so did, more indirectly, membership in a Black sorority or fraternity, whose founding principles go hand in hand with activism and anti-racism). 170

The second are relationship-based roles. Being a parent, for example, is a role, though it is not based on a project: there is (except in very special cases) no project of parenthood which all parents take themselves to be participating in. Rather, parenthood is a social role defined by a position within a culturally inflected division of labor (on this reading, even non-biological caregivers, for example, can be parents). And, of course, parenthood can be a powerful source of identification. Seeing someone, for example, struggling to keep themselves sane while trying, and failing, to balance work and family responsibilities can easily trigger each of the epistemic, affective, and normative components of identification we discussed earlier. And it can also provide a basis for acting in solidarity with other parents when the government cuts subsidies for childcare.

3.3Condition and experience

In this subsection, I discuss identification based on condition and on experience together. This is because the differences between the two are subtle and often confused. To illustrate the idea of a solidarity grounded in shared experiences, I gave the example of being a cancer survivor. In this subsection, I change example to engage an important illustration of contemporary solidarity, namely the idea of sisterhood, or solidarity among women as women. Is sisterhood best grounded in identification with a way of life, set of experiences, condition, or cause? Answering this question will also show how our distinctions between possible forms of identification can be used for a normative evaluation of different conceptions of solidarity. This is relevant inter alia when we take the internal perspective of a group seeking to establish a ‘we’ as a basis for acting in solidarity: What forms of identification should provide the basis for our solidarity? Which ones shouldn't? (Note that there could be more than one ground – indeed, there could be, among different members, different and overlapping bases for acting in solidarity.) While I focus on sisterhood in this subsection, it should be clear that the account could be used to illuminate other examples, too. 171

It seems uncontroversial today to assert that, given diversity among women, the basis for sisterhood should not be shared experiences of womanhood. This has, by now, become a staple of the feminist literature: the experiences of Black, working-class, Egyptian, Irish, lesbian, trans women (including the intersections among any of these categories) will be vastly different – so different that it would be exclusionary and divisive to base identification and, in turn, a politics of solidarity on a canonical list of such experiences. Trying to come up with such a list will, more often than not, turn out not to represent something universal about women but something altogether more partial, namely the perspective of those privileged few who have the power and access to forge and disseminate the list as ‘canonical’ in the first place. 172 For many feminists, the response is to acknowledge (rather than repress) the radical diversity among women (including the ways in which race, class, sexuality, nationality, and gender intersect 173 ), and to build solidarity on commitment to a cause. 174 According to bell hooks, for example,

We understood that political solidarity between females expressed in sisterhood goes beyond positive recognition of the experiences of women and even shared sympathy for common suffering. Feminist sisterhood is rooted in shared commitment to struggle against patriarchal injustice, no matter the form that injustice takes. 175

Ending patriarchal injustice, on this picture, requires an acknowledgment that such injustice will take different forms in different circumstances, and that sisterhood requires coming to terms with the way that race, class, nationality, and so on, can divide and exclude women among themselves.

This way of framing the question raises a puzzle. If the best way to understand sisterhood is to see it grounded in commitment to a cause or coalition against injustice, then what distinguishes, if anything, solidarity among feminists and solidarity among women? After all, men can (and should be) feminists. Men can (and should) recognize the marks of patriarchal injustice and fight against it. Emphasizing a common commitment to fighting patriarchal injustice gives rise to a solidarity grounded in identification based on a cause (on which more below). But, once any kind of common experience (or common essence) is rejected as uniting women, what role is there for a politics of solidarity grounded in identification among women? What kind of identification, if any, ought to ground sisterhood among women as women?

Referring to critiques of the category woman as united by a set of shared experiences (of the same kind I mentioned above), Iris Marion Young writes:

I find the exclusively critical orientation of such arguments rather paralyzing. Do these arguments imply that it makes no sense and is morally wrong to talk about women as a group or, in fact, to talk about social groups at all? It is not clear that these writers claim this. If not, then what does it mean to use the term woman? More importantly, in the light of these critiques, what sort of positive claims can feminists make about the way social life is and ought to be? I find questions like these unaddressed by these critiques of feminist essentialism. 176

I mention Young at this point because I find her discussion of what might unite the type woman illuminating as a possible basis for identification and solidarity among women as women – a basis that, in turn, promises to be less vulnerable to the diversity and exclusion critiques briefly alluded to before.

According to Young, women as a group form what she calls a series. A series is united neither by a set of intrinsic properties possessed by all members of a group, nor by a shared recognition of constituting a group, nor by a shared set of goals or experiences; it is united, rather, by a relation between persons and a set of socially conditioned material objects around which they orient their activity. The group of bus riders – who orient their activity around objects like bus stops, buses, and so on, and the norms, expectations, and patterns of behavior surrounding them – constitute a series. Similarly, radio listeners – who orient their activity around the radio and the norms, expectations, and patterns of behavior enabling and conditioning radio listening – are a series. And so are women. The primary material object around which women are expected to orient their activity is the sexed body. This is not the body understood as possessing a vagina, clitoris, breasts, and so on. Rather, it is the body as conditioned by social rules and expectations. 177 Young mentions menstruation, lactation, pregnancy, and childbirth as examples. Each of these activities is not just a brute biological fact but shaped by social practices that condition possible meanings and opportunities. The norms, expectations, and patterns of behavior surrounding the body, in turn, give rise to a range of further socially conditioned physical objects (such as clothes, cosmetics, tools, spaces, and so on), and hence further social practices. Together these reinforce two overarching social structures that position women as subordinate to men: heterosexuality (who desires and who is desired, who possesses and who is possessed) and the sexual division of labor (who does what, where, and how).

On this picture, women are those individuals marked out by the system of objects and social practices as occupying a particular position vis-à-vis men. The category woman is defined, that is, by the relation of individuals to gendered social structures rather than by any intrinsic properties they share. Young is keen to emphasize that a particular individual's response to how the structure positions her/him will be as variable as you like. Some will resist and challenge the positioning and expectations, others may internalize them, others will waver and become alienated. And, even more importantly for our purposes, some individuals’ response to the structure will be further conditioned by other aspects of their circumstances, including race, class, nationality, sexuality, and so on. There is no expectation, then, that women's (or men's) particular experience of the structure will be the same. What is the same is subjection to the structure, which is reproduced through myriad daily interactions, characteristic scenarios, institutionalized forms of behavior, expectation, and habit, and so on. 178

The analysis of women as a series also provides a possible basis for identification among women grounded in a condition shared by women: subjection to a subordinating gendered social structure. This does not imply, as we have seen, that women who identify in this way with one another have had the same experience of such subjection. Here we can draw contrast to identification among cancer survivors, which is based (we are imagining) on sharing a set of experiences. Identifying with others as a cancer survivor is identification that presupposes that others with whom one identifies have had cancer. The common experience is what motivates mutual sympathy, understanding, and an attempt to make sense together of that experience. But, as we have seen, making particular experiences the basis of identification among women is unnecessarily exclusionary, given the wide diversity of ways in which women experience their subjection to a gendered social structure. Identification based on condition promises to avoid these problems. Subjection to an oppressive social structure is like subjection to a system of law: two different individuals can be subject to the law – can be addressed by the system – without experiencing the weight of the law in the same way. 179

Notice that I shifted above from speaking of the concept woman (in my elaboration of Young's account) to the possibility of identification among women as women. The two ideas can come apart. One may, indeed, come to believe – as many feminists do – that there is no unified concept woman, or that the concept is unified, but not by the idea of oppressive subjection to a gendered structure. It would still be possible, on the picture I have drawn, to identify with other women who are oppressed by the gendered system on the basis of their shared condition. 180 There is, that is, no necessary congruence between the concept woman and the basis for identification among women. To illustrate: suppose you believe it is possible for there to be non-oppressed women – women who are not subordinated vis-à-vis men. 181 It is, on this view, not a necessary part of being a woman that one is oppressed. It might nonetheless be true that, in our world, all women are (contingently) oppressed, and come to identify with each other on that basis. 182

An intersectionality theorist may object that it is a mistake to say that there is a single gendered social structure. Each person, depending on their circumstances, is addressed by the gendered social structure in a fundamentally different way – so different that there is no sense in speaking of it as a single system. A Black woman's body, for example, will be gendered and positioned vis-à-vis men in different ways than a White woman's body, the body of a working-class woman in a different way than an upper-class woman's, and so on. The objector concludes that it would be just as arbitrary and inevitably exclusionary to identify with other women, who are positioned so differently, on the basis of a common condition as it would be to identify on the basis of a common set of experiences. 183

This is, I believe, a difficult objection to meet successfully. In a Youngian spirit, one might respond to the objection in the following way: Just as it would be mistaken to say that an employed and an unemployed immigrant within a single society are subject to entirely different systems of law, it is a mistake to say that White and Black women are subject to entirely different gendered structures. Within a single society and system of law, employment law and immigration law are interlocking and overlapping. 184 To be sure, there is no way to understand how unemployment affects immigrant rights without understanding how immigration and welfare law interact. However, although the employed and the unemployed immigrants’ legal rights will differ in basic ways (including their rights to stay, their right, in some cases, to access welfare, and so on), there are other ways in which they are addressed in the same way by immigration law (including their rights to access emergency care, their rights to appeal immigration decisions, and so on). Drawing the analogy, we can say that the same is true of Black and White women in, say, the US. While it is certainly true that Black women's bodies are positioned by the gendered social structure in different ways than White women's bodies, there are many dimensions of the gendered social structure that address Black and White women in the same way. The objects, norms, expectations, and practices of the gendered social structure address Black and White women, across many dimensions, in common (which is not to say that their experience of that subjection will be the same). That common subjection, the response concludes, can be a basis of identification among women as women, just as the common subjection to immigration law of an employed and unemployed immigrant can be the basis of their resistance to that law as immigrants.

I am not sure what to make of this kind of response, since it will certainly meet with the following counter: the response begs the question about whether there really is only one gendered system of subjection with different manifestations (analogous to a complex system of law with different parts), or rather many more such systems (analogous to different systems of law each with its own internally complex structure). Indeed, it is difficult to come up with examples that survive the objection: norms and practices regarding beauty, the sexual division of labor, the way heterosexuality is enforced, and so on, all do seem to address Black and White women differently (and upper- and lower-class women, and women of different religious backgrounds). One cannot, I believe, adjudicate between the two views by employing solely empirical criteria. Adjudicating requires asking: What is the point – politically, socially, and ethically – of insisting on one or the other reading? If one believes that the struggle for woman's liberation needs more solidarity among women as women, then one might be attracted to the Youngian view. 185 If, on the other hand, one believes that, historically, the call for sisterhood has been exclusionary, partial, blinkered, and divisive, and that it is more important to focus on fighting injustice than to seek an elusive common ground, then one will more likely opt for the intersectional–coalitional view. For our purposes, we need not come to a conclusive view; it is enough if we see how a politics of solidarity founded on identification among women on the basis of a shared condition (rather than a shared set of experiences, or a shared cause) might proceed.

We can now step back and, as in the other cases we have discussed, ask: Does identification based on a shared condition (or set of experiences) give us reason to act in solidarity? We need to consider two aspects of solidarity for a full answer. The first is whether and why identification on the basis of condition or experiences gives us reason to join together to overcome adversity. The second is whether and why identification on these bases gives us reason to come to each other's aid in the face of adversity. As before, I am not doubting that identification makes individuals more likely to join together to fight adversity and to come to each other's aid. I am asking whether this is more than an irrational bias toward those who are ‘like us’, whether, that is, we have any special, identification-based reasons to join together and come to each other's aid.

With respect to the first aspect, identifying with one another on these bases implies, as we have seen, that the set of experiences or condition has an important and guiding place in our life. It is an important part of who we are. So when adversity threatens, it threatens us as cancer survivors, or as oppressed. We have, as a result, prudential reasons to join together to fight the threat. This is true even if we have no direct personal stake in a particular form of adversity (suppose, say, that some form of legal adversity is faced by oppressed members of our group in a different country), since our identification implies that we associate our own well-being with the well-being of the group. We are better off when and because all members of our oppressed group (or all cancer survivors) are better off. By fighting together, then, we protect something that we value together. As we have seen above with the Sioux and the doctors, we also have moral reason to join together to fight adversity when and because others have already begun to do so. If we stay back, we are free-riding on their efforts.

With respect to the second aspect, my identification with others, as we have seen, makes me more attuned to other solidaries’ needs, and more emotionally responsive to their suffering. This makes it more likely that I will come to their aid in ways relevant to our common struggle. But does the fact that I empathize give me any moral reason to give their needs special attention? It strikes me that it does not. 186 Empathy attunes us, and so will make it more likely that we will aid, but it does nothing to give our solidaries’ needs any moral priority. However, the fact that the shared set of experiences or a shared condition defines a socially salient group that defines who we are, and that structures and guides our life, gives us, in the same way as before, prudential reasons to aid others with whom we identify. By contributing to other members’ good, I contribute to the good of the group, which is a key part, in turn, of my own good.

There is, however, also a closely related moral reason to do so, which is evident when we consider that the disposition to mutual aid characteristic of solidarity is also a public good. When we, as identifying members, are prepared to aid one another in the pursuit of our collective goals, we will be better able to overcome the adversity that threatens us. Mutual aid will also promote trust, which, in turn, will reinforce identification; mutuality creates, that is, a virtuous circle. Therefore, if I fail to aid others in ways necessary to accomplish our ends, then I will be, as in the other cases we have discussed, free-riding on others. Others can criticize me for benefiting from a practice that is necessary for our success in overcoming adversity – a success that, as someone who identifies with others on one or more of our bases, I welcome and endorse.

So far we have discussed oppression as a shared condition that can form the basis of identification within a group. Another, more general, shared condition that is perhaps the most proximate to solidarity is sharing a common fate or destiny. We share a common fate when we have been thrown together by adverse circumstances. We have already seen one example: being in a train wreck together. In the next section, we will consider another: being prisoners of war together. 187 Rainer Bauböck provides a powerful case for thinking of solidarity within the EU as founded on sharing a common fate. 188 In the eurozone crisis of 2009–12, for example, the fate of Germany, along with all other eurozone countries, was inevitably tied to the fate of Greece. This was a direct result of the nature and degree of interdependence between European nations. Sharing a fate is a powerful basis for the sympathy, normative orientation, and mutual understanding that constitutes identification. This kind of case is proximate to solidarity because the basis for identification among those who share a fate is the fact that they each face the same adversity. If they organize to overcome it, are disposed to come to each other's aid in that struggle, and begin to trust one another, then their collective action becomes an instance of solidarity. The basis of their identification is, then, also the object of their solidarity.

