Introduction

In this chapter, we draw out some key themes, ideas and concepts from the social sciences, philosophy and other disciplines that have influenced our conceptualisation of solidarity. Our overview contains the most influential works related to solidarity in the English language, and it follows a roughly chronological structure. It does not aim to provide a comprehensive review of scholarship on solidarity in the social sciences and humanities (which can be found elsewhere: Jeffries 2014; Sternø 2005). Instead, it also includes works and debates that do not discuss solidarity explicitly and specifically, but that we found to have an important bearing on how solidarity should be conceptualised. This chapter thus lays the ground for the introduction of our own definition of solidarity, to which Chapter 3 will be devoted.

Some Early Sociological Work on Solidarity

We have introduced the etymological root of solidarity in the Roman law concept of in solidum in the previous chapter. A similar notion existed in the law of classical Greece, where citizens within an oikos – i.e. a household that often included extended families – were sometimes jointly responsible for debts that any of them had occurred, or could jointly accept paybacks that any of the members of the oikos was entitled to receive (Smith and Sorrell 2014: 222). Solidarity entered the Western political domain in the late eighteenth century, fuelled by French revolutionaries who also used the closely related term fraternité to refer to ‘a feeling of political community and the wish to emphasise what was held in common’ (Sternø 2005: 27; see also Brunkhorst 2005). This feeling of political community was soon extended to larger groups for which the revolutionaries claimed to speak.

The idea of mutual assistance among citizens had already played an important role in social contract theories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These sought to provide a political justification for the existence of state power, that is, for political communities in which people had given up their ‘natural’ liberties – e.g. to take anything they saw, to kill their enemies, to settle wherever they liked, etc. – and instituted civil liberties in return. Although the idea of mutual assistance played an important role in social contract theories, thinkers in these traditions were not concerned with the notion of solidarity in an explicit and specific manner.