Solidarity

After freedom and equality, solidarity stands as the third term of the revolutionary triad. It is a kind of secularized heir of Christian fraternité (brotherhood). It is at the same time the most indeterminate of the three: everyone appeals to it, yet it means very different things, from spontaneous compassion through cool self-interest to the organized welfare state. An emancipatory and at the same time critical view takes the promise of solidarity seriously and at the same time poses the uncomfortable question: Who belongs to the "we" that calls itself solidary, and who stays outside? "We": is that family, friends, my region, my country, my people, my culture, or all of us?

Solidarity as reaction

Most originally, solidarity appears as a psychological reaction: as compassion, as spontaneously standing up for those who are close to us. Émile Durkheim, in De la division du travail social (1893), distinguished between a mechanical solidarity of similarity and an organic solidarity of mutual dependence. Both have an affective root: we feel bound to those who resemble us or are interwoven with us.

Precisely here critical thinking is called for. A merely felt solidarity favours the near sphere, the familiar, one's own. It can be warm-hearted and yet narrow; indeed, it easily tips into its opposite: whoever is solidary only with their own excludes the strangers. History knows enough solidarity that produced warmth inward and enmity outward. Richard Rorty draws the right conclusion from this: solidarity is not discovered but made, and the real task consists in widening the "we" until even the stranger appears as a counterpart capable of suffering (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989).

Solidarity as a useful principle

A second interpretation understands solidarity soberly as a useful principle: as insurance against risk, as cooperation for mutual advantage. The welfare state is the institutional form of this thought. No one knows in advance whether they will one day be ill, unemployed or old and needy; so everyone insures themselves together. Solidarity appears here as clever self-interest under the veil of uncertainty.

This reading has an emancipatory point that should not be underestimated: Organized solidarity frees us from the arbitrariness of charity. Whoever depends on alms remains dependent on the goodwill of others; whoever has a legally guaranteed claim stands on an equal footing. But the purely instrumental justification has a weakness. What is only useful is dropped as soon as it no longer pays. A solidarity that rests exclusively on calculation cancels the weakest, whose contribution pays off least. The moral surplus of solidarity, standing up even for the one from whom I get nothing back, cannot be won from usefulness alone.

Solidarity as an answer to the question of equality

With this, solidarity connects with the question of equality. Jürgen Habermas, in his essay Justice and Solidarity (in: Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, 1991), described both as two sides of one coin. Justice demands equal respect for each individual person as an unmistakable individual; solidarity demands care for the well-being of the other as a member of a shared form of life. Both spring from the same root, mutual recognition in reaching understanding. Whoever recognizes one another as equals in discourse owes one another not only justice but also solidarity.

From this follows a double critique. Solidarity without justice degenerates into paternalistic care that patronizes the recipient and keeps them in gratitude. Justice without solidarity stiffens into a cold formalism that administers rights but no longer touches anyone. Only together do they carry: equality gives solidarity its measure, so that it does not slide into pity from above; solidarity gives equality its warmth, so that it does not become a mere accounting of claims.

So solidarity shows itself as what it should always have been: neither mere feeling nor mere business, but a practice of widening. It begins with the reaction to nearby suffering, takes shape in lasting institutions and finds its measure in the recognition of all as equals. It is emancipatory where it transforms dependence into recognition, and it remains critical as long as it asks whose voice is still missing in the solidary "we".