3.4Cause

Identification with others on the basis of a cause is the most straightforward of our sources. We identify with others on the basis of a cause when we each share commitment to that cause, and know that we all share it. Our mutual commitment provides a basis for mutual understanding, sympathy, and normative orientation as we try to work out the best way of promoting our cause. 189 Solidarity naturally emerges from such identification whenever our cause requires defense. We join together to promote our cause against the adversity that threatens it. ‘I am a Berliner’ is, for example, an act of identification with West Germans in Berlin on the basis of a cause. When conjoined with a commitment to share the fate of West Germans against Soviet expansionism come what may, and as a statement of collective resolve against the Soviet Union (embodied and realized via NATO), it also becomes an act of solidarity.

Note that identification with others on the basis of a cause is, while perhaps less durable, the least restrictive of our bases: we need not share a way of life, role, set of experiences, or condition to share a cause. Indeed, while sharing a cause can be the basis for solidarity, sharing a cause can also be a product of solidarity in each of our examples. When junior doctors, Blacks, citizens, the Sioux, and so on, band together to fight adversity, they promote a common cause together. In addition to identifying on the basis of role, experiences, condition, or way of life, then, those engaged in solidarity can also identify on the basis of the particular cause that has motivated them to action (to fight the government, overcome racial injustice, fight inequality, and so on). This provides a further ground for commitment, trust, and mutual aid that is lacking with those who identify, but do not join the struggle.

Identification on the basis of a cause also explains how members of outgroups can join in solidarity as allies with members of ingroups. When you join the junior doctors’ strike against the government, though you are not a doctor, you act in solidarity with junior doctors; when you, as an Asian-American, protest injustice at a BLM event, you act in solidarity with Blacks; 190 and so on. 191 You do not act as a result of your identification as a doctor or as Black, or even as a result of an identification grounded in a shared fate, but as someone who identifies with a cause. While it would be reasonable for members of ingroups to be less trusting of outgroup allies, 192 trust can be won through being reliable and committed over time. As trust grows, so does the mutual sympathy, understanding, and coordinated normative orientation constitutive of cause-based identification.

3.5Reasons to identify in the first place

So far, I have assumed that individuals identify in one or more relevant senses; I then explored when and why reasons of solidarity arise. We might wonder: Can there be reasons for identifying in the first place? If so, what kind of reasons are they? These reasons are best assessed by considering what is at stake when someone feels alienated from the way of life, role, set of experiences, condition, or cause that determines their membership in the social group. In this kind of case, we assume that one is already a member of the relevant group (either by choice, as in the medicine example, or nonvoluntarily, as in the racial group examples). We set up the question in this way because we are not asking whether there is reason to adopt a role, cause, or way of life in the first place, which would bring in independent concerns that are not relevant to our inquiry.

To see the variety of considerations in play, consider these possibilities:

Doctor (role). Jane, though a doctor, does not take practicing medicine to have a very large role in her life, feels no particular emotional attachment to it, and does not put the enlarged epistemic perspective that comes with her skills and experience to any other use than in completing her day at work. She sees that medicine is a worthwhile activity, of course, but her attachment to the profession and to her fellow doctors qua doctors does not extend much further than that. It is a job. She does not do more than is strictly required by her contract, and she takes no interest in strikes and the like unless they have a narrow impact on her own life.

African-American (condition). Jerome, though Black, does not take being Black to be very important in his life, and he does not identify with other Blacks as Black. He finds the concept of race alienating and based on false beliefs about genetics and biology. He also does not find the idea that there is a Black culture plausible, and does not believe that focusing on a shared condition as ‘oppressed’ is very helpful as a basis for collective action. Indeed, he finds that the best way to overcome racial injustice is through a program of ‘racial uplift’ pursued via individual ingenuity, hard work, and grit. 193

Environmentalist (cause). Kate has been an environmental activist all her life. But now she finds herself alienated from it as a cause. She has grown cynical; she believes that it is too late, since the world is warming too fast for anyone to make any difference. She severs her ties to all the environmentalist groups and activities that had been central to her life before today. She still sees that environmentalism is a worthy cause, but she now believes it is hopeless.

Catholic Worker (way of life). John has lost his faith. He was active in his faith, going to church, developing his understanding of the Holy Spirit, and so on, until now. He has a crisis of faith that leads him to stay away from church, to stop going to confession, to cease seeing his Catholic friends, and to no longer feed the poor and homeless at the local Catholic Worker. He also no longer shows up to Worker protests against racial injustice, war, and inequality. He feels guilty about it. He feels he should rediscover his faith and struggles to find a way back.

Cancer survivor (set of experiences). Larissa has breast cancer, which is now in remission. But she would prefer not talking about it with anyone. She feels that the pressure from other cancer patients to identify as a ‘cancer survivor’ rings false. She doesn't feel she has any special attachment to others just because they happen to have had similar experiences in suffering a horrible disease.

What reasons might each individual have, if any, to identify? There may be, to be sure, prudential reasons. It may be the case, for example, that it would be good for Jane, Kate, Jerome, John, and Larissa to reorient their lives affectively, normatively, and epistemically in light of their shared role, way of life, and so on, and to identify with others on that basis. Their life might be more flourishing as a result. Whether or not they have such reasons will depend on the further circumstances of their life, and there is little in general that we can say. There may be general prudential reasons, of course, for any human being to identify with something – given the profound role that such identification usually plays in a human life and given the nature of our sociability – but such general reasons will rarely play a role in motivating anyone in particular. But whatever prudential reasons apply, there is little further normative pressure – other than the proffering of advice – that we can put on someone on this basis.

It might be thought, given the personal and intimate nature of identification, that there are no non-prudential reasons to identify with other members. This is a mistake: there are, I will argue, sources of normative pressure on individuals to identify that do not come merely from prudential considerations. In evaluating each scenario, we must be attentive to both the reasons each takes themselves to have (I will refer to them as a person's operative reasons) and compare them to the reasons they genuinely have (a person's reasons as such). 194 In the case of Jerome and Kate, for example, the reasons for feeling alienated do not stem from purely prudential considerations about what would make their life go better. Rather, their alienation stems from either moral judgments about what justice requires or from pragmatic judgments about the best means to achieve given ends (or both). For example, Jerome agrees that Blacks are subject to racial injustice; he just has very different ideas about what might best promote the cause. These are his operative pragmatic reasons, reasons he takes himself to have about the best means to a given end. He may be wrong about this. If he is wrong, then he does have reason to identify with other Blacks as oppressed, since this is the best way to achieve racial justice (which he continues to believe is worthwhile). Notice that it is much the same with Kate, the environmentalist, who takes herself to have pragmatic reasons to abandon the cause, but may be wrong about them, given her continuing commitment to stopping climate change. In each case, then, there can be non-prudential reasons for them to revise their pragmatic beliefs in a way that would give them reasons to continue identifying.

Jerome, unlike Kate, may also have moral reservations. He may feel that, even if he were to agree that racial solidarity is necessary to overcome injustice, most Blacks who identify with one another on the basis of their oppression do not merely have different ideas about the nature, causes, and consequences of racial injustice, but radically incompatible ones that would make their joint pursuit of justice impossible. Again, he may be wrong. Whether he is wrong turns on substantive empirical and moral questions about racial injustice and about the appropriate degree of toleration for disagreement within the broader group. If he is wrong on either account, then there is normative pressure on him to change his attitudes toward other Blacks. If he is wrong, then he has, that is, (genuine) reasons to be more empathetic, to do more to promote a common perspective on the causes and consequences of oppression, and to take the joint struggle against injustice more seriously than he is currently doing. If he does have such reasons, he also has, a fortiori, the same reasons to act in solidarity with other Blacks as we discussed above in standard non-alienated cases. Kate's situation is analogous: she may also have moral reservations about identifying with other environmentalists on the basis of the cause if she believes other environmentalists have come to have radically incompatible ideas about climate change. And, just like Jerome, she may be wrong in her judgments.

To be sure, even if Jerome recognized the reasons to change his attitudes, this may not be enough to bring him to a full identification with other Blacks, just as it may not be enough to restore Kate to full identification with other environmentalists. Identification, as we have seen, has normative, epistemic, and affective dimensions. But all three together may not be forthcoming. Both Jerome and Kate could end up in a situation like John, the Catholic Worker. John believes that he has conclusive reasons to seek out and understand his fellow Workers, but he lacks the desire. He lacks the desire because he lacks the belief required for his faith. Although he sees that he has reason to believe, these reasons do not motivate him to believe. 195 He just can't quite summon the faith that is the foundation of his identification; without his faith, that is, he finds he no longer identifies with other Catholics in the normative, epistemic, or affective senses. In these kinds of cases, the person is divided against themselves. John may still be criticizable if he does not act in solidarity when this is needed and expected of him, given that he still sees all the reasons that support his identification as a Catholic Worker, and hence all the ways in which he still benefits from their activities. 196 This only may be the case, however, because it might also be true that, given the magnitude of his personal crisis, it would be unfair to expect more of him. He could be excused, as it were, rather than justified in his refusal.

But what if Jerome, Kate, and John were to entirely lose their interest in racial justice, environmentalism, and Christianity? What if, that is, they no longer took themselves to have reason to pursue any of these things? For all three, there would now be general reasons to identify that flow from natural duties to support justice-promoting endeavors. These are reasons, as we have seen before, that apply to anyone. It may be that Jerome, Kate, and John can best realize this duty by identifying with anti-racism, environmentalism, and Christianity, respectively. This might be the case because of their special, past connection to each of those groups – a connection that might make them more effective in discharging the duty successfully. But this is entirely contingent. It may be that, in virtue of their profound alienation, none should realize the general duty through the paths they once did; they would be less effective, were they to try. In that case, their energy would be better spent elsewhere. Or they may feel that they would justifiably prefer to discharge that duty in other ways, given their alienation. There is very little, I believe, that one could say if they chose to do so.

In assessing this more thoroughgoing alienation, does it make a difference that Jerome is a member of a nonvoluntary group (African-Americans), and Kate and John are not (environmentalists and Christians)? Even though Jerome would gladly dissociate himself from Blacks as a group (since, recall, he believes that the concept of race is a vestige of a racist past that has no use today), he cannot do so. The way race is socially constructed prevents him from dissociating himself. Kate's (and John's) situation is different. When Kate ceases to believe in the environmentalist cause, and ceases to associate with other environmentalists, she ceases to be an environmentalist. The same thing is true of John (given standard understandings of Christianity). Leaving aside past ties that they have in virtue of their past memberships, they are now just like any third party. Does this difference in their situation make any difference to their respective reasons to identify? No. Note that fellow environmentalists, Christians, and Blacks are likely to feel let down by Kate, John, and Jerome. They will feel let down because they expect that those who identify as members of the group will continue to do so, since their contribution is needed for the success of the causes in which they participate. But these expectations, though understandable, do not, I believe, create any special normative pressure to continue identifying. 197

Can identifying African-Americans rightly say to Jerome that he will continue to benefit from their collective efforts, in virtue of his being Black, in a way that Kate and John no longer benefit after they have abandoned environmentalism and Christianity? It strikes me that, once we ask this question, the grounds for fair play have shifted, with important consequences. In the previous scenarios, we were assuming that, were Jane, Jerome, and John to have recognized the moral and strategic reasons that applied to them, they would have come to identify with the members of their social group. Here we are supposing that, even were they to have recognized the moral and strategic reasons that applied, they still would not have come to identify. This is because, in our scenario, each of the three has lost interest in the cause as such. They might recognize the moral and strategic reasons as important ones for others who identify, but not themselves. In this case, if fair-play considerations apply, they must apply not in virtue of the benefits of identification but in virtue of other, more indirect benefits. The benefits to Jerome would come not from identification with a cause that he identifies with in principle, but from merely being Black; similarly, Jane and John benefit now merely as members of the general public. These fair-play considerations are much weaker because the benefits are narrower. To be sure, Jerome benefits as Black, and so more than a member of the general public. But still the benefit is indirect and no longer mediated by the structure of his identifications (and the reasons supporting those identifications). And so it is with John and Jane. They might, then, have general moral reasons to support collective efforts, but they now lack moral reasons to identify.

The cases of Jane (the doctor) and Larissa (the cancer survivor) are subtly different in virtue of the fact that the source of their identification is not as intimately bound up with struggles against injustice. With respect to Jane, does she have reason to identify with her fellow doctors? What kind of fault, if any, is her failure to do so? To be sure, she is less public spirited than her peers, and less invested in her profession. Prudentially, she may have reason to take more of an interest. Her public-spiritedness would also be praiseworthy in itself. (But is there really any requirement for her to be public spirited with respect to her profession? Wouldn't she be just as praiseworthy were she to show that spirit in other areas of her life?) Does she have any other reason to regret her alienation from her work? Once again, fair-play considerations are relevant. Her success in her profession – dependent on the flourishing of the profession as a whole – depends, it seems reasonable to assume, on more than doctors merely ‘doing their job’. It requires doctors to be engaged in steering and guiding the profession and in maintaining its ethical, professional, and administrative standards as well as adapting them to changing circumstances. A practice guided by a common project supported by doctors who identify with their role and with each other as occupants of the role makes everyone, including Jane, better off. Given her reliance on the profession as a project, it seems much less plausible for Jane (when compared to Jerome and Kate) to sincerely and correctly hold that those benefits are not worth the cost. Furthermore, it can't be argued that Jane, who has options to being a doctor, doesn't accept those benefits voluntarily. 198 Fair-play considerations give her reasons, if not obligations, to take her profession and its standards more seriously, to orient her work around those common standards, to seek out and engage other doctors on the project, and to do to her part in shaping them. While (objective) reasons to believe, desire, and act intrinsic to identification then apply to her, even if she were to accept them, she may still find herself alienated. In that case, she will be in a situation like John's.

