Andrea Sangiovanni
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Response to critics

In the final chapter of the volume, Andrea Sangiovanni responds to his critics. Taking the preceding chapters one by one, he assesses the validity of the main points raised and offers counter-arguments.

I am very grateful to Avery Kolers, Jared Holley, Sally Scholz, Rainer Forst, and Catherine Lu for writing such thoughtful and careful responses to ‘Solidarity: Nature, Value, and Grounds’. It is a humbling task to respond, which requires one to come face to face with how one's work appears to others, and to see, often quite clearly, how one could have done better. But it also offers an opportunity to try to make progress together even if, in the end, we decide to take different paths to the same destination. I take each response in the order in which it appears in this volume. To keep this exchange readably short, I have refrained from trying to answer every point or challenge made. Instead, I have tried, to the best of my ability, to choose the lines of argument that struck me as most salient and most instructive.

Avery Kolers

Avery Kolers’ careful and probing remarks challenge whether solidarity should really be understood, as I claim, as a special form of joint action. To make the argument, he gives a fruitful example from early twentieth-century colonial Trinidad. The example involves the famous Trinidadian cricket player, Wilton St. Hill. In an earlier stage of his career, St. Hill faced a choice: he could either play with the ‘higher caste’, lighter-skinned, bourgeois team – Maple – or with the working-class, darker-skinned team – Shannon. Maple, however, actively excluded dark-skinned blacks. (St. Hill's skin is deemed light enough, and his play good enough, that it doesn't matter in his case.) St. Hill decides to throw his lot in with Shannon, despite the greater advantages, both social and athletic, that a career playing for Maple might offer him. The reason that St. Hill gives is that Maple would ‘not have accepted his brothers’. Kolers says that St. Hill's act of identification as such counts as an act of solidarity. And so, Kolers concludes, there can be solidarity without joint action. This is because St. Hill's taking sides with the more disadvantaged is a purely individual action, and therefore cannot be understood as part of a wider joint action in which, say, Black Trinidadians, let alone his fellow team players, oppose the racial and colonial caste order.

But is this really true? I agree with Kolers that St. Hill's throwing his lot in with Shannon counts as an act of solidarity, but I disagree that it cannot be understood as part of a wider, ongoing joint action. I want to argue that what makes it such a powerful example of solidarity is precisely the fact that, in deciding to go with Shannon, St. Hill does his part in a collective act of resistance to the colonial and racialist order. Indeed, part of the point of C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary, from which the example is drawn, is to bring out how the West Indian cricket of the time is a central stage 1 in which everyday Trinidadian resistance to colonialism is played out (and, often, as in James's own more ambivalent case, only half-played out). The teams are the lived embodiment of both a spiritual and a physical resistance; in them, among other things, Black Trinidadians place their hopes for transcending the categories of racialism and colonialism. James writes:

I do not know of any West Indians in the West Indies to whom the success of a cricketer meant so much in so personal a way. There may be some among the emigrants, but I know that to tens of thousands of colored Trinidadians the unquestioned glory of St. Hill's batting conveyed the sensation that here was one of us, performing in excelsis in a sphere where competition was open. It was a demonstration that atoned for a pervading humiliation, and nourished pride and hope. Jimmy Durante, the famous American comedian, has popularized a phrase in the United States: ‘That's my boy.’ … Wilton St. Hill was our boy (James 2013 [1963], p. 93).

When St. Hill takes the field for the West Indian team as a Shannonian he acts on behalf of and for the people, where the people is understood as a collective agent who has placed their hopes for beating the English at their own game in one of their own. His act of throwing in his lot with Shannon, then, makes most sense in terms of an expression not just of loyalty to his own but also of protest against the order. As one of many such acts, each of which needs to be understood in terms of all the others, it is part of a much wider set of coordinated, mutually supportive acts through which, we might say, the Trinidadian people resist. They resist not separately and accidentally, but jointly and intentionally; they resist, that is, together.

To draw the contrast, compare a Black Trinidadian man living abroad, who is watching a cricket match between Maple and Shannon on television and decides, that afternoon, to side with Shannon because he wants to be on the side of the people. Let us imagine that this is a purely individual act and that his commitment will last. Now further suppose that no one knows of his decision, his decision has no public or social meaning (and is not intended to have any such meaning), and that it therefore affects no one. Suppose, that is, that there is no plausible way in which his decision can be taken as playing his part in a larger-scale, collective act of resistance. Is this an act of solidarity? It looks too lonely, too disengaged, to count. Perhaps, one will object, the problem here is that his decision is costless. But let us suppose he must pay some personal cost to side with Shannon (that, once again, affects no one but himself and remains private). I submit that this makes no difference. Without the sense that, by acting, he is playing his part in a larger cooperative activity of resistance – and, just as importantly, without the mutual commitment to the cause and to each other that comes (most often implicitly) in the wake of such decisions – this cannot be an act of solidarity. 2 Mikhail Bakunin refers to the ‘single law of solidarity’ in his 1873 pamphlet Solidarity in Liberty: A Workers’ Path to Freedom: ‘No man can emancipate himself save by emancipating with him all the men about him’ (Bakunin 1873). Solidarity, when it is a virtue, is a virtue of association, which therefore requires cooperation. While of course solidarity requires individual action, it is individual action that is intentionally aimed – via the cooperation of others to whom one has committed and who are committed in return – toward the collective end of overcoming some significant adversity.

Kolers goes on to worry about the role of deference in my account. Kolers says that I cannot explain how a group like ‘White Coats for Black Lives’ can be in solidarity with BLM if they defer to BLM in how, when, and whether to conduct their protest activities. But this is to misunderstand my view on deference. To see this, we need to draw a distinction between three types of deference: moral, epistemic, and practical. When I say that the egalitarian attitudes intrinsic to relations of solidarity rule out deference, I mean hierarchical deference – namely the deference of a socially inferior caste, order, or group to one deemed superior. This is the deference of the slave and servant to the master, the servile wife to the husband, and so on. This is evidently not the case with the ‘White Coats’. Rather, the ‘White Coats’ defer in two further senses, both of which – as I explain in the lead essay at p. 57 – are compatible with the account I have provided of solidarity.

