Solidarity – Nature, grounds, and value

Front matter

Manchester University Press

CRITICAL POWERS

Series Editors: Antony Simon Laden (University of Illinois, Chicago), Peter Niesen (University of Hamburg) and David Owen (University of Southampton).

Part II Responses 2 Solidarity is not joint action Avery Kolers

3 The (anti)colonial limits of solidarity: history, theory, practice Jared Holley

4 Collective transformative hope: on living in solidarity Sally Scholz

5 The meaning(s) of solidarity Rainer Forst

6 Solidarity and structural injustice Catherine Lu

Part II Reply

7 Response to critics Andrea Sangiovanni page viii x

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Contributors

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Center ‘Normative Orders’ at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 2012 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. Important publications are: Contexts of Justice (1994, published in English 2002), Toleration in Conflict (2003, Engl. 2013), The Right to Justification (2007, Engl. 2012), Normativity and Power (2015, Engl. 2017), Die noumenale Republik (2021, Engl. forthcoming). He is the author and subject of two volumes in the Critical Powers Series: Justice, Democracy and the Right to Justification (2014) and Toleration, Power and the Right to Justification (2020).

Jared Holley is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, having previously held a Marie Sktodowska-Curie Fellowship for the project ‘Anticolonial Solidarity: analytical clarification through historical reconstruction’. He is the author of Rousseau’s Politics of Taste (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) and several articles, the most recent of which is ‘Racial Equality and Anticolonial Solidarity: Anténor Firmin’s Global Haitian Liberalism’, American Political Science Review (2023).

Avery Kolers is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (2009) and A Moral Theory of Solidarity (2016), as well as numerous papers in applied ethics and social and political philosophy. He is working on a book about what political theory can learn from the individual and collective goods we realize in athletic activity and games. A recent paper in this vein is ‘Groundwork for the Mechanics of Morals’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2021).

Contributors ix

Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her research interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative theoretical studies of colonial international order, structural injustice, and global justice; alienation and reconciliation; and cosmopolitanism and the world state. In addition to writing articles on these themes, she is the author of Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Sally J. Scholz is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. An award-winning teacher and researcher, Scholz works in social philosophy on solidarity, oppression, violence, and just war theory. Publications include the books Political Solidarity, On de Beauvoir, and On Rousseau, and Feminism: A Beginner’s Guide. Scholz has co-edited numerous books and special issues, and served as editor for Hypatia, Journal of Peace and Justice Studies and the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Feminism. In addition, Scholz is a leader in the profession, serving on the board of the American Philosophical Association and president of the North American Society for Social Philosophy.

Series editor’s foreword

Andrea Sangiovanni has established himself as one of the most innovative and important political philosophers of his generation through a series of conceptual and theoretical works that range from his path-breaking articles on practice-dependence' and the sites of justice” in political philosophy to his continuing normative engagement with the institutional structure of the European Union.’ In his powerfully argued book Humanity without Dignity he grounds human rights not on an appeal to the concept of dignity but in the moral right of each person not to be treated as inferior to other persons. He defends this argument through a substantive account of being treated as an inferior manifest in dehumanization, instrumentalization, infantilization, objectification, and stigmatization.

1 See, for example, ‘Normative Political Theory: A Flight from Reality?’ in Political Thought and International Relations, ed. D. Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 219-40; ‘Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality’, Journal of Political Philosophy 36(2) (2008): 137-64; ‘How Practices Matter’, Journal of Political Philosophy 24 (2016): 3-23.

2 See, for example, ‘Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35(1) (2007): 2-39; ‘The Irrelevance of Coercion, Imposition, and Framing to Distributive Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 40(2) (2012): 79-110.

3 See, for example, ‘Solidarity in the European Union: Problems and Prospects’, in The Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law, eds. Julie Dickson and Pavlos Eleftheriadis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 384-412; ‘Solidarity in the European Union’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 33 (2013): 213-41; ‘Non-Discrimination, Free Movement, and In-Work Benefits in the European Union’, European Journal of Political Theory 16 (2017): 143-63; ‘Debating the EU’s raison d’étre: On the Relation between Justice and Legitimacy’, Journal of Common Market Studies 57 (2019): 13-27.

Series editor’s introduction xi

Sangiovanni’s concern with moral equality construed in these terms offers one route through which an interest in solidarity naturally arises, since an important site of solidarity is that of groups who are treated as inferior and engage in political struggle against their being so treated. But a second route arises directly from his work on the European Union and its commitment (at least in principle) to solidarity between member states. The fact that his work raises the issue of solidarity from these two different directions is a reason why Sangiovanni finds himself confronting the general question of whether the use of the word ‘solidarity’ in both contexts can be seen as particular specifications of the same concept or not, and hence the question with which he begins the lead essay of this volume concerning the nature of solidarity, its grounds, and its value. The ambitious aim of this essay is to offer a general account of solidarity that has sufficient structure to be empirically and normatively valuable, to distinguish solidarity from other normative concepts, and to encompass an important range of standard uses.

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

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

David Owen

Part I

Andrea Sangiovanni