Larissa's case is, I believe, different. Given her views about her own cancer, there is very little reason for her to identify with other cancer survivors (again, leaving aside any prudential considerations). She may benefit from the organizing work that other cancer survivors do, but her benefiting will be indirect. Here it is plausible for her to say that, though she benefits, the organizing work, while laudable, is not worth the cost to her of contributing. She does not rely on other cancer survivors’ identification in the way that Jane relies on other doctors’ identification.

The conclusion we should draw is that reasons to identify once alienation has set in are scarce. In one sense, this is as it should be: identification is an intensely private and intimate matter. It is through our identifications that we become who we are, or discover who we would like to be. It would be surprising if there were many sources of non-prudential reasons for identifying with a cause, role, way of life, set of experiences, or condition. Once again, this is as it should be: if there were too many reasons to identify – especially if we think of reasons to identify that extend beyond cases of alienation – then we would be quickly overwhelmed. 199

3.6Is identification a core condition?

So far, I have only discussed when and why identification can provide reasons to act in solidarity with others. I have not argued that such identification is paradigmatic of solidarity; for all I have said so far, it could be that there are core instances of solidarity that are not grounded in any kind of identification. In this subsection, I want to suggest that identification on the basis of one or more of the grounds discussed characterizes all core cases of solidarity.

The argument proceeds by trying to find the most likely cases of solidarity without identification. It strikes me that the most plausible such test case is the following. In summer 2020, Jeff Bezos posted a message of support for BLM on the Amazon website, followed by an e-mail exchange in which he defended his decision against an angry customer (who, in a familiar refrain, claimed that all lives matter, not just Black lives). Did Bezos act in solidarity with BLM? Let us suppose that the BLM movement (or the vast majority of its adherents) welcomed the message (so there is no question of symmetry), and would come to Bezos’ aid should he need it in ways related to the joint effort. But let us further suppose that Bezos is cynical in his support: he does not really identify with the cause that BLM represents. He merely supports it because it will be good for business if people believe he is sincere. He will, as a result, be willing to sacrifice narrow self-interest where this will be public and serve to prove his sincerity, and be willing to pay some short-term reputational costs to secure the long-term advantage as he sees it. We might imagine that this was the case when he wrote the response to the angry customer. Suppose, finally, that his gamble fails, so that he ends up hurting his business even in the long run. From the outside, it will be impossible to tell whether he is sincere or not; he is effective at masking his operative reasons; and indeed it looks particularly plausible that he is sincere, since his gamble has failed to pay off. In this case, he does everything that an identifying participant in the movement would do, but for cynical reasons. Did he act in solidarity? No. Genuine identification is paradigmatic, whether it be identification with a cause, role, way of life, set of experiences, or condition.

But, one might wonder, isn't it possible to act in solidarity with others – by meeting conditions 1 to 4 from section 1 – but fail to identify with other solidaries on any basis? To be sure, one might think, acting in solidarity usually goes along with identification on the basis of a cause, role, way of life, condition, or set of experiences, but this need not always be the case. Take John, the Catholic Worker. He believes he has reasons to identify with other Catholic Workers on the basis of his faith and his commitment to faith-based justice, but he feels alienated. He has lost his faith and hence his enthusiasm regarding Worker activities. But suppose he still shows up, trusts the others to do their part, maintains his disposition to aid fellow Workers when necessary, and so on. Or suppose there is someone, Paula, who meets conditions 1 to 4 for a given struggle against adversity – the Catholic Worker, or BLM – but doesn't take that struggle or its group-based causes to be very important in her life; she lacks the normative, epistemic, and affective orientation toward the struggle or other participants that is intrinsic to identification.

These are limit cases that show something important: cases of solidarity that do not involve any identification are hard to come by. It strikes me that John's case can be classified as an instance of solidarity precisely because he sees he has reason to identify, even if he can't bring himself to actually identify. It is the exception that proves the rule. If we suppose that Paula in addition to failing to identify also sees no reason to identify with other participants in the struggle, then it strikes me as less plausible to say that she is acting in solidarity. Indeed, we may reasonably wonder why she goes out of her way to participate in the group's activities, given that she doesn't identify. She may say that she does so because justice requires some action, and this is the group whose struggle she has adopted, but any other group would have done just as well. If this is the case, I think we have reason to doubt whether she is truly acting in solidarity, or just in support of a worthy cause. Indeed, if other members knew of her reasons, they might also have reason to doubt her commitment. But even if we resist this conclusion, we can grant that the case is unusual, and seems indeterminate precisely because it only partially satisfies the paradigmatic conditions.

3.7Sharing interests or values

One might reasonably wonder, at this point, why I haven't mentioned shared interests or values as potential grounds of solidarity. 200 The reason I haven't is that they don't strike me as precise enough to warrant inclusion alongside the other grounds I have discussed; indeed, any case of shared interests or values that strikes us as relevant can be captured more informatively by one of our other grounds. It is often said, for example, that workers’ solidarity is grounded in their shared interests. Now, in one sense, this is true, but it does not really distinguish between interests shared in virtue of sharing a role, set of experiences, or condition. Sharing any of those further properties will give one shared interests, but they will do so in very different ways. Furthermore, if sharing interests as such can give grounds for acting in solidarity, and for identifying with one another, then it will become easy to confuse interest groups for solidarity groups. But interest groups – which are formed precisely to protect shared interests, such as the interests of consumers or pensioners – are not solidarity groups, precisely because they lack the identification among participants (e.g., affective, normative, and epistemic attitudes) and the willingness to share another's fate in ways relevant to the shared goal. Eliminating the idea of a shared interest as central helps, that is, to clarify things.

I hope it is clear that similar things can be said with respect to sharing values. 201 We might share all kinds of values, but that fact alone will not, except when one of our other bases is at play, normally give rise to identification, or, a fortiori, to acting in solidarity. Of course, sharing a cause or an aim will often reflect shared values, and I need not deny that. Furthermore, recall that, as we have seen, sharing values is not always necessary: people can act in favor of a cause they share, or act together to overcome significant adversity, even if on the basis of very different values or in the presence of serious disagreement on values. 202 Failing to share values (or interests – think of privileged outgroups who identify on the basis of a cause) does not preclude solidarity.

4Value

So far, I have discussed the normative specification of each of the variables in the general definition of solidarity. But we can also ask: Why and when does acting in solidarity have value? 203

Solidarity will often, of course, have instrumental value. As we have seen, when we are moved by considerations of solidarity, the joint actions and institutions that are the focus and result of our action will be more stable and robust in the face of foreseeable obstacles and unavoidable setbacks. And, when the attitudes constitutive of solidarity are common knowledge, trust and therefore reliance among participants is likely to grow, as is their willingness to share one another's fates. 204 This much seems uncontroversial. But does acting in solidarity have any non-instrumental value? I believe it does. Before we proceed, however, we need to be clear about what kind of non-instrumental value I will be discussing.

Sometimes the idea of non-instrumental value is associated with the idea that something must possess its value impersonally. 205 If something is non-instrumentally good, that is, it must be good simpliciter – we are led in this way to imagine whether that thing would be good completely independently of any human interest – rather than good for someone or something. Furthermore, if something is good for someone or something then it must be good because it is useful for that someone or something: knives are good for cutting (by which is meant that knives are useful for cutting), flour for baking, arrows for shooting, nourishment for growth. Therefore, the argument goes, whenever something is good for something else, this must be because it contributes to it, and if it contributes to it, then it is a means to it. It makes no sense to say, on this view, that something can be non-instrumentally good for something or someone. When we say that friendship is good for us we must mean that it is good because of its effects on our flourishing or well-being or happiness. On this picture, friendship contributes to well-being as a means to an end, and so instrumentally.

But this is a mistake: things can be non-instrumentally good for us. The mistake lies in missing that something can contribute to flourishing without being a means to flourishing. It can simply be constitutive of flourishing. Water is good for a plant because it is useful: without it, a plant cannot flourish. But the vigor and growth of the plant is good for it not in the sense that it instrumentally contributes to its flourishing. Rather, its vigor and growth make their contribution constitutively: they are what its flourishing consists in. We can say the same for goods like love, pleasure, knowledge that reflects one's interests and passions, the appreciation of beauty, and health. 206 Each of these is good for us (when they are good for us 207 ) not instrumentally, but constitutively. The presence of them does not lead to something else, namely our flourishing. Rather, our flourishing just consists in a certain arrangement of the goods of which it is made, just as something's being a statue just consists in a certain arrangement of the lump of clay of which it is made. Indeed, one way of showing that something is non-instrumentally good is to show that it contributes (constitutively rather than instrumentally) to our flourishing. This is what I will argue about solidarity: solidarity is non-instrumentally good, but it is non-instrumentally good for us, by which I mean that, in the right conditions, solidarity makes our life better.

Suppose that we will surely die at the hands of our oppressors. Do we simply let ourselves be killed, or do we die fighting together? Here our joint struggle has, let us suppose, no instrumental value whatsoever. It does nothing to promote our general cause, which is by now lost. We can even suppose that no one will ever come to know of our last battle against the oppressors. This kind of case serves to bring into relief the fact that, when we act in solidarity, we do not merely act so to realize the cause or to promote one another's flourishing. Rather, we act for the sake of each other and the cause. When I act for the sake of a cause or for the sake of another, my action is guided by more than just its instrumental significance to the realization of an end. My action is, we can say, expressive of my commitment both to the cause and to others; when I die fighting I manifest and make plain my double commitment. The question then becomes: What value does such expression have? Solidarity has non-instrumental value because the actions that are expressive of its constitutive attitudes, commitments, and sacrifices (conditions 1 to 4) instantiate non-instrumental values such as valor, trust, mutual commitment, and reciprocity.

The expressive account of the value of solidarity therefore shares a feature with a purely individual action of the same general kind. The non-instrumental value of an individual's struggle against some adversity can also, that is, be explained by the first expressive consideration just canvassed, namely the commitment to a worthy cause, and the valor required by its pursuit. But acting in solidarity adds another feature: in struggling together, we not only express our commitment to a worthy cause and the valor of our pursuit but also the worthiness of our commitment to sacrifice for one another. Our valor has non-instrumental worth, but so do our mutual commitment and the reciprocity that it brings with it. 208 G. A. Cohen characterizes exactly the kind of reciprocity I have in mind in this way:

[In communal (or perhaps solidaristic would be more appropriate here?) reciprocity] there is indeed an expectation of reciprocation, but it differs critically from the reciprocation expected in market motivation. If I am a marketeer, then I am willing to serve, but only in order to be served: I would not serve if doing so were not a means to get service. Accordingly, I give as little service as I can in exchange for as much service as I can get … A non-market cooperator relishes cooperation itself: what I want, as a non-marketeer, is that we serve each other … To be sure, I serve you in the expectation that … you will also serve me. My commitment to socialist community does not require me to be a sucker who serves you regardless of whether … you are going to serve me, but I nevertheless find value in both parts of the conjunction – I serve you and you serve me – and in that conjunction itself: I do not regard the first part – I serve you – as simply a means to my real end, which is that you serve me. 209

When I act to serve you, and you act to serve me, it is the conjunction of the former and the latter that has (non-instrumental) value, rather than merely the former in addition to the latter, taken separately. Again, recall the essentially relational character of solidarity: as a form of joint action, solidarity is made up of the symmetrical network of I–you relations and attitudes described above.

On the Cohen reading, the reciprocity constitutive of solidarity has value independently of its effects. But, leaving aside the other values instantiated by solidarity, why should we value solidaristic reciprocity as such? At first glance, one might think that the value of such reciprocity is exhausted by the fact that it contributes to the achievement of goals that would otherwise be unreachable. But I think Cohen is right to suggest that there is something more (although he does not explore what it might be).

To unpack why solidaristic reciprocity has non-instrumental value, it is instructive to return to the history of solidarity. Recall the role that solidaristic reciprocity plays as a counter to the fragmenting, divisive, and alienating forces unleashed by the rise of modern industrial societies. The anomie, isolation, and market egoism of modern society destroys the quality of traditional civic and social relations. Solidaristic reciprocity, it is hoped, could serve to replace the old ties with new ones. Solidaristic reciprocity becomes, then, not just a means of realizing objectives that we would otherwise be incapable of achieving, but also constitutive of a new kind of social unity among strangers – a unity grounded in a sense of collective resolve and joint responsibility. This social unity has, at its core, a common recognition that our individual flourishing inevitably depends on the actions of myriad others in an extensive division of labor, and hence that the flourishing of all is necessary for the flourishing of each. This aspect of solidarity is evident, as we have seen, in each of the main sources of our thinking on solidarity, namely solidarism, socialism, liberal nationalism, Christianity, and the social movements of the twentieth century.

We can deepen this account of social unity by considering it in light of Rawls's discussion of a well-ordered society as a social union of social unions. In those passages, Rawls draws a distinction between what he calls private society and social union. 210 Private society is the society established by the pursuit of self-regarding ends organized by common rules that work to the benefit of everyone. Market society is a paradigm (as is Hegel's notion of civil society). The value that marks such cooperation is efficiency: by following common rules, everyone is able to do better for themselves than they would have otherwise. Each actor views the scheme as a way of getting the best outcome for themselves. Cooperation is purely instrumental. In a social union, by contrast, participants see common rules as establishing the basis for a shared project in which each contributes to a collaboratively achieved and valued end. This end, Rawls says, is valued for its own sake. Examples include games, where the shared end is a ‘good play of the game’, as well as the arts and sciences, where the collaborative ends that are the product of the shared activity are complex and articulated over many generations.

The shared ends have non-instrumental value, but, Rawls argues, so does the very cooperation involved in producing and reproducing the activity that sustains those ends. The cooperation itself is non-instrumentally valuable because and insofar as it allows us to participate in the complementary excellences of others. Because of the complexity of all worthwhile human endeavors, no one person can realize all of the excellences of all of the valuable activities open to us. We must choose which excellences to develop over a life. In seeing our shared ends realized through the mutual learning, coordination, and adjustment of our talents and abilities with those of others, we rightly 211 take pleasure in the complementarity of our talents. We take pleasure, that is, in the fact that everyone's good is affirmed by the contribution of each, and in the fact that our cooperation permits the realization of activities that could never have been realized by any one of us alone.