The first sense of deference is epistemic. One defers epistemically when one puts aside one's first-order beliefs about some matter – say, regarding health – and takes the doctor's say-so as a reason to believe a contradictory proposition. One defers in this sense because the doctor knows better. Anyone who is an ‘outsider’ to a particular struggle – i.e., who is not directly implicated in the adversity against which the struggle is directed – should defer epistemically to those within the struggle who know better for analogous reasons. This will often be the case because those within the struggle have first-hand acquaintance with the structure and character of whatever adversity is at stake – an acquaintance that, therefore, gives them privileged epistemic access to truths about that adversity (and hence, potentially, what to do about it) (Bettcher 2009). When conjoined with the fact that, given one's structural position, one may be blinded to features of the adversity at stake because of one's privilege, epistemic considerations give powerful reasons to defer. 3

The second sense of deference is moral. Once again, this is a deference appropriate for members of outgroups who participate in solidaristic action with an ingroup. One defers morally when one sets aside a range of first-order objections to Xing and does Y instead, just because members of an ingroup have issued a directive to Y. 4 This is not because one deems members of the ingroup to be in an epistemically privileged position to make a decision, or because doing so will promote better coordination of ends. Rather, one does so out of respect for what is at stake for members of the ingroup.

Both forms of deference would be appropriate, in different contexts and for different members, for a movement like ‘White Coats’. Kolers agrees. So where is our disagreement on the role of deference? There are two. First, for Kolers, deference is essential to solidarity. Paradigmatic forms of solidarity all exhibit, he argues, the forms of deference we have just discussed. On my account, this is too strong. Indeed, foregrounding deference has the effect of making the relationship of outgroup members to ingroup members the central, defining characteristic of solidarity, while perversely making it difficult for ingroup members (who do not defer to one another) to be in solidarity. 5 On my account, by contrast, deference is appropriate in the cases we have discussed, but it is not a central, let alone defining, feature of solidarity itself. Looking at the long history of solidarity, deference of this kind looks peripheral: it only makes an explicit 6 appearance in much more recent social movements, and only when outgroups are concerned.

Second, for Kolers, the fact of deference shows that relations of solidarity can be asymmetrical, in the sense that members of the outgroup can be expected to defer and to sustain costs on behalf of the ingroup in ways that the ingroup is not toward the outgroup. Solidarity requires uptake by the ingroup but not reciprocation. As Kolers writes, this makes it possible for the ‘bi [to] be in solidarity with a even if it would be strained, at best, for a to claim to be in solidarity with the bi ’. The problem with Kolers’ view is that it cannot distinguish support for a noble cause from solidarity. The key differentiating example is the following one. Suppose that there is an outgroup – such as ‘Asians for Black Lives’ – who protest on behalf of and alongside core members of BLM. Suppose that BLM welcomes their support. But further imagine that, while the Asians for Black Lives are willing to take on significant costs for the core members – for example, imagine they are willing to stand up to police should there be violence, accept risks of imprisonment to defend other Black protesters, and so on – the core members are not disposed to take on any such costs in return. Suppose further that, while they welcome their support, the core members do not identify in any way with the Asians for Black Lives. As described, 7 I do not believe there is any solidarity between the Asians for Black Lives and the core members: this is because they are not mutually willing to share one another's fate in ways related to the end toward which they are working. Solidarity always requires mutuality and reciprocity, and here both are missing. All that remains is cooperation, but that is not enough, and we have other concepts (e.g., support for a noble cause) to explain what is happening.

Kolers is, however, right to query whether and what kind of asymmetry is compatible with my account. In this response, I extend the account. In the main text, I defended the idea that there must be symmetry between participants in their mutual commitment, willingness to share one another's fates, dispositions not to bypass others’ wills, and trust. But how strong or perfect must this symmetry be? We have already discussed how symmetry is compatible with deference. But even in the absence of deference, different participants in any ongoing solidaristic action will have varying degrees of commitment, trust, and willingness to share others’ fate and not bypass others’ wills. Is such variance compatible with solidarity? I believe it is. The key is to see that the related ideas of mutuality, reciprocity, and mutual commitment undergirding my account spell out a threshold above which variation doesn't matter. As long as participants are mutually committed enough, disposed to share each other's fate enough, and so on, then they can count as acting in solidarity, even if their absolute level of each of these elements varies. This allows, then, for solidarity among core and more peripheral or occasional members, as long as there is some mutual commitment, reciprocity, and mutuality (which was, by design, missing in the previous example discussed). It will be difficult to say, of course, where that threshold will lie, and the threshold will vary itself across different types of solidarity groups. But the important thing is to see that the logic of the account allows for variation in a way that seems plausible, given the value, practice, and history of solidarity across each of our paradigmatic contexts.

Jared Holley

Jared Holley's insightful response urges us to reconsider the role of solidarity in the French late nineteenth-century colonial context in which it emerged. He worries that accounts like mine exhibit a ‘methodological nationalism’ such that solidarity is worked out as a response to and engagement with solely domestic issues (for example, the class conflict endemic to the Third Republic in which solidarism was born). This is a mistake because it obscures how solidarity emerged (in part) as a response to and in engagement with a much more international, and in the French case, colonial (and postcolonial) context. I believe that Holley raises an important point with respect to the history of solidarity in an international, and especially colonial, context. That history has yet to be written. 8 But I believe that Durkheim (and the Durkheimians) had a more complex relationship to France's colonialism than Holley allows; they were not blind supporters of France's mission civilisatrice. I will say more about this first, and then turn to Holley's discussion of postcolonialism.

It is first worth reflecting on the relationship of Durkheim's division between mechanical and organic solidarity, on one side, to colonialism and colonial ideology, on the other. There can be no doubt that Durkheim based his account of mechanical solidarity – adequate to so-called ‘segmented’ or ‘inferior’ societies – to a large extent on the societies described by contemporary ethnographers – themselves often colonial settlers. Such societies included, for example, the Iroquois and Kabyle. But did Durkheim portray modern societies as morally superior to premodern societies? And, relatedly, did he advocate the colonization of the latter by the former? Holley suggests a tentative answer in the affirmative to both questions. I don't think it is so clear.

There are two reasons to doubt that Durkheim put modern and premodern in any kind of value hierarchy; indeed, I think he is better read as actively resisting any such attempt. The first reason is that he is everywhere adamant that moral systems are functional responses to a society's underlying organization. There is no ‘best’ morality sub specie aeternitas, only moralities that serve (and do not serve) to stabilize and coordinate the societies in which they operate. As he writes in Sociology and Philosophy, ‘History has established that, except in abnormal cases, each society has in the main a morality suited to it, and that any other would not only be impossible but also fatal to the society which attempted to follow it’ (Durkheim 1953 [1924], p. 28). ‘We cannot aspire’, he continues, ‘to a morality other than that which is related to the state of our society. We have here an objective standard with which to compare our evaluations’ (Durkheim 1953 [1924], p. 30). 9 Now, to be sure, Durkheim often talks of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ societies, ‘more’ and ‘less’ complex ones, ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ groups, and so on. But in all such cases, it seems more plausible to maintain, given his general organicism, that he means ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, not in ethical terms but in taxonomical terms. Just as the biologist speaks of higher and lower orders, more and less complex organisms, and so on, so Durkheim speaks of societies. 10 And nor does he think that ‘more primitive’ societies are bound to develop, by an inner logic or impulse, into ‘higher’ ones (on this he disagrees with sociologists like Herbert Spencer). He is clear that it is only in a given set of circumstances – for example, an increase in population, competition, and social interaction – that more ‘primitive’, less complex societies will develop a more specialized division of labor. 11 In the absence of such forces, segmentary societies are very stable.