But there is another aspect to the value of cooperative activity (one not noticed by Rawls). It strikes me as uncontroversial that the value of truly joint activity is conditional on the ends having some value. But it would be wrong to conclude that, therefore, we value the activity required to produce the ends merely instrumentally. Hume gives us an apt example in the case on the individual: we do not value simply attaining the solution to a difficult mathematical problem; we also relish the difficulty of thinking through and solving the problem ourselves. We face and overcome a challenge; we rightly take pleasure in the exercise of the capabilities that enable us to solve the problem. 212 Our agency is reflected, invested, and embodied in both the work and the solution; the work and the solution represent not only our skill but also the deeper values and commitments that led us to it; we see ourselves in them. Our knowledge of the solution, though valuable as an end, would not have the same meaning for us were it simply given to us. The working through therefore doesn't have merely instrumental value, but also non-instrumental value. The non-instrumental value of the activity is, however, conditional on the value of the end. 213 If the end were trivial or uninteresting or otherwise not worth pursuing, then the activity – challenging though it might be for us – would be much less non-instrumentally valuable than when it is in the pursuit of something interesting or truly difficult.

We can clarify the structure of this argument with the idea of an organic unity. An organic unity exists whenever a unified whole – a whole, that is, that possesses more structure and internal complexity than a mere collection of items – has a value that is greater than the sum of the values of its parts taken independently. Knowledge of the stars, for example, has (non-instrumental) value; it is, in our terms, good for us for its own sake. And so does the ardent pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But notice that the latter would be much less good for us were it to lead to ignorance and falsehood or were it directed to knowledge that is trivial; by contrast, the value of the pursuit is immeasurably heightened when it leads to genuine knowledge that is also significant. 214 Furthermore, the knowledge alone would be less good for us if we possessed it without actively seeking or wanting to possess it (or, indeed, if we wished we didn't have it). 215 In such cases, the whole ardent-pursuit-of-knowledge-where-the-knowledge-acquired-is-genuine-and-important has greater value for us than the value of the knowledge itself (taken independently) plus the value of the ardent pursuit of knowledge (taken independently). And so it is with the Humean example we just considered. Solving a truly difficult and interesting math problem has (non-instrumental) value. Ardently pursuing a solution to a math problem also has (non-instrumental) value. But when the ardent pursuit succeeds, and is in the service of a truly challenging problem, the value of the pursuit is much greater than it otherwise would have been.

The truly joint activity of a social union has the same structure. The pleasure we take in our endeavor, as an activity, is the same as Hume's working through a difficult mathematical problem. But in social union, the activity acquires another, cooperative, dimension. We not only see our own individual skills, commitment, and values reflected in the work we do as individual participants, but we also see our skills, commitment, and values transformed and mutually adjusted through the you-and-me reciprocity discussed above. The working through is now on an entirely different scale. It is not, however, merely a matter of scale. Once our skills are developed and exercised collaboratively, we also begin to relish the mutual accountability to others that our collaborative pursuit requires. 216 We acquire obligations to others; we rely on one another; we begin to trust each other; we develop and apply standards to each other that are intrinsic to our activity and the norms governing it. The mutual obligations and mutual subjection to shared norms are welcomed as a reflection of our joint commitment to the ends we pursue together. When our cooperative activity is successful, we then rightly take pleasure in the realization of our collective agency: just as in the individual case, we see ourselves (as a unitary ‘we’) reflected in the outcomes we realize. It then makes sense to say that we not only identify with each other, but also with our successes and failures as a group.

It strikes me that solidaristic reciprocity has the same properties; indeed, solidaristic reciprocity seems like a paradigm example of social union. The mutual recognition at the heart of our identification with one another – whether as, for example, workers, citizens, women, fellow nationals, or human beings – triggers a demand to act together to overcome our shared adversity. In acting together, we realize the force of our joint resolve, and rightly take pleasure in the commitment, complementarity, and trust that has made it possible for us to do much more than what any one of us could have done alone. At the same time, we see our collective agency invested and reflected in the activity required to realize our joint ends. We take pleasure in the complex exercise of those reciprocal, mutually adjusted, and mutually reinforcing capabilities that have enabled us to overcome forms of adversity that would have been impossible to overcome alone. 217 The collective activity of overcoming, then, just like the mathematical working-through, comes to have non-instrumental value. While this value is conditional on the worthiness of our ends, it is still valued for its own sake.

But, one might wonder, if solidaristic reciprocity has non-instrumental value, then does that commit us to saying that solidarity among the Mafia also has non-instrumental value? No. On the picture I have just painted, the non-instrumental value of the trusting, cooperative you-and-me reciprocal activity constitutive of solidarity is, as we have seen, conditional on the value of the ends it promotes. If the ends are wicked – as we are assuming the ends of the Mafiosi are – then the solidarity enacted to realize them becomes disvaluable as well. This goes for all forms of solidarity bent to wicked ends: racist groups, terrorist cells, xenophobic nationalists, and so on. While they count as forms of solidarity if all our conditions are met (and they take themselves to have reasons to identify with one another in overcoming some significant adversity), their solidarity has negative value. This is as it should be: imagine a world in which the Mafiosi disrupt an entire political order, and do so in solidarity, and a world in which they disrupt the political order, but without solidarity. Is the former in any sense better than the latter (though both are bad, all things considered)? If anything, it seems that the former is worse than the latter. Solidarity's non-instrumental value is amplified by whether it promotes good, or bad, ends: if solidarity's ends are good, then the non-instrumental value is all the greater; if they are bad, then its non-instrumental value is all the worse. 218 Solidarity in the service of a valuable end is an organic unity.

4.1Comparison to justice

I want to close this section with a reflection about the relation of solidarity to justice – a reflection that will, at the same time, also allow us to highlight the distinctiveness of the concept I have outlined. 219 Solidarity is both broader and narrower than justice, whether we understand justice as the domain of institutional morality (as, for example, Scanlon does 220 ) or of enforceable duties (as Kantians usually do 221 ). It is broader in five senses. First, it can involve reasons to act that may be neither enforceable nor institutional; indeed, sometimes we may have reasons to act in solidarity with others that, while pre-emptive of a wide range of lower-level concerns, are not obligations. Think, for example, of the way calls for solidarity in many social movements – especially where action may be dangerous – entreat one to participate but do not require it as a duty.

Second, there are many cases where solidarity demands more than merely justice. Justice may often allow us to act in ways that solidarity would not. Justice, for example, may permit you to fire someone who has not done their job well. But solidarity may (noncoercively) demand that you do otherwise, especially if the person in question (let us assume they are well-off and have options on the job market) has been a committed and loyal member of the firm and has gone above and beyond the call of duty in times of adversity. Your identification with them on the basis of a project-based role, and your mutual commitment to sharing one another's fate, gives you reason to refrain from firing them, even though it would be fully permissible at the bar of justice to do so. Or, consider Britain's decision to exit the EU. Here we may say that there is no justice-based reason for Britain to remain (as long as its divorce from the rest of the EU is concluded on fair terms). But there may be reasons of solidarity for Britain to stay in, especially given the string of refugee and financial crises of the past few years, and given the trust, commitment, and willingness to share Britain's fate that the rest of Europe has displayed since its accession to the EU. 222

Third, solidarity and justice may pull in opposite directions. 223 Solidarity, for example, might demand that, as a judge, we give special consideration to members of one's own (say, oppressed) group, whereas the impartial demands of our office may prohibit it. In cases like this, it seems plausible to argue that justice should take priority, and so the demands of solidarity are not morally binding. But there are other cases where we may be more torn. Solidarity may, for example, demand that we stand by our solidaries in self-defense, even if they are in the wrong. Here it may be unclear what is the right thing to do; there may be no way to act that leaves us without moral loss. 224

Fourth, there are cases where solidarity may aid in making the application of justice more determinate. Here solidarity expresses what we might call (in a Kantian vein) the internal aspect of justice – the attitudes, relations, commitments, and structure of deliberation that ought to lie behind and support a sincere affirmation and realization of principles of social justice. 225 Focusing on the internal, attitudinal dimension of justice might, for example, allow us to describe a societal ethos in ways that mere attention to higher-level institutional principles would not. Illustrations are not hard to find. As a matter of justice, it may be unclear, for example, how much we may demand to do work that we would willingly do at lower rates of pay. Considerations of solidarity may make it evident in such cases that the leeway we are allowed is much narrower than mere attention to the principles themselves might have led us to believe. 226 Our identification with one another as members of an organization, and our recognition of the support our organization has been willing to give us in the past, may, that is, gives us additional project-based reasons not to get as much as we can when at the bargaining table. Another example is the following. It may be the case that it is indeterminate, according to justice, whether we, as Northern Europeans, ought to send monetary compensation to receiving states in Southern Europe in the midst of a refugee crisis, or whether we ought, instead, to open our borders to relieve the pressure. Considerations of solidarity – of what sharing another's fate requires in the midst of crisis and suffering, especially in light of our identification with one another as participants in a worthy supranational project – may make it clear that justice, rightly understood, requires us to do the latter and not the former.

Fifth, solidarity can be seen as a crucial motivating factor in realizing principles of justice. One might say, for example, that identification with others on one or more of the bases we have discussed gives people reasons to engage in justice-promoting collective actions that are independent of justice. In such cases, reasons flowing from identification with others can reinforce reasons of justice. 227 (Of course, this is not to deny, as we have seen, that the two can also run in opposition to one another.) If we identify with one another on the basis of shared roles, conditions, experiences, causes, or ways of life, we will then be more likely to set aside self-interest in securing what justice requires for each one of us. Returning to our discussion of role-based identification among citizens, identification secures the resilience, robustness, and determination of a political community even when there is profound disagreement regarding what justice requires as well as broad and deep ethnic and cultural diversity. Where and when we identify as authors of common institutions, we are less likely to feel alienated from political life, or to feel that politics does not affirm and include our good.

Seen in this light, solidarity need not be as exclusionary as it is sometimes claimed to be. 228 We have already seen how, even within a single political community, solidarity can be grounded in what we together do rather than in who we are. 229 In the discussion of sisterhood, we have also seen how the danger of exclusion has been confronted from within an ethic of solidarity among women as women. We must also remember that solidarity, while it does require special concern among those with whom one identifies, does not require an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Solidarity requires adversity, not opposition. For example, a truly cosmopolitan solidarity could be grounded in our mutual exposure to climate change, where mutual exposure counts as a condition that we all share, and on the basis of which we can identify with one another. 230 A wider and more encompassing cosmopolitan solidarity could, furthermore, be based on our role as authors of international institutions or as contributors to an international division of labor that reinforces rather than alleviates inequality. Solidarities at different levels, finally, can be mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive: our narrower solidarities can be marshalled in support of our broader ones, and our broader ones can contribute to the flourishing of our narrower.

Solidarity is, however, also narrower than justice. There are two ways in which it is narrower. First, duties of justice may arise between individuals who share no identification with one another (and no reason to identify) and create no further demands to join in collective action. Negative duties of justice provide an example. I have argued that demands of solidarity, on the other hand, only ever arise in the presence of identification. Reasons to act in solidarity, that is, must be grounded in identification with others on the basis of a cause, role, condition, set of experiences, or way of life. But, as we have seen in section 3, if one does not already identify with others on one or more of these bases, there is very little non-prudential normative pressure that we can put on another to identify. This should not be surprising: the normative, epistemic, and affective degree of commitment required by solidarity far outstrips what is required – by way of our attitudes rather than our actions – to meet the demands of justice. The nature of our identifications is intimate and personal, precisely because such identifications in large part define who we are (and how others see us). 231 In principle, it is possible, as Kant noted, for us to comply with the demands of justice whatever our internal attitudes toward that compliance are. Not so with respect to solidarity, where the attitudes are essential. This makes solidarity a rare, but also precious, public good.

Second, solidarity has much more descriptive content than justice. Justice most often refers to a set of principles that applies to institutional settings. Solidarity refers to a set of practices with normative and evaluative significance. If the account that I have offered is correct, it refers to a distinctive way of acting together. As we have seen, on some views, the concept of solidarity is treated as thick, as combining both evaluative/normative and descriptive elements. 232 This is the case, for example, if one believes that for two or more individuals to act in solidarity, the actions and attitudes involved must either be morally permissible, morally required, or good in some other way. On the view I have defended, by contrast, the concept of solidarity can be deployed in normatively and evaluatively neutral ways. Recall, for example, that though we can rightly say that the Mafiosi act in solidarity, their solidarity lacks value. Whether something is or is not solidarity, and whether it is good, are, on my view, two separate questions. But on either view, the concept's descriptive content goes far beyond the content of justice as a concept, which is, indeed, usually treated as thin.

As I mentioned in the introduction, solidarity therefore lies within the wider class of what we might call associational ethics – the ethics of life in associations and within social relationships that extend beyond relations among intimates. 233 Other members of the class of associational ethics include the ethics of larger social and economic collectivities, such as corporations and social movements. This area has been much less studied than the ethics of family and friendship, on one hand, and the classical concerns of political justice such as the state, human rights, and international relations, on the other. By bringing solidarity to the fore, I have tried to suggest that it is a value that is worth studying more carefully in its own right and for its own sake.

4.2Silent and passive solidarity

I now turn to an important objection that will allow me to clarify the overall account, and especially the role of the evaluative considerations that have been central to this section. Michael Zhao starts an article on solidarity with the following examples:

A prisoner-of-war is secretly offered release by his captors, who know that his father is an important figure in the military. He decides to remain in captivity in solidarity with his platoon mates.

A young girl is undergoing chemotherapy for leukaemia, which has caused her hair to fall out. Her parents and older siblings shave their own heads in solidarity with her. …

Marie is a young woman living in East Germany in the late 1980s. On the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall opens, reuniting East and West Germany after 44 years of separation. A group of young people from both countries have climbed atop the wall and spontaneously begin singing the Deutschlandlied, a song of German unity. Marie, watching from her own home, sings in solidarity with them. 234

These kinds of examples may seem to pose a challenge to my account. In each of them, there is an action by an agent, but the agent is not acting together with others. There is no sense, it seems, in which the prisoner-of-war [POW], the young girl, or Marie are doing their part in some joint activity. But they are (except for Marie) symbolically sharing one another's fate. While not sharing anyone's fate, Marie signals her support for the cause, with which she identifies. If I am right about solidarity being a form of joint action, then what is there to say about such cases?

Let us take the POW first. I think there is an evident way in which his action does in fact count as a form of acting together. When he forgoes being freed, he is now in a position to stand with his fellow soldiers. He is now available for coordinating, overcoming resistance, and so on. He is doing his part in the joint activity of resisting the captors. He is also giving them strength by showing his willingness, and by strengthening their collective resolve. Indeed, from this perspective, maintaining resolve and fortitude in the midst of suffering is itself a joint action, in which they all participate and play their respective roles. Similar things can be said with respect to the young girl's family. Their symbolic action strengthens their collective resolve to fight, together, the cancer.

But now suppose that we bring the example closer in line to Marie. Imagine that the soldier's refusal to be freed will not be communicated to his platoon mates, that it will not affect the probability of the platoon's being freed, and this is known by the refusing soldier. His refusal will have no effect on the other soldiers, who all believe he has been freed. On this description, there really is no joint action. Like Marie's singing, there is no cooperation and no mutual aid.

These are, I believe, limit cases. On one hand, they do not fit well with the history of solidarity (none of the predominant traditions in which solidarity has figured takes such cases as significant). But, on the other, they do share some important features with the central cases we have been discussing throughout. There are two ways in which such cases are relevantly similar. First, they only make sense to us as instances of solidarity, I want to claim, in the shadow of nearby forms of possible joint action. The soldier's actions, in the normal course of events, would have formed part of a joint action; in the normal course of events, people like Marie are there to participate in the joint action. It is also germane here that the relevant action takes the form that it would have taken had the action been joint. For example, had Marie merely raised a glass to the supporters, or yelled out ‘hurrah’, the action would have been an instance of showing support, not of solidarity. Similarly, had the family merely commiserated with one another regarding the young child's condition, this commiseration would not have been solidarity. Without the shadow cast by a nearby joint action, such shows of support and self-sacrifice might be laudable but they do not count as solidarity. Solidarity requires us to stand together.

The second way in which the cases are similar is that they are instances of the same expressive value discussed in this section. In Marie's case, they express commitment to a worthy cause that is shared by others with whom she identifies. When she sings the song she acts for the sake of the cause and for the sake of others who act together to promote it, even if her own action does not promote it, and does not help anyone. In the soldier's case, the action expresses his commitment to his fellow soldiers, and his willingness to suffer alongside them. He acts for their sake and for the sake of the cause, even if his actions are futile. In this sense, they therefore share an important feature with paradigmatic forms of solidarity. What they lack, however, is the other feature of solidarity that makes its value distinctive, namely the non-instrumental value of investing our agency in forms of cooperation that aim at overcoming, in ways that no individual could do alone, weighty forms of adversity. Both actions do not play a role in a wider, collective action, they are not instances of overcoming adversity together, and there is no mutual aid. This is what makes them limit, or borderline, cases. The conclusion I think we should draw is that they are the exceptions that prove the rule: while we can classify them as instances of solidarity, if we want, we should not classify them as central, but as peripheral or incomplete, and as parasitic on the paradigmatic forms that we have discussed throughout.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued for an account of the nature, grounds, and value of solidarity. I end with a list of the main claims I have defended.

  1. Solidarity is the name of a practice that has evolved since the early nineteenth century. My aim has been to introduce a concept that can capture the distinctiveness of the practice, and that can be used to develop normative and empirical conceptions of solidarity across different contexts. The account should be assessed, therefore, according to whether it (a) is useful in elucidating the practice and its development over the past two centuries, (b) captures what is distinctive about solidarity compared to related phenomena, and (c) makes sense of what we find valuable and normatively compelling in solidarity. It should not be assessed by asking whether it tracks our linguistic intuitions.
  2. Solidarity is a complex and distinctive form of joint action in which participants take themselves to have reasons to act together in virtue of identifying with one another on the basis of a way of life, role, condition, set of experiences, or cause.
  3. Both de re and de dicto identification have three constitutive components: epistemic, affective, and normative.
  4. Solidarity can be grounded in merely de dicto identification, and hence can extend beyond one's circle of intimates and friends.
  5. Joint action of the relevant kind requires (1) an intention to overcome, together, significant adversity; (2a) a willingness to set aside narrow self-interest; (2b) a commitment not to bypass other participants’ wills; (3) a disposition to share one another's fate; and (4) mutual trust.
  6. One can understand the general concept of solidarity as a formula whose values can be fixed according to context. Depending on one's theoretical and/or practical interests, this allows for the development of both empirical/descriptive and normative/moral conceptions of solidarity.
  7. The general concept of solidarity can be used to make sense of solidarity's history, and, in particular, to capture both the diversity and unity among five dominant traditions of thought and practice: solidarism, socialism, liberal nationalism, Christianity, and twentieth-century social movements.
  8. Unlike fellow-feeling, solidarity, although grounded in forms of identification that have an affective component, is not itself an emotion, sentiment, or feeling.
  9. Unlike mere support for a worthy cause, solidarity requires acting together to achieve ends that no one could achieve alone and a willingness to share other participants’ fate in that pursuit.
  10. Unlike charity or altruism, solidarity is symmetrical and omnilateral, rather than asymmetrical and unilateral. The account of solidarity defended here therefore departs from common usage, which is more permissive.
  11. Unlike special responsibilities grounded in a sense of preexisting community, solidarity must involve acting together against significant adversity. Picking up my brother from the airport is not an instance of solidarity, even though I am discharging a special responsibility grounded in preexisting community, viz. the family.
  12. While there are limit cases of solidarity that involve individual action that is not coordinated with others (recall: the prisoners, the POW), these only make sense in the shadow of nearby forms of joint action (e.g., where joint action would have been preferred but was not possible). They are therefore the exceptions that prove the rule.
  13. My identification with you on the basis of a way of life, role, condition, set of experiences, or cause gives me both prudential and moral reasons to act in solidarity with you when adversity threatens. My identification reflects the fact that I value the relationship (grounded in way of life, etc.) between us. This gives me prudential reasons to join the struggle. But I also have moral reasons of fairness to join, flowing from what is required to maintain what is of value to each one of us.
  14. Does someone who is a member of a group, but alienated from the way of life, cause, etc., that grounds the identification among members have reasons to identify? Of course, there can be prudential reasons, if such identification would make our lives better. There is also normative pressure to identify when our alienation is based on mistakes regarding the reasons we take ourselves to have. Given that identification involves affective elements that are not under our direct voluntary control, we might also be in a position where we see that we have reason to identify but fail to do so.
  15. Solidarity has both instrumental and non-instrumental value. The non-instrumental value of solidarity has three components. (i) Solidarity instantiates the non-instrumental value of, inter alia, mutual commitment, where what is valued is not just my standing by you, or your standing by me, but the conjunction of the two. The value of this kind of mutual commitment is evident in thinking through cases in which we prefer struggling together against adversity than surrendering, even if we know we will be overwhelmed. (ii) Solidarity instantiates a form of non-instrumentally valuable cooperation in which we each participate in the complementary excellences of all, and take pleasure in the collective realization of ends that none of us could achieve alone. (iii) When we act in solidarity, we also rightly take pleasure in the fact that we can see our collective agency reflected in our joint, coordinated, and beneficial activity; we can say, for example, not only that justice was done, but that we did it.
  16. The non-instrumental value of solidarity is, however, conditional on the promotion of good ends. This is true of many activities that we value for their own sake. As Hume notes, we value, for example, the working-through of a difficult mathematical problem for its own sake, but we only value it on condition that the solutions we reach are worth reaching. If the solutions were trivial or boring, the activity would lack non-instrumental value. And so it is with solidarity: we value the activity in the ways specified in 15, but only if they promote good ends. This is as it should be: Mafia and terrorist groups may act in solidarity, but we are not thereby forced to say that their solidarity has non-instrumental (or instrumental) value.
  17. Solidarity is both broader and narrower than justice. It is broader in the following five senses: solidarity (i) can involve reasons that are neither enforceable nor institutional; (ii) can require of us things that principles of justice alone would leave open; (iii) solidarity can pull in the opposite direction to justice; (iv) can sometimes be invoked to make justice more determinate; (v) can play a motivating role in complying with the demands of justice. However, solidarity is also narrower than justice in two senses. First, duties of justice may apply to individuals who do not identify with one another (and have no reason to identify with one another), and have no reason to join together in collective action. Negative duties of justice provide an example. Second, justice most often refers to sets of principles that apply in institutional settings. Solidarity, by contrast, refers to a set of practices. The concept of solidarity has, therefore, much more descriptive content than the concept of justice.

Solidarity is not just a fuzzy stand-in for diffuse feelings of togetherness, sympathy, or community. It is also not synonymous with a disposition to give to others in need. It is a distinctive social practice for an age anxious about its increasingly fragmented, unequal, and divisive politics, and hungry for forms of collective resistance that can right the balance.