The second reason why we ought to resist the idea that Durkheim placed societies in a value hierarchy is that he often emphasizes an essential continuity between modern and premodern. Modern religions like Christianity, for example, are more complex and articulated combinations of the very same elements as ‘primitive’ religions. As he writes in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,

But howsoever real this greater complexity and this higher ideality may be [the greater complexity and higher ideality of modern religions], they are not sufficient to place the corresponding religions in different classes. All are religions equally, just as all living beings are equally alive, from the most humble plastids to man. So when we turn to primitive religions it is not with the idea of depreciating religion in general, for these religions are no less respectable than others. They respond to the same needs, they play the same role, they depend on the same causes …

(Durkheim 1995 [1912], p. 15).

Indeed, the suggestion that there was no essential difference in nature between Christianity and the animist, totemic religions studied by Durkheim and the ethnographers is what made the Elementary Forms so controversial in his time.

But, if this is all true, then how do we read the enigmatic final passages of the Division quoted by Holley? Doesn't Durkheim say there that modern morality – embodied in the cult of the individual – is both more human and rational than its predecessors? And doesn't he also seemingly applaud the assimilation of premodern peoples into the modern metropolitan way of life? Doesn't he, that is, outspokenly advocate France's civilizing mission? It is worth quoting the two passages in full; it is also essential to put them in context. In the last passages of the Division, Durkheim is reflecting on the fact that our morality is ‘in the throes of an appalling crisis’ (Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 317). The new, more specialized and advanced division of labor – with factories, large cities, and large numbers of workers, each of whom must compete for jobs that are ever more specialized – has outstripped our morality, and, more specifically, our sense of justice. As discussed at much greater length in Part III of the Division, modern class struggle and the ensuing social breakdown is due, in part, to the fact that workers have come to feel that they are mere ‘cogs in the machine’. Seeing what seem like idle entrepreneurs and rentiers (often from aristocratic backgrounds), they have come to the belief that they are not receiving a just reward for their labor and merit. Finally, growing unemployment in the absence of a secure safety net has given workers the sense that there is not enough work available to make ends meet. In the face of these threats, Durkheim calls on his readers to ‘fashion a new morality’. It is against this background that we should read, I believe, the following passage:

But the mere existence of rules is not sufficient: they must also be just. For this the external conditions of competition should be equal. If, on the other hand, we call to mind that the collective consciousness is increasingly reduced to the cult of the individual, we shall see that the characteristic of morality in organized societies, as compared to segmentary societies, is that it possesses something more human [plus humain], and consequently more rational, about it. It does not cause our activity to depend upon ends that do not directly concern us. It does not make us the servants of some ideal powers completely different in nature from ourselves, powers that follow their own course without heeding the interests of men. It requires us only to be charitable and just towards our fellow-men, to fulfil our task well, to work towards a state where everyone is called to fulfil the function he performs best and will receive a just reward for his efforts. The rules constituting this morality have no constraining power preventing their being fully examined. Because they are better made for us and, in a certain sense, by us, we are freer in relation to them. We seek to understand them and are less afraid to change them.

(Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 317).

When Durkheim says that our morality is plus humain, I think what he means is that our morality is more ‘down-to-earth’, not that it is morally superior. The idea he is trying to convey is that our morality is more down-to-earth because it no longer relies on the backing of fixed and distant god-legislators (or ancestors or spirits) who punish but about which we can do nothing. We are now (especially after reading Durkheim's own work) in a position to know that morality is made by us to suit our ends. This gives us an opportunity that other societies lack: we can act to change our morality as circumstances require. Indeed, at the end of that passage, he is anxious to calm the reader that, just because it lacks transcendental backing, our morality is not in fact any less worthy of commitment and support. He also says, to be sure, that our morality is ‘more rational’, but again, I think here he meant that, because of its reflexive character, it is capable of modification in light of rational reflection, not that it is in some sense, from an ‘absolute’ point of view, better. This passage is meant to encourage the reader to see the possibilities in refashioning a morality of justice – a new morality of solidarity – to undergird the new division of labor, and to shore up the anomie that has broken out across all European societies. It is meant to reflect on what kind of morality is required by us here and now, not to assert its superiority over the moralities of segmentary societies.

Where does this leave Durkheim with respect to France's late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial projects? Durkheim says very little with respect to the colonies. But what he does say seems, if anything, critical. In ‘The Concept of the State’, he writes that the ‘State must … increasingly strive, not to base its glory on the conquest of new territories, which is always unjust, but to bring about the reign of greater justice in the society that it personifies’ (Durkheim 1986, p. 50). 12 In Moral Education, he bemoans the meeting of ‘unequal cultures’:

Wherever two populations, two groups of people having unequal cultures, come into continuous contact with one another, certain feelings develop that prompt the more cultivated group – or that which deems itself such – to do violence to the other. This is currently the case in colonies and countries of all kinds where representatives of Europe and civilization find themselves involved with underdeveloped peoples. Although it is useless and involves great dangers for those who abandon themselves to it, exposing themselves to formidable reprisals, this violence almost inevitably breaks out. Hence that kind of bloody foolhardiness that seizes the explorer in connection with races he deems inferior. 13

His ironic qualifications – ‘deem themselves more cultivated’, ‘deems inferior’ – signal that he is sceptical that Europeans’ claims to superiority justify violence – such violence, in addition, is ‘useless’ and ‘dangerous’. It is in this light that we should read the following passage from the Division, quoted by Holley:

There is nothing that demonstrates that the intellectual and moral diversity of societies is destined to continue. The ever greater expansion of higher societies, whereby the absorption or elimination of less advanced societies occurs, is tending in any case to lessen that diversity.

(Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 319n6)

The footnote occurs in the context of a discussion regarding the possibility of a global organization designed to secure peace and regulate the division of labor at a supranational level. Durkheim worries that, given vastly different levels of development (which correspond to different moral systems), such a global organization has no hope of emerging. He notes, however, that European societies (which do share a similar level of development, and hence a moral system) are beginning to cooperate in this direction. 14 But can such an organization ever become truly global? Here Durkheim notes that there is no reason to think that it can't be (and includes the footnote cited above). Given the passages I have cited, I think we can (tentatively) conclude that Durkheim was not celebrating the absorption or elimination of less advanced societies (e.g., via colonialism), but merely noting it as an inevitable fact about the current world order.

This does not make Durkheim an anticolonialist. His position was most likely similar to his (Durkheimian) successors, including, most famously, his nephew Marcel Mauss. The Durkheimians were against the universalistic mode of French colonization. 15 According to this ‘Jacobin’ ideology, the natives were considered to have no history or culture worth preserving; the point of French colonialism was to replace their backwards (morally) inferior culture with the modern, rational, universal French way of life. As we have seen, the Durkheimians believed that this was not only counterproductive but also wrong-headed: native ways of life were neither superior nor inferior to the French way of life; their moral systems were adapted to their societies, and simply to replace them with a foreign system would destroy the fragile fabric of their society. But what was the Durkheimian response? It was not to challenge the colonial system wholesale, or to advocate for the self-determination of subject peoples. Rather, the response was to encourage the French authorities to engage with and to respect native ways of life in running the colonies. The colonies offered a key natural resource for the ethnographer, namely their Indigenous populations. There is a ‘key interest’, Mauss wrote, ‘in having an exact and thorough knowledge of [the Indigenous population's] languages, its religions, and its social frameworks, which it is unwise to thoughtlessly destroy’. 16 The proposal, that is, was for a ‘kinder, more gentle’ colonialism – but colonialism it still was. There is no doubt that the Durkheimians had much to gain from this position. In 1925, the Colonial Ministry funded a new Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris, founded by Marcel Mauss and several Durkheimian collaborators. 17 The purpose of the institute was scientific, but it also had another function: to train future colonial administrators – doctors, governors, missionaries – about the culture and mores of the colonies they were going to rule. 18

What conclusions should we draw? It is clear that Durkheim and the Durkheimians had a definite place in France's colonial project, and hence served to reproduce and reinforce patterns of structural inequality and violence between settler and colonized. What is less clear is how the idea of solidarity itself was shaped and shaped this project. On one hand, the idea of categorizing ‘primitive’ societies as exhibiting one kind of solidarity – characterized by homogeneity in thought and way of life – and ‘higher’ societies as exhibiting another kind – characterized by heterogeneity and diversity – served to support the French adoption of its own form of indirect rule. 19 Such indirect rule, it is important to remember, was often promoted alongside of a denial of the superiority of Western societies (and so very much in a Durkheimian spirit). 20 Furthermore, the language of solidarity – including specifically European solidarity – was later used to support plans for integrating not just Europe but also its colonies into a single ‘Eurafrican’ empire. 21 But, on the other hand, is the distinction between organic and mechanical solidarity essential to the idea of solidarity itself? Must an invocation of European solidarity necessarily be yoked to colonialism (or neocolonialism)? (Can't the idea of solidarity be used for counter-hegemonic purposes [as it often has been and as Holley himself grants]?) The kind of ideology critique that would be required to complete the debunking argument has yet to be written.

I now turn to the second part of Holley's response, which focuses on the anticolonial solidarities, for example, of the First Nations in Canada. His main claim is that the divergences and disagreements about solidarity within Indigenous anticolonial movements undermine my attempt to identify a unified concept of solidarity. In response, I want to suggest that Holley's examples can be used to reinforce my account. Take the distinction, as used by Holley, between resurgence and reconciliation within Canadian anticolonial Indigenous solidarities. Resurgence theorists are more radical: they argue that pressure to adopt and adapt to Western norms of constitutionalism and self-governance reproduce, at a structural level, the same settler violence that characterized the displacement of the First Nations in the early modern and modern periods. Solidarity requires movement against and often outside of the current order, a non-Western understanding of communal/national self-determination, and limited interaction with settler communities. By contrast, reconciliation theorists demand greater recognition of land, cultural, and self-governance rights, and argue for greater engagement with, and inclusion in, the Canadian constitutional order, and hence greater engagement with settlers. Solidarity here requires rebuilding relationships not just among the First Nations, but among settlers, the First Nations, and the wider natural environment on which they all depend. 22 Holley writes that, in both cases, contestation about what solidarity is (e.g., land-based, aim-based), what it requires (e.g., working within/without the constitutional order), what it opposes (e.g., hegemonic discourses, strife, and conflict), and who it includes (e.g., settlers, other Indigenous groups) is central to the way practitioners use and understand the concept.

Is this account of disagreement among Indigenous activists incompatible with my account? I don't think it is. As Holley recognizes, explaining the possibility (and character) of meaningful disagreement about the aims, scope, content, and basis of solidarity is central to my account. Seen from the perspective of the resurgence–reconciliation debate, my account gives a conceptual framework within which to understand what is at stake in the disagreement. (NB: It does not aim to determine how the disagreement should be resolved.) For example, the disagreement regarding whether to claim greater recognition from the constitutional order or to go outside of it is a disagreement about what the shared goals of the movement should be. Disagreement about whether solidarity is grounded in membership of a particular First Nation (say, the Mohawks), or whether it should span across Nations, or whether it should also include settlers is a disagreement about the basis of identification undergirding solidarity. Across Nations, the basis is a condition as oppressed by settler colonialism. Within a Nation, it is based on what counts as sharing the way of life (and therefore who counts as a member of the relevant group 23 ). 24 With respect to settlers, the basis is a shared cause. 25 Disagreement about what is required by way of sacrifice for the cause is a disagreement about what counts as sharing others’ fate. In short, I don't see why there is any tension between the divergent self-understandings of the groups in question and the categories I lay out for analyzing the structure of those disagreements. There is nothing I say that rules out contestation over the core features of solidarity.

Sally Scholz

Scholz's insightful and inspiring response urges us to reconceive of solidarity less as a kind of action and more as a transformative set of relationships that evolve over time. Rather than merely act in solidarity, she pushes us to live in solidarity. Solidarity, she claims, is transformative in two senses: internal and external. It is externally transformative in the sense that it aims at radical societal and political change. It is internally transformative in the sense that it encourages us to rethink and rework our relationships to ourselves and to others. With respect to ourselves, being in solidarity compels us to overcome bias, prejudice, isolation, and self-interest; with respect to others, being in solidarity sparks care, concern, and mutual understanding while also generating the possibility of new kinds of cooperative association.