1 Prainsack and Buyx 2012.
2 Vasak 1979; Wellman 2000
3 See, e.g., Shelby 2009; hooks 2015a; Scholz 2010.
4 See www.constituteproject.org (accessed May 15, 2023) for a searchable list of over 200 constitutions across the world. See also the instructive discussion in Brandes 2021. Constitutions refer to solidarity in a wide variety of contexts. I list several of them: background inequality among regions within the country (e.g., Argentina, Chile, Spain, Germany); ethnic, linguistic, and religious conflict (e.g. Bangladesh, Spain, Nepal); social rights provisions (e.g., Poland, EU); intergenerational justice (e.g., Belgium, Portugal); terrorist attacks and natural disasters (e.g., Bolivia, EU); national unity (e.g. Thailand, Vietnam, Portugal); expressions of support for other socialist and/or postcolonial countries or for pan-Africanism (e.g., Cuba, Cameroon, Mozambique, Nicaragua). For the EU, see, e.g., Ross and Borgmann-Prebil 2010; Sangiovanni 2013; Somek forthcoming.
5 See, e.g., Derpmann 2015, p. 85: ‘There is plainly no distinct philosophical concept of solidarity that equally supports the notions of solidarity with humankind, towards the unfortunate and the oppressed, and among a revolutionary army or a football club.’
6 See, e.g., Scholz 2010.
7 See, e.g., Bayertz 1999b; Stjernø 2005.
8 See, e.g., Banting and Kymlicka 2017, Introduction.
9 See, e.g., Bayertz 1999b; Brunkhorst 2005.
10 Cf. Scholz 2010, pp. 18–21.
11 Cf. Van Parijs forthcoming, who writes: ‘In this enterprise, I shall be guided by my own linguistic intuitions, and hence probably by the way the relevant words are used in French more than in other languages. This may account for differences with what readers more familiar with other languages may regard as the best explication of the concept.’
12 See, e.g., Dworkin 1986. On some problems with Dworkin's attempt to make law into what he calls an ‘interpretive’ concept, see Plunkett and Sundell 2013b. My essay is, more broadly, an attempt at ‘conceptual engineering’. See, e.g., Cappelen and Plunkett 2020. The particular form of engineering I am deploying assumes that we should take solidarity to be a social kind determined by historically evolving social conventions, norms, behaviors, expectations, and background circumstances. My account is intended to track this kind, not to reproduce the semantic values paired with current word usage. The idea, then, is that we need to reorganize and sharpen our basic concept of solidarity to better track the social phenomenon; as I point out in the text, current usage has, in many cases, led us astray. On social kinds, see Mallon 2016; Millikan 2000, pp. 18–20; Boyd 1991; Godman 2020. In section 2, I will argue that the concept becomes salient as a response to the breakdown of traditional ties of kinship, guild, and church, and responds to a need to find a large-scale form of social unity among strangers capacious enough to sustain a willingness to sacrifice for others. A parallel here is to the concept of sexual harassment. While the behaviors and practices tracked by the concept have been around for centuries, the concept only emerges in the late 1970s (for this history, see Brownmiller 1999; Fricker 2007, pp. 149ff). Once the concept comes into usage, in turn, it transforms the very category itself, including the meanings and possibilities of action and reaction associated with it (for other analogues, see Hacking 1999; Mallon 2016, chs 2 and 8). I think a similar pattern characterizes solidarity: the underlying pattern of dispositions, norms, behaviors, and attitudes has been around for centuries, but it only becomes theorized as a distinctive phenomenon, and enters public and social discourse, in the nineteenth century. Once it does, solidarity as a category of action becomes transformed as people begin to think of themselves as acting in, and out of, solidarity with others. (See below, second section and Sangiovanni ms.b)
13 See the useful discussion of the importance of conceptual history to understanding which concepts we should use (and which we shouldn't) in Plunkett 2016.
14 See also Derpmann 2015, p. 84.
15 Rorty 1989, p. 190, for example, refers to solidarity as a feeling.
16 There are several differences between the account here and Sangiovanni 2015. This essay identifies a single concept of solidarity that can unite different traditions (rather than defending one tradition against others), explains how to use the concept to generate particular empirical and normative conceptions (and to distinguish more clearly between them), clarifies the symmetrical rather than unilateral nature of solidarity, provides an account of the value of solidarity, compares solidarity to other related or structurally similar concepts, including justice, love, and charity, amends the specific conditions required of joint solidaristic action (most importantly, this essay includes a discussion of the significance of identification – for more detail on the differences in condition, see below, note 26).
17 For the importance of identification, see also Shelby 2009, p. 68.
18 Cf. the way identification as and with is presented in social identity theory in, for example, Hogg and Hains 1996, pp. 295–7.
19 On the role of imagination in identification, see Wollheim 1974.
20 Laplanche and Pontalis define the psychoanalytic (Freudian) conception of identification in the following way: identification is a ‘psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 2018 [1973], p. 205). See also Scheler 2017 [1923] on sympathy, and the necessity of keeping the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ separate when feeling-with another and Lugones 1987 on ‘world-travelling’.
21 Wollheim 1974, p. 191.
22 On the importance of the affective dimension in understanding the identification that underlies solidarity, Carol Gould writes that empathy is required to ‘understand the specifics of others’ concrete situation, and to imaginatively construct for oneself their feelings and needs’ (Gould 2007, p. 156). See also Bartky 2002, ch. 4, and Lu 2000, p. 256.
23 On vicarious pride and shame, see also Feinberg 1974, p. 237; A. E. Taylor 2015, p. 133; Mason 2000, p. 23. On the idea that identification with a social group can transform reasoning from an ‘I’ to a ‘we’ perspective, see also Sugden 2000, 2003. From a social identity perspective, see also Kramer and Brewer 1984, p. 1045.
24 Nota bene: The structuring role of identification need not extend over an entire life. The structuring and commitment may hold even over a brief period. As long as, during that period, the object of one's identification structures one's life in all the ways listed, that is enough. Thanks to Zofia Stemplowska for discussion on this point.
25 Cf. Scheffler 2010.
26 I defend a similar account of the conditions for solidary collective action in Sangiovanni 2015. Here are the differences: (a) (1) is stated in a way that is ecumenical with respect to the dominant accounts of collective action and shared intentionality (see also note 28); Sangiovanni 2015, by contrast, was committed to the view that shared goals without shared intentions were sufficient (for the importance of shared intentions rather than merely shared goals see, for example, Searle 1990); (b) trust is included as a core component of solidarity (otherwise agents who merely happen to share a goal and who do not expect one another's reliance could count as acting in solidarity); (c) the account contains a discussion of the importance and role of ‘sharing another's fate’, which is left unspecified in Sangiovanni 2015; (d) the conditions require identification as a trigger, whereas Sangiovanni 2015 does not.
27 On the importance of the fact that participants must intend to advance a shared goal (in our case, overcoming significant adversity) in part by way of the intentions of each in favor of the shared goal, see Bratman 2014, pp. 50–6, esp. p. 55.
28 The idea of acting with the intention of ‘doing one's part’, that is, must be further analyzed to make it non-circular. The account of solidarity I offer is meant to be ecumenical with respect to how it should be analyzed, as long as the account is scalable to larger groups. There is some doubt, for example, whether Bratman's account of shared action (Bratman 2014) – which depends on individuals’ each intending that we J – is scalable (see, e.g., Shapiro 2014). Bratman himself leaves it to others to figure out how (and whether) it might be adapted for larger groups (see Bratman 2014, p. 8). Gilbert 1996; Kutz 2000a; Tuomela 2013; Sugden 2000; Searle 1990, by contrast, are clearly intended to be scalable. The way I have stated condition (1) is most similar to Kutz's formulation precisely to avoid the reference to a set of individual intentions that we J. Given that, in forming an intention, we must take ourselves to settle the matter of our J’ing just by our intending it, Bratman's way of formulating the shared intention looks too demanding for very large groups (for this critique of Bratman, see, e.g., Velleman 1997).
29 Gardner 2002. I have taken the simplified version of the example.
30 For this way of putting it, see Sugden 2003.
31 See note 28.
32 Cf. Tuomela 2013, who argues that the we-mode characteristic of solidarity groups requires a single group reason on which the group acts and a goal that is set by the group for the group. See, e.g., Tuomela 2013, pp. 41–2 and ch. 9.
33 Cf. what Malcolm X told SNCC workers in Selma, Alabama, just before he was murdered in 1965. He worried that though they were struggling for a just cause, America would turn its back on them: ‘I don't want to make you do anything you wouldn't do…. I disagree with nonviolence, but I respect the fact that you're on the frontlines and you're down here suffering for a version of freedom larger than America's prepared to accept’ (from an interview with Taylor Branch; National Public Radio Transcript, Saturday, April 4, 1998), quoted in Dawson 2003, p. 240.
34 For the contrast with the organizations that were part of the civil rights movement, see, e.g., Harris 2015; Tillery 2019. On new social movements more broadly, see, e.g., Della Porta and Diani 2020.
35 The umbrella organization the Black Lives Matter Global Network has an increasingly centralized structure, but it is not widely recognized as organizing and leading the movement on behalf of all its members. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Global_Network_Foundation (accessed April 9, 2022).
36 See, e.g., this interview with its leader, Bwalya Sørensen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8feE8cXf20 (accessed May 9, 2022).
37 See the comparison of US and Danish BLM movements in this study: https://rucforsk.ruc.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/59105903/Group_21_Black_Lives_Matter_Semester_project.pdf (accessed May 15, 2023).
38 For the most recent statement, dated June 10, 2021, see www.blmchapterstatement.com/no2/ (accessed May 15, 2023). See also the following press articles: www.politico.com/news/2020/12/10/black-lives-matter-organization-biden-444097 (accessed May 15, 2023) and www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/us/black-lives-matter.html (accessed April 15, 2022).
39 Cf. Shelby, who argues that ‘there are five core normative requirements that are jointly sufficient for a robust form of solidarity [identification with the group, special concern, shared values or goals, loyalty, and mutual trust]. By ‘robust’ I mean a solidarity that is strong enough to move people to collective action, not just mutual sympathy born of recognition of communality or a mere sense of group belonging’ (Shelby 2009, p. 68; see also May 1996, p. 44; cf. Feinberg 1973, p. 677). But, on this view, a reading group might exhibit all five features, and move its participants to do things together, and yet it seems strained to say that a reading group’s participants are in solidarity with one another. (Once again, it is strained not so much because it doesn't capture the ordinary English meaning, but because it seems to jar with the value and history of the practices in which the term has predominantly figured, and which make sense of the role we might want an account of solidarity to play.) It is also unclear, on this view, whether collective action is a necessary condition of solidarity, or whether two or more people can be in solidarity by holding the attitudes mentioned without ever acting together in some relevant sense. Might brothers be in solidarity by possessing all five of the listed attitudes, though they never act together in the pursuit of any goals, or come to each other's aid in any way? On whether shared values are necessary for solidarity, see section 3.
40 And so excludes cases of what Bratman calls ‘opportunistic sociality’ (see Bratman 2014, p. 72).
41 For the contrast between shared cooperative activity and shared intentional activity simpliciter, see Bratman 2014, pp. 86–7. Joint action in general, unlike solidarity, can tolerate severe coercion (as between a master and slave) as long as the coercion works to get the slaves to intend the joint activity as such, and the master intends to work by way of the slave's intention in favor of the activity. The only background coercion that would be compatible with solidarity, by contrast, is background coercion that is intended by all participants as a means of providing assurance (e.g., steeling one's will in cases of dangerous action or where the temptation to free-ride might be high); coercion designed to get another to intend the joint activity in the first place, as in the master/slave example, does not count as solidarity. For more on background coercion, see Sangiovanni 2015.
42 On commitments more generally, see Calhoun 2009.
43 If we take the idea of ‘debt’ metaphorically, then to be in solidarity one must be prepared – just as in the original Roman law formulation of a jus in solidum (from which our modern usage derives) – to take on another's debts as if they were one's own. For more on this history, see section 2.
45 www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2017/apr/23/london-marathon-runner-helps-exhausted-athlete-finish-race-video (accessed December 7, 2021). It is important that it is one marathoner sacrificing his own prospects of doing well sharing the fate of another marathoner. If it had been a general member of the public, and so no mutual identification with the cause of finishing the race together (and also a fortiori no mutual identification based on a shared condition or role), then it would have been an act of charity or aid, not solidarity. Thanks to Tom Parr for discussion.
46 The idea of ‘sharing another's fate’ therefore goes beyond the mere ‘disposition to help’ that Bratman identifies as key to shared intentional activity in general. See Bratman 2014, pp. 56–7. Solidarity is more demanding. However, it is important to note that participants in solidarity need not take each other to have obligations to share others’ fates (again, dangerous actions provide a good example). Cf. Gilbert 2000. It is enough if they take themselves to have weighty reasons to do so.
47 For the notion of trust on which I am relying, see Holton 1994. See also Alonso 2009.
48 The trust condition also serves to deal with cases like Spy and Counter-Spy as elaborated in Kutz 2000a.
49 Note that trust and reliance do require that one lack a belief that others will not do their part; the point is that it does not require a belief that they will. On this point, see Holton 1994, p. 8.
50 See, e.g., Velleman 1999.
51 Many thanks to Barry Maguire for discussion on this point.
52 On this point, see hooks 2015b, esp. ch. 4; Mohanty 2003, esp. ch. 4.
53 I will return to this point in section 2, when discussing Kolers 2016.
54 In her important monograph on solidarity, Sally Scholz argues that the broader notion of solidarity has three components. First, it specifies a relation between the individual and the group of which the member is a part. Second, solidarity must represent some form of unity among members of the group; there must be something, that is, that ‘binds people together’. Third, solidarity ‘entails positive moral obligations’ (Scholz 2010, p. 19). Solidarity is therefore, on this account, essentially moralized. There can be, by implication, no genuine solidarity between terrorist groups or White nationalists. See also Gould forthcoming.
55 I adopt a similar strategy as MacCallum in his famous article on freedom. See MacCallum 1967.
56 The schema for solidarity given above is, that is, what Millikan calls a substance template: it indicates the kinds of things we ought to look for and study in instances of solidarity. The schema helps us to identify rather than merely classify a given social form as an instance of solidarity. ‘Animal’ is a substance template: once we know something is an animal, we know that we can ask about how it gets around, what its metabolic rate is, whether it is a vertebrate or not, and so on – things it would make no sense to ask, for example, of chairs. See Millikan 2000, ch. 3.
57 For an instructive discussion of different forms of canonical and noncanonical disagreement over concept usage, see Plunkett and Sundell 2013b, 2013a. Plunkett and Sundell, it should be noted, do not use the concept/conception distinction in the same way as I do.
58 The distinction between concept and conception I use here, though much more general, is compatible with Rawls's usage in Rawls 1999, p. 5. The idea of a negotiation over which of two different specifications of an overarching concept of solidarity might be more useful in a particular context of inquiry could be explained, although I don't press the point here, with Plunkett and Sundell's notion of a ‘metalinguistic negotiation’ (Plunkett and Sundell 2013a). If we think of the social kind as picked out by the overarching concept, the idea of a metalinguistic negotiation over more particular uses is, I believe, compatible with content externalism. Cf. Cappelen 2018, ch. 15.
59 I draw the distinction between ‘operative’ and ‘genuine’ reasons from Scanlon 1998, p. 19.
60 Cf. Forst forthcoming on the relation between concept and conceptions of solidarity.
61 I thank Jared Holley for discussion on this point.
62 I say that the concept of solidarity is modern. But does that mean that I don't believe solidarity exists before the modern era? No. As I have already highlighted, there is a difference between solidarity as the social kind and solidarity as a concept. The social kind, understood as a distinctive form of action, is probably as old as humanity itself. But the concept describing it acquires salience and significance in the modern era for the reasons I have cited. It is only in the modern era that it becomes theorized as an object of particular social concern. It then becomes what Hacking calls an ‘interactive kind’: once it enters into general usage, it transforms the kinds of possibilities for solidarity that there are in politics, and the meanings and opportunities associated with it. We can say that the ‘thin’ social kind has existed for centuries, but, as the concept enters usage and debate, the category itself acquires new layers, opportunities, and possibilities. For analogues, see Hacking 1999; Mallon 2016. As I mentioned in the introduction, an analogy is the phenomenon of sexual harassment – a phenomenon that has existed for centuries but only becomes theorized and conceptualized in the 1970s, which transforms the meanings and possibilities for action and reaction associated with it. See the history recounted, e.g., in Brownmiller 1999.
63 On this history, see, e.g., Wildt 1999.
64 See, e.g., Blais 2007; Stjernø 2005.
65 See also Tönnies 1980.
66 Célestin Bouglé writes, ‘Solidarism is becoming a kind of official philosophy for the Third Republic’, cited in Blais 2007, p. 26, my translation. For the history of solidarism, see especially Blais 2007; Hayward 1961.
67 Bourgeois 1902.
68 Bourgeois 1902, p. 137, my translation.
69 See also Bourgeois's discussion of equal moral worth at pp. 109–10.
70 Bourgeois's formulation bears a striking resemblance to Rawls. For Rawls on the difference principle as a principle of ‘fraternity’, see Rawls 1999, pp. 90–1. Cf. the illuminating discussion of solidarism as distinct from liberalism in Kohn 2018.
71 Bourgeois 1902, pp. 132–4, 8, my translation.
72 Bourgeois 1902, p. 182.
73 Bourgeois was mainly influenced by Alfred Fouillée's writings on solidarity. See Blais 2007.
74 I thank Rouven Symank for discussion, including the massive influence of Louis Pasteur on the intellectual life of the belle époque in France.
75 Durkheim 1984 [1893], pp. 63–4.
76 Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 81.
77 Durkheim 1984 [1893], pp. 80–1.
78 Durkheim 1984 [1893], pp. 67–8.
79 Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 153.
80 Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 178.
81 Durkheim 1984 [1893], pp. 289–90.
82 Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 27.
83 Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 11.
84 Durkheim 1984 [1893], pp. 17–18.
85 Durkheim 1984 [1893], pp. 315–16.
86 For a useful history of solidarity in the socialist tradition, see Stjernø 2005, which is especially good on the role of solidarity in the major twentieth-century European social and Christian democratic parties.
87 An important related school of thought is anarchism as elucidated in writers such as Bakunin and Kropotkin.
88 Kautsky 1910 [1892], ch. 5, sec. 5–6. See also Wildt 1999.
89 Marx 1978, p. 522. Given its association with the ‘utopians’, it is revealing that neither Marx nor Engels ever used ‘solidarity’ as a term in any of their systematic writings. Where they did use the term was in their speeches and letters in defense of the workingmen's associations that were springing up everywhere in defense of socialism.
90 For earlier proto-socialist elaborations of the idea that mutual dependence elicits group consciousness and commitments to sacrifice, see Sewell 1980 on guilds, corporations, and mutual aid societies in France until 1848, and Hayward 1959.
91 Renan 1882, p. 29 available at http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Qu’est-ce_qu’une_nation_%3F (accessed May 15, 2023).
92 ‘Nazionalismo e Nazionalità’ (1871) in Mazzini 2009, p. 63. It is relevant that the younger Mazzini had been an exile in France and Switzerland in the 1830s, where he was introduced to the circle of Saint-Simonians then in Paris, including Pierre Leroux. For this history, see Faucci and Rancan 2009.
93 C. Taylor 1989, p. 166.
94 On this point, see also Miller 1995.
95 Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987), §40.
96 Tischner 1984 [1982], pp. 8–9.
97 See, e.g., Van Kersbergen 2003.
98 Pesch 2004 [1918], p. 104.
99 §17.
100 See, for example, the helpful discussion on the ‘solidarity of interdependence’ in Potter 2009. See also Doran 1996, pp. 92ff; Beyer 2014, pp. 12–13.
101 Sollicitudo rei socialis. (1987), §38.
102 The doctrine of subsidiarity receives its most important expression, after a brief mention in Rerum Novarum, in Pope Pius XI's Quadregismo Anno (1931). It is also worth noting that two of the most prominent advocates of Christian solidarism and subsidiarity after Pesch, Oscar Nell-Breuning and Gustav Gundlach, were also very influential in shaping German Christian democracy in the postwar period. See, e.g., Koslowski 2000.
103 ‘Heal the World: Subsidiarity and the Virtue of Hope’ (September 23, 2020), www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2020/documents/papa-francesco_20200923_udienza-generale.html (accessed May 15, 2023). I thank Meghan Clark for discussion and pointers.
104 It is worth noting that liberation theology had an important influence on Pope John Paul II's writing of Sollicitudo. In that encyclical, for example, he endorses the ‘preferential option for the poor’. See Beyer 2014, p. 14.
105 Sobrino 1994, pp. 98–9 quoted in Potter 2009, p. 145.
106 Freire 1993 [1970], p. 48.
107 Gutiérrez 1973, p. 127.
108 hooks 2015a, p. 15; see also hooks 2015b, p. 47.
109 For the development of modern Black nationalism, and its distinctness from the ‘classical’ period, see Robinson 2001; Moses 1988. See also the study of Black nationalist attitudes in Dawson 2003.
110 Cruse 1967, pp. 14–16.
111 Malcolm X 1992, p. 80.
112 See, e.g., Rivers 1995.
113 Most prominently, Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey. See Moses 1988.
115 For Martin Luther King's support for the labor movement and his views on economic justice, see Honey 2018; Shelby and Terry 2018.
116 Cf. Zhao 2019, p. 8, who, citing the possibility of paternalistic and hierarchical relations of solidarity, denies that equality and symmetry are necessary conditions.
117 I remind the reader that here we are discussing solidarity in its descriptive guise. What matters, then, are the reasons, attitudes, dispositions, and principles that participants avow and display, not whether those principles (like equality) are actually realized. Whether they are actually realized in practice is a normative issue that can be taken up in a separate, critical moment. Does the movement in question, say, genuinely realize the demands of equality it avows? Do people really have genuine reasons to identify on the basis concerned? (See the next two sections, ‘Grounds’ and ‘Value’, for discussion on the normative evaluation of solidarity). I thank Tom Parr for discussion.
118 Cf. Rawls, who writes: ‘fraternity [which we interpret here as solidarity] is held to represent a certain equality of social esteem manifest in various public conventions and in the absence of manners of deference and servility’ (Rawls 1999, p. 90).
119 On the role of reciprocity in solidarity, cf. Miller 2017, p. 63; Forst forthcoming.
120 Kolers 2016.
121 Kolers 2016, p. 58.
122 Compare critiques of ‘second-wave’ feminism as being too White, (unconsciously) exclusionary, and middle class. See, e.g., Zakaria 2021; Spelman 1988; Crenshaw 2017; hooks 2015a.
123 On this point, see, e.g., Clark forthcoming.
124 See also Deveaux 2021, pp. 204ff.
125 I thank Barry Maguire for discussion. For more on the idea that solidarity can be objectionably exclusionary and, indeed, illiberal, see Sangiovanni forthcoming.
126 Kolers 2016, p. 62.
127 On deference, see also the instructive discussions in Gould 2020, p. 131; Deveaux 2021, p. 205.
128 For more on this distinction, recall the discussion of love as a de re attitude and solidarity as (most commonly) de dicto. Note that for cases in which there is asymmetry (with or without deference) – where, say, one group is disposed to share the fate of another group but not vice versa – then I say this is not solidarity but support for a cause. I say more about this below.
129 See also Populorum Progressio, which often speaks of the need of the rich nations to come to the aid of the poor, but without any mention of the need to engage the agency of those in need, including by acts of renunciation, mutual understanding, and communication (recall liberation theology), and through education aimed at joint rebellion against oppression (recall Freire).
130 See also Rippe 1998, p. 358, although, for Rippe, solidarity still remains primarily uni- rather than omnilateral.
131 See also Bayertz 1999a, p. 19; West-Oram et al. 2016, p. 2; Gould 2007, p. 157.
132 With respect to the distinction between charity and solidarity, it is worth remarking on the early and influential discussion of solidarity in Pierre Leroux's 1840 Doctrine de l’humanité. Known at the time as a Saint-Simonian but also somewhat mystical socialist, Leroux defends a religion of humanity grounded in an account of the solidarity of the human species. What is useful for our purposes is his attempt to argue that, while Christianity is a religion of solidarity – after all, it, too, represents a faith in the unity of the human in Christ – it must be superseded by a religion of humanity. The discussion turns on his rejection of Christian charity as a foundation of human fraternal love. Where Christianity goes wrong, he argues, is that it leads to a denial of self-love, and hence of something necessary for individual freedom. In Christianity, the stark opposition between self-love and the command to love one's neighbor leads to forms of self-denial that are pathological and extreme. Furthermore, Leroux argues, Christian charity is founded on pity, and hence on inequality. It presupposes and reinforces an imbalance of power, which is in direct contradiction with the altruism that is supposed to drive it. The solution is to ground, Leroux argues, love of another in love of oneself through an act of identification of oneself, as a human being with needs and desires, in others, and of others in oneself. This renders solidarity, he writes, ‘organizable’ by secular society, rather than relying on an otherworldly love of God. See Leroux 1845, pp. 157–75. Leroux writes: ‘Pity may be the perversion of compassion, but its alternative is solidarity.’ See also Hannah Arendt, who writes: ‘It is out of pity that men are “attracted toward les hommes faibles” but it is out of solidarity that they establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited’ (Arendt 1990 [1963], p. 88).
133 A good example are the protests of the Silent Sentinels against Woodrow Wilson's lack of support for women's suffrage. On October 20, 1917, police arrested a large group of women (including Alice Paul, one of the leaders of the movement) and sent them to the Occoquan Workhouse, where they were eventually beaten after going on hunger strike. Many on the ‘outside’ protested, including Dudley Field Malone, who resigned his post within the administration in solidarity with the women, and wrote a public letter to the president. For this history, see www.newspapers.com/clip/32859084/dudley-field-malone-resigns-1917/ (accessed February 5, 2023) and Stevens 1920.
134 This is a result of the fact that for us truly to be acting together (in any case), there must be something close to common knowledge; indeed, all the main accounts of joint action, including Bratman 2014; Kutz 2000b; Gilbert 2000; Tuomela 2013; Searle 1990 include a variant. I here revise, then, what I held in Sangiovanni 2013 in a discussion of resistance groups that do not know of each other's existence.
135 I am indebted to discussion in Owen 2021.
136 There are, however, important cases in which refugees do succeed in organizing. See the collection of essays in Bradley et al. 2019. Many thanks to Catherine Lu for the reference.
137 For the importance of this requirement, see Deveaux 2021, ch. 6; Land 2015.
138 In an insightful discussion of solidarity, Van Parijs forthcoming claims that the difference between charity and solidarity is that the latter (but not the former) is based on the thought that ‘I help you because I assume that I could have been you – even though I know that I am not you and may also know that I shall never be in the sort of trouble in which you are now’. But most Christian accounts of charity, indeed, most forms of humanitarianism, emphasize the same thing: it is in virtue of our shared vulnerability, or shared suffering as fallen human beings, that we owe others our aid. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ is a prototypically Christian thought. If this is right, then what distinguishes, on this reading, solidarity from charity? I have suggested the difference is that solidarity necessarily involves joint struggle in a way that a mere disposition to aid on the basis of an underlying identification – as in the earthquake case – does not. See also note 119.
139 Onora O’Neill, for example, distinguishes solidarity with (unilateral) and solidarity among (omnilateral) in O’Neill 1996, p. 201. See also A. E. Taylor 2015, who distinguishes expressional (i.e., unilateral) from robust solidarity (i.e., omnilateral).
140 Van Parijs forthcoming, for example, writes: ‘What is distinctive of solidarity, I submit, is the symmetry captured by the expression “mutual responsibility”, responsibility for each other as members of some (more or less imagined) community. When I help you out of solidarity, I do so because you are “one of us”, because “I could have been you”, because, in this sense, I “identify” with you.’ For a similar view, see Mason 2000, p. 27.
141 I draw this example from Van Parijs forthcoming.
142 This discussion also serves to respond to Kolers’ worry (Kolers 2016, pp. 59–60) that my original discussion, in Sangiovanni 2015, lacks an account of the ‘pro-attitudes’ (beyond mere commitment to a goal) that characterize solidarity.
143 On the idea of a way of life, see Mason 2000, pp. 22–3.
144 See, for example, Miller 1995.
145 Cf. Coulthard and Simpson 2016, pp. 6–7.
146 See, for example, the struggles of the American Indian Movement throughout its history to address injustice against native peoples in Banks and Erdoes 2005. More recently, see the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline build on Standing Rock Sioux land in www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/us/north-dakota-oil-pipeline-battle-whos-fighting-and-why.html (accessed February 14, 2022). See also the account of ‘grounded normativity’ in Coulthard 2014; Coulthard and Simpson 2016, pp. 254–5; and the account of the structural injustice of colonialism in Lu 2017. I thank Jared Holley for a helpful discussion on anticolonial solidarities in general. In my terms, anticolonial solidarities have most commonly (though not exclusively) been based on a way of life (especially in the context of the anticolonial nationalisms of the 1960s and 1970s) and/or on a condition as structurally dominated by settler powers (especially in the context of the transnational solidarities typical of the pan-movements, such as Pan-Africanism and the various cross-national movements for Indigenous rights, such as the Red Power movement); allies in these struggles then count as acting in solidarity on the basis of identification with a cause. See also Coulthard's engagement with Fanon in Coulthard 2014, in which he discusses the importance of revitalizing and reclaiming Indigenous ways of life as a mode of prefiguring a postcolonial future.
147 Blum 2007.
148 See also Simmons 1996 for a convincing critique of the argument that we can have special obligations to other members of social groups, when and because such membership is a constitutive part of our identity.
149 This, it strikes me, is also a problem with arguments in favor of associative obligations that take the same shape as Scheffler 1997. Scheffler argues that, if special relationships didn't require participants to give each other's interests priority, they would lack the value that we (correctly) attribute to them. Therefore, recognizing the value of special relationships implies that we have special responsibilities. Could one use this form of argument to claim that members who have reason to value the Sioux nation must act in solidarity when required to overcome adversity? The success of the argument would turn on whether it could be shown that membership of the Sioux nation would lack value if members didn't recognize such mutual obligations. But the prior question must surely be: Why would membership of the Sioux nation be impoverished without a recognition of the moral demands of solidarity? The trouble is that the answer to this question would seem to presuppose an argument explaining why demands of solidarity are, indeed, a requirement, which is what we are trying to show in the first place.
150 Cf. Tommie Shelby, who writes: ‘[An obligation to resist racial injustice] would follow from the principle that if one wills the end, one also wills the necessary means, provided of course these are morally permissible. If such a position is sound, then blacks who fail to commit to black solidarity are open to criticism’ (Shelby 2009, p. 214).
151 Note that the argument from fairness would also apply to a non-Sioux who lives among the Sioux, and whose way of life is also threatened by government expropriation. Should she decline to join, she would also be free-riding, and so also be criticizable on that basis. On fair play, see also note 153.
152 I return to cases of this kind below, when discussing alienation.