I find myself in agreement with almost all of what Scholz writes. I, too, believe that solidarity is transformative. Although I only emphasized the external dimension, I also believe that sympathy, shared understanding, shared normative orientation, and mutual concern (embodied in the disposition to share another's fate) can be, in certain circumstances, transformative. (Recall that the first three in this list for me characterize identification with another, which is a core component of solidarity.) I also believe that solidarity is essentially relational: it is only present when the identification, dispositions, and intentions constitutive of it are mutually directed, only when, that is, you identify with me, and I identify with you, you are disposed to share my fate, and I am disposed to share yours, I trust you and you trust me, and so on, and this is all out in the open between us.

But it is also true that I write about solidarity as a form of action, and not as a way of living. I think this marks an important difference; this difference, however, is not as stark as it may at first seem. Sometimes Scholz writes as if solidarity names an open-ended virtue that is displayed by anyone who shows a disposition to enter into the kinds of transformative relationships with others in many (perhaps all?) areas of their life. For me, this is not necessary. Solidarity is present whenever there is the kind of collective action undergirded by identification that I outline in the main text; solidarity does not name, then, a general disposition of an agent, displayed when the person acts and relates with others in the ways indicated across many domains of their life. Someone could end up experiencing solidarity with others, on my view, only once in their life, or only intermittently. While one might talk, derivatively, of a solidaristic person – as someone who is disposed to act in solidarity with others consistently across many domains of their life – this usage is not central. It does not refer to the social kind, but derives from it. An analogy: one might be a cooperative person, but being a cooperative person is a different kind of thing than cooperation itself.

Speaking of solidarity as a form of action may give rise, however, to the following Scholz-inspired objection. Answering the objection will help us to see that the general idea of living and acting in solidarity are not as far apart as they may at first seem. The objection is this: solidarity seems to name a relation that persists beyond and independently of any particular actions to which it may give rise. For example: Isn't Malcolm X in solidarity with other Black people even when he is not acting together with them? Is Malcolm X really in solidarity with other Black people only when he is giving a speech, or at a protest (and only with the people attending)? In response, I think the key is to identify the correct description of the collective action. This can be more or less fine-grained. In the examples given, we can say that the collective action at stake is the civil rights movement, which is composed of many thousands, perhaps millions, of smaller-scale individual and collective actions, each of which is intentionally and jointly directed at overcoming racial oppression. Each person in each one of these smaller-scale actions can be understood as doing their part in the broader action of overcoming racial injustice. As long as they are appropriately responsive to one another's actions, have overlapping satisfaction conditions, each intend to do their part, and this is all common knowledge, they count as acting together. And they count as acting in solidarity if the further conditions for solidarity are present. (Are they disposed to share one another's fate, should this be required? Do they trust one another? And so on.) If we think of the overall action in this way, we can also think of a map or graph, where each person is a node connected to others via their dispositions, identifications, and intentions in acting. Conceived in this way, there will be more and less dense regions of connection relevant to solidarity, varying with, among other things, the degree of interaction among persons in achieving more proximate goals (for example, a protest, an action of everyday resistance, support for a political candidate, and so on). As long as there are connections among all the regions, then the smaller-scale actions can combine to produce the larger-scale one, which, in our case, is the civil rights movement as a whole. We can then think of the action as distributed not just across space but also across time. Perhaps it is best, then, to describe it as an activity rather than an action. Described in this way, Malcolm X is in solidarity with all those who identify with one another (perhaps on different grounds), who resist, together, anti-Black racism, who trust one another, and who are disposed to share one another's fates and not bypass each other's wills. Once we allow for such unfolding, developing joint activities over time – distributed through many smaller-scale actions – then it is possible to see acting in solidarity as much more similar to, though not the same as, what Scholz means by living in solidarity.

Rainer Forst

Forst's rich and penetrating analysis raises two main sets of concerns. 26 The first set of concerns lays out a series of challenges designed to show that solidarity can exist in the absence of action and can be unilateral. The second set of concerns queries the normative structure of solidarity, and especially its relation to justice. I address each in turn.

In the text, I give the example of Marie. 27 In the silence of her living room, Marie, an East German, is watching television on November 9, 1989, and sees a group gathering together on the Berlin Wall to sing the Deutschlandlied. She begins singing along with them. Is she singing in solidarity with them? The example seems to challenge my view because there is no joint action. Her singing along is not singing together, given that the group is not responsive in any way to her singing (in the same way as each member of the group on the wall is with respect to each other). In the text, I say that we can conceive of her singing as an act of solidarity but only in a limit, or borderline, sense. It is only because we conceive of her singing as if it were joint, it is only because we imagine her to be disposed to share the others’ fates should that be necessary, just as they would be disposed to share hers, and so on, that we can rightly call it acting in solidarity. 28 (This is why I say that her singing counts as solidarity because it is in the shadow of a nearby joint action.) If she had merely raised a glass, or shouted ‘hurrah’ at the television, or merely inwardly felt the warm glow of community, this would not have been an act of solidarity.

Forst, in response, says two things. First, if I grant that this is a borderline, or limit, case, then doesn't this mean that I don't hold joint action to be necessary, and so contradict myself? No. Nearly all concepts have borderline cases about which we are uncertain whether a given object is within the extension of the concept or not. This explains why I use the language of ‘core’ and ‘penumbra’ and don't speak of necessary and sufficient conditions. The criteria I set out for identifying what solidarity as a social kind is are meant to pick out core features; this leaves it open for some of the core features to be missing in certain cases as long as we can explain why the fact that they are missing makes the case a borderline case. If a counterexample looks central, then the account would fail. But Marie's case is, I have argued, clearly peripheral. Why? For two reasons. First, as we have just seen, the case only counts as solidarity if we think of it as occurring in the shadow of a nearby joint action. Merely shouting ‘hurrah’ wouldn't count. Second, as I explain in more detail in the text, Marie's action lacks the cooperative values that make solidarity distinctive and worthy of our attention. It is no surprise that cases like Marie are not central to any of the main traditions of thinking about solidarity. To see the contrast, let us take the ‘hurrah’ version again. Merely shouting ‘hurrah’ at the television is an expressive act of support without any gesture toward cooperative activity, sharing others’ fate, being committed to a cause, and so on. The plausibility of Marie's case trades on the similarity between singing along and singing together, and puts us in the mind that she would have, if only she could have, been up there on the wall with her fellows, tearing it down, and so on.