153 This is a standard fair play case in which an individual sincerely and correctly believes the costs are not worth the benefits of cooperation (and hence where there is no independent reason why turning down the benefits would be illegitimate). On the importance of the condition that the costs be worth the benefits, see Simmons 1979, pp. 320–1. Note, however, that I modify Simmons’ defense of fair play in two ways. First, the belief that the costs are not worth the benefits must be not only nonculpable (i.e., the person's beliefs cannot be a result, say, of avoiding gathering evidence) but also correct (the person's beliefs that the costs aren't worth the benefits must be true). If the person falsely but nonculpably believes that the costs are not worth the benefits, then the person is a free-rider, but has an excuse. On this modification, see Arneson 1982; see also Simmons 2001, pp. 32–3. Second, there must be no independent reason why turning down the benefits would be wrong (e.g., if turning down the benefits would unilaterally impose unreasonably large costs on others, or if turning down the benefits, although not unilaterally harmful, could not be suitably generalized). On the importance of generalizability, see Cullity 1995. Note that, on this modified view, voluntary acceptance of benefits is not required for fair-play obligations to apply (whether such obligations are, in addition, enforceable is a different matter). Voluntary acceptance, that is, is not required when the belief in the costs/benefits is false, or when the refusal of the benefits would not be generalizable or impose large costs on others. I discuss and further defend these modifications in Sangiovanni ms.a.
154 Ralph Chaplin, ‘Solidarity Forever’.
155 An interesting, almost paradigmatic, example of worker-based solidarity is the Polish union Solidarnosc. It is somewhat unusual in this context because Solidarnosc, while beginning in the shipyards of Gdansk, became a movement representing ‘society’ (spoleczenstwo) against an alien, totalitarian state power. In this case, it was the oppression suffered by citizen-workers at the hands of the nomenklatura that provided the basis of identification. See Ash 2002; Michnik 1985.
156 For the emergence of medicine as a profession (in which it is often contrasted with medicine as a business or guild), see Haakonssen 1997.
157 On fair play, see note 153.
158 On welfare state solidarity and its relation to justice, see also Bayertz 1999a, pp. 21–6.
159 See also Stilz 2016.
160 I make this argument in the context of the global justice debates at greater length in Sangiovanni 2007.
161 Cf. Jodi Dean's conception of reflective solidarity in Dean 1995, p. 123.
162 See also Miller 2017, p. 68.
163 On meeting others halfway, see the Introduction to Banting and Kymlicka 2017.
164 Recall Bourgeois 1902. For more discussion, see Kohn 2018.
165 On conditions for fair-play obligations to apply, see note 153.
166 See, e.g., Habermas 2001; Ingram 1996; Müller 2007.
167 Cf. Levy 2005, p. 107: ‘[The inhabitants of a political community] are not what nationalists falsely claim co-nationals to be: members of some pre- or extra-political social whole that can make its will felt through politics … They are not the particular subset of humanity united by allegiance to some particular political ideal, at any level of abstraction; even if most people had sufficient political knowledge and sufficiently coherent views to qualify as holding an ideal, politics contain a perennial diversity of such ideals … There is no polity made up entirely of liberals or social democrats or civic republicans, and each of those is found in more than one polity.’ The account of civic identification I defend in the text, which relies only on our role as collective authors, does not fall prey to this criticism.
168 I thank Siba Harb for highlighting to me the importance of making this distinction.
169 Where sisterhood is understood here as referring to members of a sorority rather than to women as such.
171 See Shelby 2009 for an account of how identification based on a condition (in our terms) rather than on a way of life or a set of experiences can ground a powerful form of Black solidarity. Cf. Gooding-Williams 2009, pp. 189ff, 238; Marin 2018. See also the illuminating discussion in Deveaux 2021, ch. 4, on how a shared condition (and shared understanding of that condition) can ground solidarity among the poor.
172 For seminal contributions on this point, see, among others, Lorde 2009, pp. 219–20; King 1995; Spelman 1988; Crenshaw 1990.
173 For a useful overview of recent debates on intersectionality, see Carastathis 2014. See also Collins 2019.
174 See, e.g., ‘The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House’, in Lorde 1984, pp. 111–12 and ‘Difference and Survival’, in Lorde 2009, p. 201.
175 hooks 2015a, p. 15. Cf. de Beauvoir 2012 [1949], p. 18, who writes, ‘The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women's effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received. The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women.’
176 Young 1994, p. 717. See also Zack 2005, p. 7 and Alcoff 2005, p. 143: ‘What can we demand in the name of women if “women” do not exist and demands in their name simply reenforce the myth that they do? How can we speak out against sexism as detrimental to the interests of women if the category is a fiction? How can we demand legal abortions, adequate child care, or wages based on comparable worth without invoking the concept of “women”?’
177 One might wonder here whether another exclusion is in the wings: what about trans women? But even in this case, one might argue, in defense of Young, that trans-women as women are also expected to comply with the social rules and expectations that have built up around the sexed female body. This threatens further forms of exclusion and subordination if they cannot meet those expectations. See, e.g., Hall 2009.
178 Cf. Haslanger 2012, p. 239.
179 Cf. Haslanger 2012, p. 239: ‘So women have in common that their (assumed) sex has socially disadvantaged them; but this is compatible with the kinds of cultural variation that feminist inquiry has revealed, for the substantive content of women's position and the ways of justifying it can vary enormously. Admittedly, the account accommodates such variation by being very abstract; nonetheless, it provides a schematic account that highlights the interdependence between the material forces that subordinate women, and the ideological frameworks that sustain them.’ See also Alcoff 2005, p. 148.
180 On this point, see Mikkola 2007, pp. 375–80.
181 Cf. Stone 2007, pp. 160–3 on Haslanger. And see also Stoljar 1995, p. 281.
182 I thank Jude Browne for helpful discussion.
183 Crenshaw 1990, p. 1299; Spelman 1988, p. 167. See also Stone 2004.
184 Cf. the Combahee River Collective on the interlocking character of oppression (Combahee River Collective 1983 [1977]).
185 Cf. Schor 1994; Riley 1988.
186 See also Jodi Dean's critique of what she calls ‘affectional solidarity’ in Dean 1995, pp. 116–17.
187 On common fate as a basis for social identification, see Brewer 2003, pp. 36–7.
188 Bauböck 2017.
189 For an insightful account of solidarity grounded in this form of identification, see Scholz 2010. See also Kolers 2016, ch. 2, who argues that, although solidarity is ‘not action taken for political ends but action taken on others’ terms’, it should not be confused with loyalty. Loyalty requires deference to the group as such, solidarity is deference to the group in virtue of a deeper commitment to fighting injustice and oppression. In our terms, then, Kolers’ account of solidarity is an instance of identification, ultimately, with a cause.
190 See, for example, the Asians 4 Black Lives movement. They describe their aims here: https://medium.com/@asians4blacklives/asians-4-black-lives-uplift-black-resistance-help-build-black-power-b01ef091cc0c (accessed May 6, 2022).
191 As we have seen in sections 1 and 2, it is important that, for such outgroups to act in solidarity, the attitudes of mutual support, commitment, and cooperation have to be reciprocal. If joining the common action is unwelcome by those for whom one acts, then one cannot be said to be acting in solidarity.
192 On this point, see Gooding-Williams 2009, p. 190.
193 Jerome is loosely modeled on the Black conservatives described in Dawson 2003, pp. 281ff.
194 For this usage, see, e.g., Scanlon 1998, p. 19.
195 On the possibility of akratic beliefs, see Scanlon 1998, p. 36.
196 Cf. Miller 2017, p. 66 on ‘as if’ solidarity.
197 There is an old story that the women in Kant's village would set their clocks by noting when he passed by their houses on his evening walk. They surely have a reasonable expectation, given his regularity, that he will go out on his walk every night. They can justifiably rely on him to do so. But it would be absurd to claim that, should he decide to stay in one evening, he would be betraying their trust or otherwise letting them down. For this example, see Simmons 1996.
198 On the role of voluntariness in fair play, see note 153.
199 See Viehoff forthcoming for a lucid account of the way in which we would be overwhelmed if the demands of solidarity were to come from too many sources.
200 Cf. Feinberg 1974, p. 234, who argues that a strong community of interest is a necessary condition. The idea of sharing interests and values is ubiquitous in the recent literature on solidarity. See, e.g., Bayertz 1999a, p. 8, who mentions shared interests alongside shared convictions, feelings, and history. At a general level, Bayertz 1999a, p. 3 defines solidarity as containing a factual element – what he refers to as some ‘common ground’ (including shared interests, convictions, feelings, and history) – and a normative element – namely positive obligations to aid others. But, if this is right, then any special obligation, say, among friends, family, parties to a contract, and so on, would count as an obligation of solidarity. The definition also makes it unclear whether the obligations must be genuine to count as solidarity: does the common ground between members of a White nationalist party give them obligations to aid one another in their struggle?
201 Cf. May 1996, p. 44.
202 On this point, see also Miller 2017, p. 64.
203 Here I intend to explore the non-specific value of acting in solidarity. We might also wonder what the value of acting in solidarity in specific contexts might be, but that would vary according to the context, so I focus on the general case. Cf. Carter 1999, to which I am indebted.
204 David Miller lists a range of other instrumental benefits of solidarity in Miller 2017, pp. 66–7.
205 The locus classicus for this view is G. E. Moore 1993 [1903]. For an argument against the idea that there is such a thing as impersonal goodness, or goodness simpliciter, see Kraut 2011. Although I find the argument convincing, I need not be committed to it here. It is enough if I can show that solidarity is non-instrumentally good for us, and leave the question whether it is also good simpliciter aside.
206 I do not argue here for a substantive account of human flourishing as an account of well-being, which would take us too far afield. For such accounts, see Foot 2001; Kraut 2007; Thompson 2008. Other accounts of well-being, such as ideal-desire theories, are also compatible with the general account defended here.
207 All of these goods, that is, can sometimes be bad for us, depending on what else is true of our lives. Pleasure can sometimes be bad for us, just as love can. But when the conditions are right, each of these things makes their contribution to our flourishing constitutively. So, we might say, their value for us is conditional but constitutive. I say more about this below.
208 See also Zhao 2019, pp. 12–13 who argues that solidarity is non-instrumentally good because it expresses an ‘attitude of community’ toward others. Bommarito 2016, similarly, argues that solidarity can be non-instrumentally valuable when and because it not only ‘manifests concern for others’ but also aids in the development of such concern through habit and re-enactment.
209 G. A. Cohen 2009, pp. 42–3.
210 Rawls 1999, pp. 456–79.
211 Nota bene: We take pleasure in the activity because of its value, rather than the other way around. The pleasure is a reflection of its value. We do not, that is, believe the activity is good merely because of the pleasure it gives us.
212 Hume 1978 [1793], pp. 449–52. See also Frankfurt 1999, pp. 90–1; Owens forthcoming.
213 Cf. Korsgaard 1996, pp. 263–4.
214 I adopt here the conditional interpretation of organic unity distinguished in Hurka 1998. This account is different from the one recommended by Moore, where the value of the parts remains constant in an organic unity, i.e., where the whole is the carrier of (greater) value (G. E. Moore 1993 [1903], pp. 79ff). See also Nozick 1983, pp. 413ff. It is, however, important to note a significant difference between the account of value I have offered and the account in Nozick, Hurka (and Moore). For the latter three, the non-instrumental value at stake is impersonal; they are interested in the good simpliciter. For me, it is personal; I am interested in what is good-for-us. This is why I have used our involvement and engagement in the ends we pursue to explain the non-instrumental value of that pursuit.
215 For this point, see Parfit 1984, pp. 501–2.
216 For this point, I am indebted to Owens forthcoming.
217 Cf. the value of unity-in-diversity as discussed in Nozick 1983, pp. 415–16, where he argues that the degree of organic unity increases as a function of the internal diversity and complexity of an entity, on one hand, and its degree of unity, on the other. See also the instructive discussion of the unity of value in Wenar 2023.
218 Many thanks to Juri Viehoff for discussion on this point. I note that if solidarity's ends are neutral, this does not mean that it has no non-instrumental value (we do not multiply by 0); rather, we say that the solidarity does have non-instrumental value – value that is neither amplified nor reduced by the further goodness of its ends. This may be the case, for example, in many team sports, where we assume, for the sake of argument, that there are no further positive or negative ends promoted by play of the game, but where players on a team exhibit all the characteristic features of solidarity.
219 As will be evident in a moment, my view of the distinction between justice and solidarity is different than Klaus Rippe's, for example, who writes: ‘A look at the modern classics of liberalism (such as Ronald Dworkin or John Rawls) appears to confirm [that solidarity is not a part of liberalism]. Justice, and not solidarity, individual rights and not social ties or mutual obligations are the central themes of such theories’ (Rippe 1998, p. 355). I do not believe it is accurate to say that liberalism is not concerned with social ties or mutual obligations. See, e.g., Part III of Rawls 1999 and Dworkin 1986 and Dworkin 2000 on ‘liberal community’. That said, it is true that liberals have not had much to say about solidarity as a value, other than to note its role in providing a motivation to abide by principles of justice. As I have argued throughout, solidarity is a value that is not only important in understanding the motivational bases of egalitarianism or the welfare state, but also as a central aspect of non-state associations, such as social movements. On this point, see also Laitinen and Pessi 2015, p. 19.
220 Scanlon 1998, p. 6.
221 See, e.g., Ripstein 2009.
222 Of course, as we have seen in section 3, to make the case that the UK has solidarity-based reasons to remain would also require showing that they have reasons to identify with the EU on the basis of, say, a shared project (recall that they may have such reasons, as a normative matter, though they fail to recognize them).
223 Van Parijs forthcoming makes a similar point.
224 See, e.g., Williams 1965.
225 In Habermas 1990, p. 244, Habermas argues that solidarity is the ‘reverse-side’ of justice, by which he means that the deliberatively designed moral point of view cannot give determinate results, or be sustainable, without an ‘intersubjectively shared form of life’ that underlies it. See also Pensky 2009.
226 Cf., e.g., Cohen's incentives critique in G. A. Cohen 2008, and see in particular responses by Shiffrin 2010; J. Cohen 2001.
227 See also Rawls 1999, pp. 90–3, who argues that the reverse of what I have suggested is also true: organizing a society according to principles of justice will likely promote solidarity, since people will be see that no one in the society gains at the expense of others. Solidarity and justice, on this picture, are mutually reinforcing.
228 Cf. Levy 2005.
229 See also the powerful account of plantation politics in Gooding-Williams 2009, pp. 186ff.
230 See, for example, Straehle 2010; Gould 2007, defending cosmopolitan and transnational forms of solidarity, and for a response Lenard 2010. Cf. Rorty 1989, p. 192. See also Munoz-Dardé forthcoming, defending the idea that solidarity essentially involves an ‘us’ against a ‘them’. Wiggins, in an unconventional discussion of solidarity, treats it as the ‘root of the ethical’ (Wiggins 2006, pp. 244–7). Although he does not define it, he treats solidarity as the disposition to recognize another as a separate, embodied, feeling subjectivity against whom one feels it is impossible, without much resistance, to do certain things (for example, ‘wilful killing’). This ‘ethic of solidarity’ is used by Wiggins to undermine simple forms of maximizing consequentialism. As a disposition oriented to others as human, solidarity, on this view, has a scope that extends to all human beings (if not animals that display similar sorts of subjectivity). In our terms, it is closest, perhaps, to the idea of identification with others on the basis of a condition. But because his discussion is not trying to capture the descriptive, normative, historical, or evaluative dimensions of the social and political practices in which the term has predominantly figured, I don't think it competes with any of the views discussed in this essay.
231 This is an important theme in Viehoff forthcoming.
232 On thick and thin concepts, see, more recently, Väyrynen 2013.
233 On the need for such an intermediate category, see also Fraser 1985 and Honneth 1996, pp. 129–30, who situates solidarity as a form of symmetrical recognition present within (modern) societal groups that are no longer bound together by corporative, honor-based ties.
234 Zhao 2019. See also Bommarito 2016, pp. 447–8, who argues that entirely private acts of self-sacrifice – in which someone symbolically shares another’s fate by voluntarily giving up benefits that another cannot enjoy – can be acts of solidarity.

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Solidarity – Nature, grounds, and value

Andrea Sangiovanni in dialogue

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