Forst, on the other hand, wants us to adopt a view of solidarity according to which a mere willingness to act is sufficient. Forst writes: solidarity ‘is a practical attitude of the willingness to act with and/or for others on the basis of a common bond grounded in a common cause and/or identity’. Note that being willing to do something is weaker than both desiring it and intending it. One might be willing to do something that one neither has a desire to do nor intends to do. Someone might be willing, say, to clean the house (if only the conditions were right …), but also have no intention or desire to do so. There are two problems. The first is that merely being willing looks too weak. If you are merely willing to take action with others, but do not ever actually do so (because, say, there might always be some other moment or because one is weak-willed), then one is not in solidarity with others. Solidarity requires commitment (which I capture via the idea of intention [on which more below]). The second is that this makes cases like Marie paradigm cases of solidarity rather than peripheral. Marie, on Forst's view, is just as much in solidarity with other East Germans as workers in the shipyards at Gdansk are with each other. This is the case even if she never takes up the opportunity to act together with anyone to accomplish anything – being willing, Forst says, is enough.

Forst then wonders why – since I refer to intentions, dispositions, and other attitudes throughout – I require action. Why wouldn't the intention be enough (on a par with Forst's mere willingness)? The reason is simple: intentions connect very tightly with action, and it is for this reason that it is standard in the literature to refer to actions as constituted by sets of interlocking, joint intentions (e.g., Bratman). If one has an intention to X, one assumes that, absent special conditions, X will be forthcoming. This is in part because intentions require what is called a ‘settle condition’: one must take oneself to be able to settle whether X will occur for one to act with an intention that it occur. 29 I cannot intend to do things that I do not believe are within my power to settle. I might try to do them, or wish to do them, or desire to do them, or be willing to do them but I cannot intend to do them. So what might thwart my intention to X? I might take myself to be able to settle some matter, but not actually be able to settle it. Or someone might prevent me from Xing either by stopping me or not fulfilling some condition necessary for me to succeed. But these will be special cases, and I will (normally) still be doing something in the pursuit of X. So, suppose we each intend to do our part in the protest, but the police stop us from ever getting started. Note that there will be all kinds of joint action on the way to the protest: the joint planning, mutual coordination of activities, and so on. This is sufficient for solidarity (under the usual conditions). We can imagine, of course, limit cases: each of us intends, on her own and without any knowledge of what others are doing, to go to the first planning meeting, announced in an uncoordinated way on social media, but we are blocked before we even start. Did we act in solidarity? The answer will be mixed. Yes, because we all intended to go to the meeting, identified with one another, were disposed to share one another's fates, and so on. No, because while we intended to begin our joint activities on the way to overcoming some significant adversity, we were stopped before we ever got started. Our solidarity, we might say, was only incipient.

Forst also challenges whether solidarity must be omnilateral, with examples in which people act on behalf of a group ‘blindfolded by ideology’, but in which the target group themselves do not act (indeed, they may resist the need for any such action). Forst illustrates the point with the women's movement, which, he claims, can rightly be regarded as acting in solidarity not just with other women who participate in the movement, but with women everywhere, and with the workers’ movement, where socialist workers have often thought of themselves as fighting for both striking workers as well as those workers who remain misled by capitalist ideology. My response is similar to the response I gave to the example of refugees and prisoners in the main text. The key distinguishing feature of such cases is that, to count as solidarity, activists must aim to engage the agency of those on whose behalf they fight. This includes not only deliberating with them but also respecting their autonomy (even if they disagree with their point of view). If the activists either do nothing to engage those on whose behalf they fight (say, by ignoring them), then they fail to act on solidarity. Why is this a plausible requirement? Solidarity, once again, is essentially cooperative and relational: core cases involve individuals acting together. In cases where this is not possible (as in my refugee and prisoner cases), individuals can still act in solidarity with the target group if they act as if the agency of those involved is engaged, or with the aim of engaging that agency. That is why I called such solidarity latent. But in cases where such engagement is possible, and activists do seek to engage the agency of a target group, but this group outright rejects their entreaties, then the activists can act on behalf of but not in solidarity with those who have rejected them. Solidarity – as a form of cooperation – requires mutuality in the exercise of autonomy and unity in the exercise of agency. Without such mutuality and unity, one has humanitarian aid or acting on behalf of, not solidarity. As becomes clear in Forst's discussion of Christian charity qua humanitarianism, his view – which allows merely unilateral forms of action and aid (as long as such action and aid is grounded in identification) – cannot make this distinction.

I now turn to the second set of concerns. Forst wonders whether identification – whether on the basis of a role, cause, way of life, set of experiences, or condition – can ever give a normatively independent ground for acting in solidarity. Forst grants that, for example, an injustice, or the continued existence of, say, a certain community, or the value of a profession can all provide grounds for acting in solidarity; but what, then, to say of identification as such? 30 In answer to these questions, we can use the distinction between personal and impersonal reasons, where personal reasons are reasons that I have in virtue of special features of my situation, and impersonal reasons are reasons that everyone has, whatever their particular situation. My claim in the text is that personal reasons can give one special reasons to act in solidarity with others that merely impersonal ones do not. For example, the injustice that the Roma experience across Europe gives everyone (impersonal) reasons to join together in solidarity to fight the injustice. But the fact you are Roma gives you a special reason that someone who is not Roma lacks. The special, personal reason derives from the fact that you identify with other Roma, and, on the basis of that identification, also feel special concern and attachment to other Roma, and a special indignation when it is your fellows that suffer. These are reasons to join in solidarity that those who are not Roma lack. The same thing applies to identification based on a cause. Suppose you have invested much of your life and time in fighting climate change; it is one of your ground projects, something that defines who you are. This gives you special, personal reasons to join in solidarity with others who share your passion and commitment. This is not to deny, of course, that everyone has impersonal reasons to join the struggle; when they do – when they make the cause their own alongside others who have also made the cause their own – they then have further, personal reasons to continue the fight together.

Forst also suggests that solidarity cannot have non-instrumental value because its value is conditional, among other things, on meeting standards of justice. But doesn't this then make the value of solidarity reducible to that of justice (or to other values on which it depends)? What independent value would solidarity have? This objection elides the distinction between value that is conditioned on something and value that is derived from it. To illustrate: your desire to fight the occupation on the front lines might be conditioned on your mother not needing your care at home but it does not derive from your mother not needing your care. And so it is with solidarity: solidarity can have distinctive forms of non-instrumental value (such as the ones I discuss in the text), while this value is only realized when the solidarity in question does not promote or involve unjust ends.

Catherine Lu

Lu's illuminating response encourages us to consider failures of solidarity in conditions of structural injustice. My lead essay focuses mostly on instances when solidarity not only succeeds in bringing people together but is also valuable. Although I do mention cases of solidarity bent toward wicked ends, I don't discuss more nuanced cases where there is a mix of bad and good. And although I do discuss cases where people are alienated from groups for which they might otherwise act in solidarity, I only briefly discuss cases where there should be more solidarity than there is, and where such solidarity might itself be a demand of justice. In this response, I want to build on Lu's insightful remarks to see if we might make some further progress. I will focus on (a) the relation between justice and identification, (b) the variety of ways structural injustice can disrupt identification, and (c) problematic solidarities that are not wicked.

The reason I am reticent to say that solidarity can be a demand of justice turns on the place of identification in the overall account. While of course calls to joint action designed to overcome adversity can be demands of justice, and while of course the action required to realize such ends can, in appropriate circumstances, be subject to coercion, it is less clear whether identification as such can be mandated or coerced. But without identification, joint action that meets all of our other conditions is not a core case of solidarity; it may be a borderline case, but it is not paradigmatic. To illustrate: suppose that someone participates in joint action designed to overcome adversity, is willing to aid others in its pursuit, relies on others to do their part, but does it only because they are at the point of a gun. The person is not acting in solidarity, though they are acting as if they were in solidarity. Because there is no identification with the others involved, no trust, and no willingness – on the basis of one's identification – to set aside self-interest in overcoming adversity, this is not a case of solidarity. The same thing applies for someone who acts together in all the same ways as the person at the point of a gun, but who does so only because they are trying to impress their girlfriend, or because they have been paid a handsome sum to do so.

This has implications for how we ought to think of the relation between solidarity and justice. If justice commands the sphere of what Kant called ‘external’ actions, it does not touch on one's reasons or motivations or (broader) intentions in acting. On this view, justice commands us to do certain things – like pay our taxes or refrain from killing – but doesn't care why we do so. Similarly, if justice bounds the sphere of enforceable duties, then it mandates actions that can be coerced by an authorized enforcer (such as the state). Because solidarity reaches deeper than the sphere of the enforceable or the external, only the external part of solidarity can be enforced. Identification is, on this view, outside of the reach of justice. With respect to the coercive aspect of justice-based duties, this is as it should be: coercion cannot apply to identification without excessive incursion on our liberty. For similar reasons, I am hesitant – given the private, emotional, and intimate character of identification – to speak of obligations to identify with others. In part, this is why, in section 3, I wondered whether there could be moral obligations to act in solidarity with others, and focused on cases where people already identify but fail to act (when required) to aid the group in overcoming adversity. (I concluded that the normative force of the demand comes mainly, in such cases, from considerations of fairness.) In such cases, there is no question of being obligated to identify, only of being obligated to act. 31

Lu usefully reminds us that structural injustice can disrupt identification in myriad ways, and so stymie the possibility of solidarity where it is most needed. For the sake of this discussion, let us take structural injustice to mean injustice that is persistent, patterned (usually by unequal distributions of power possessed by different social groups), and highly resistant to change (even with the best of intentions). Typical examples include the persistent patterns of exclusion, vulnerability, marginalization, and exploitation to which subordinated groups are subject. As Lu points out, structural injustice can affect (and disrupt) the relations between members of oppressed ingroups just as it can disrupt the possibility of meaningful identification (and hence solidarity) between members of privileged outgroups and oppressed ingroups. Lu mentions several mechanisms, and we can distinguish several others. Most commonly, the mechanisms for such disruption are material, epistemic, moral, and psychological. Materially, structural injustice will reduce the access of subordinated groups to resources that could facilitate joint resistance to oppression while also enabling privileged groups to protect their privilege. Epistemically, structural injustice sows distrust, especially where it creates large cultural, economic, and social distances between and within groups. 32 It can also blind the privileged to the nature of their privilege, and so dampen the perceived urgency of political response. Distrust, in turn, makes identification either less effective or less likely, or both. Morally, structural injustice is reflected in broken relations between groups, and the mutual resentment that past strife and conflict creates between them. This gives a moral dimension to distrust, where distrust is a product not merely of being unable to rely on what others will do (given their track record) but also of diffidence and justified resentment. Psychologically, structural injustice can affect how ingroups perceive the likelihood of success in collective action. The persistence of injustice can, that is, lead to desperation and resignation, which makes identification and joint action even less likely than it would otherwise have been. Privileged outgroups, finally, will often seek to justify and reinforce their privilege, not merely because of narrow self-interest, but because of the dissonance involved in recognizing their role in perpetuating the very same injustices they might otherwise have wanted to eradicate. 33 Lu is right to note the tragic paradox that sometimes solidarity is most needed where it is least likely to flourish.

Lu also raises the possibility of cases – like the Canadian Catholic Church – where solidarity can sometimes have effects that are mixed: good in some ways, but bad in others. In such cases, can solidarity have non-instrumental value? The Canadian Catholic Church, Lu suggests, has a high degree of internal solidarity. Catholics within the Church identify with one another, are prepared to struggle against adversity together, and are disposed to come to each other's aid. But their solidarity seems to give out when they are asked to promote healing and reconciliation efforts with the Canadian First Nations. While they recognize their past participation in forcibly assimilating aboriginal people (in an effort to destroy their customs and traditions), they are not as willing to repair for past wrongs as they are to fund a large and expensive church renovation. Lu suggests that this nullifies any non-instrumental value their solidarity would otherwise have. I'm not so sure. Remember that, in Lu's example, the Catholic Church raised $3.7 million for peace and reconciliation; even though this is thirty times less than what they raised for the church renovation, and far short of the amount they had initially pledged, it is still something. And yet Lu is surely right that, against a background of structural and past injustice, this failure to raise as much as had been hoped sends a message to the First Nations: ‘you matter, but not all that much’. To come to a view about the value of Catholic solidarity in Canada, I think we need to distinguish three different cases. In the first, most favorable case, we can imagine that, had there not been any internal solidarity within the Canadian Catholic Church, Catholics in Canada would have given even less than $3.7 million. In this case, I believe we should say that, although Catholics within the Church are still blameworthy, their internal solidarity is both non-instrumentally and instrumentally valuable. It promotes, after all, not only important collective efforts involving Catholics but also efforts involving other groups, like the First Nations. Because non-instrumental value is conditional on instrumental value, it is enhanced (or at the very least preserved) rather than diminished in this case. While it would have been even more valuable had the full amount of their pledge been realized, it still retains value. 34 In the second case, the internal solidarity neither encourages nor discourages the peace and reconciliation effort. Catholics would have given the same, and in the same way, with or without a high degree of internal solidarity. They are still blameworthy, but their internal solidarity remains both instrumentally and non-instrumentally valuable. This is because their internal solidarity, we are assuming, promotes valuable ends generally (and does not undermine, or enhance, their peace and reconciliation efforts).

The final case is the most interesting one. Here we imagine that Catholic internal solidarity makes Catholics less likely to promote peace and reconciliation with the First Nations; Catholics would have given more, had they not had internal solidarity. This could be either because Canadian Catholics invest all their time and effort in improving the condition of those with whom they identify, which takes resources away from other pursuits, or it could be because their internal solidarity increases their prejudice, contempt, or animus toward the First Nations. In either case, both the instrumental and the non-instrumental value of their internal solidarity diminishes. There is no point in trying to say by exactly how much. Different people will come to different judgments depending on their overall assessment of the blameworthiness of their lack of concern, and the impact of Catholics’ solidary beliefs and internal practices on that blameworthiness. 35 The important point is that the instrumental and non-instrumental value of Catholic solidarity, just as Lu suggests, decreases in this case.

1 See, e.g., James 2013 [1963], p. 66, where he describes cricket as a ‘stage … charged with social significance’.
2 For more on why ‘silent’ forms of solidarity should not count, see pp. 119–20.
3 Cf. Anderson 1995.
4 Cf. the ‘Letter to White People’ issued by Krys Foster in the context of the US medical profession's involvement in BLM, available at www.annfammed.org/content/annalsfm/19/1/66.full.pdf (accessed May 15, 2023). As a doctor within a large health organization, she recommends that White people listen to Black people and people of colour; support leaders and advocates of vulnerable communities with time, expertise, and voice; identify, sponsor, and mentor colleagues of colour to serve as leaders; explore and uproot biases; and use privilege to advocate for changes designed to address systemic racism and health inequalities.
5 Kolers suggests, in response, that ingroup members defer to the group as such. See main essay, pp. 57–9 and Kolers 2016, p. 62. For example, union members defer to the union in deciding what to do. But this solution only works for organized groups with clear authority structures, where it is clear what the ‘marching orders’ are. In looser groups, such as a protest or in a wider social movement, there may not be a single, generally recognized authority issuing orders in the name of the group. In such cases, is solidarity impossible? Or consider just two people who stand in solidarity against some adversity. It would be odd to say that they defer to ‘the group’, or that they cannot stand in solidarity unless they do so.
6 It is likely that such practices have been widespread (though not theorized) whenever outgroups have been involved. Perhaps the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War can provide earlier examples (though I have not been able to find any). Explicit practices and politics of deference and allyship seem to trace their origin (as far I can tell) to support for the miners in the UK in the 1980s (including, as made famous in the 2013 film Pride, the group ‘Lesbians and Gays for the Miners’). Practices of deference seem irrelevant in civic and nationalist forms of solidarity.
7 I very much doubt this was the case between the real-world members of Asians for Black Lives and core members of BLM.
8 For a history of the impact of French solidarism on international law, see Koskenniemi 2002.
9 See also Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 311; 1982 [1895], p. 86.
10 On this point, see also the instructive discussion in Fields 2005.
11 See, e.g., Durkheim 1984 [1893], p. 197.
12 Many thanks to Rouven Symank for the reference.
13 Quoted in Kurasawa 2013, p. 198.
14 Durkheim presumably had in mind precursors to the League of Nations, such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1889) and possibly the Concert of Europe. The Division was published in 1893.
15 For this point, see the discussion in Kurasawa 2013, p. 191; Conklin 1997, pp. 279, 310; Fournier 2005, pp. 235–6.
16 Quoted in Fournier 2005, p. 237.
17 For this history, see Fournier 2005, pp. 234ff.
18 See Conklin 1997, pp. 196ff; Fournier 2005, p. 237.
19 See Conklin 1997.
20 See, e.g., Wagner 2022, ch. 7. Malinowski, for example, presented two papers at the 1938 Volta Congress – organized by Italian fascists, and which brought together all the European colonial powers to discuss integration and better management of the colonies – in which he compared, non-hierarchically, the rationality of Indigenous societies with modern ones.
21 See Hansen and Jonsson 2014.
22 For an overview of this debate that canvasses a variety of different positions within each of these camps, see Asch et al. 2018. For powerful statements of the resurgent view, see Coulthard 2014; Alfred 2005.
23 Here the criteria for membership of, say, the Mohawks is relevant. There have been important disagreements within the community about what the basis of such membership should be. Should it be based on traditional understandings that emphasize matrilineal descent and practices of adoption? Or should it be based on settler ideas about whether a person has a ‘quantum of blood’? These disagreements determine who should be included in the way of life that defines the Nation, and hence with whom one identifies as a Mohawk. See, e.g., Dickson-Gilmore 1999.
24 Of course, what counts as the way of life that solidarity aims to protect can also be the site of protracted disagreement, including what counts as desirable forms of self-government. See, e.g., the conclusion of Coulthard 2014.
25 The Dakota Access Pipeline protests, cited above, are a good example of all three modes of solidarity.
26 Forst also raises a third set of concerns regarding the conceptual structure of the account, but I think here there really is no disagreement between Forst and me, so I leave them aside.
27 I draw the example from Zhao 2019.
28 I note, in passing, that had the group on the Berlin Wall known that there would be people at home watching their televisions, singing with them, and had people at home known that they knew this (and had this knowledge been in common among them), then this would have been an instance of singing together. There would have been, in this case, mutual responsiveness: for example, if the group had known that the television connection had cut out, then they would have waited to start singing until it was on again.
29 See, e.g., Harman 1976; Bratman 1987.
30 Although what I will say will apply to both cases, it is worth recalling here the distinction between the reasons one takes oneself to have [‘operative’ reasons], and the reasons one really does have [‘genuine’ reasons] – the Mafia, for example, have reasons of the former but not the latter kind to act in solidarity with other members of the relevant family in advancing wicked ends.
31 Of course, if we take a broader view of justice, where justice describes both constraints on external action as well as a virtue, then there is more scope for including solidarity within the domain of justice. But it strikes me as more clear to keep justice for the sphere of the external, institutional, or coercive.
32 See, e.g., Shelby forthcoming.
33 See, e.g., DiAngelo 2018.
34 Things would be different if one believes that no action on behalf of the First Nations would have been better than the paltry effort displayed by the Church.
35 This is a common critique of solidarity: solidarity within any one group can diminish solidarity with other groups. I try to address the general critique in Sangiovanni forthcoming.

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Zhao, M. (2019), ‘Solidarity, Fate-Sharing, and Community’, Philosopher's Imprint 19: 1–13.

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Solidarity – Nature, grounds, and value

Andrea Sangiovanni in dialogue

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