Solidarity and Public Goods

Avigail Ferdman, Margaret Kohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367551803
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000194135
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the wake of health and economic crises across the world, solidarity is emerging as both a moral imperative and urgent social goal. This book approaches solidarity as a political good, both a framework of power structures and grounds for moral motivation. The distinct approaches to public goods and social value demonstrate how social connectedness is intricately tied to the distribution of public goods, and the moral commitments that grow out of them.

The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute property's social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

The theory and politics of solidarity and public goods

Avigail Ferdman

and Margaret (Peggy) Kohn

ABSTRACT

For over forty years, economic inequality and distributive justice have been two of the primary concerns of political philosophers. This volume addresses these issues in a novel way, by focusing on the concepts of solidarity and public goods as both descriptive and normative frameworks. Solidarity links the social, political and moral together, in a distinctively political approach that recognizes the social sources of power on the one hand and sources of moral motivation on the other. Public goods such as education, healthcare, and transport systems are indispensable to the forging of solidarity, but at the same time they may become sources of oppression or injustice, when they fail to respect individual autonomy or when they calcify majoritarian preferences. The essays in this volume explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. The moral theory of solidarity is advanced in one case as an intrinsically valuable concept of social connectedness and in another as an approach of epistemic deference; a structural account of solidarity theorizes about action against racial oppression, and a power-relations account points at the urgency of the affective, non-rational dimensions of solidarity. The social value of property and its moral implications are articulated through the lens of French 19th Century ‘Solidarism’ and as a complementary theory to left-libertarianism. Public goods are defended as instrumental to solidarity, in one case within a liberal framework and in another within a human-perfectionism framework. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the volume re-establishes solidarity and public goods as pertinent concepts for theorizing about social justice and inequality.

The publication of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book Capital in the twenty-first Century sparked a global discussion about rising economic inequality. The growing concentration of wealth and income was already well known, but Piketty provided strong evidence to support several additional claims. First, he showed that inequality had reached levels similar to the era of the robber barons or what the French called the Belle Époque. Second, he argued that the equalization achieved in the first half of the twentieth century was anomalous and unlikely to recur without a politics of redistribution. Finally, he demonstrated that public wealth had been decimated and replaced by private wealth.

This volume addresses these issues, but it does so in a novel way, by focusing on the concepts of solidarity and public goods. For over forty years, economic inequality and distributive justice have been two of the primary concerns of political philosophers. While it would be unfair to fault political theory for the failures of political practice, it is worth asking why egalitarian political philosophy has not resonated in public discourse. In the Belle Époque, a largely forgotten group of French intellectuals asked a similar question. The philosopher Alfred Fouilleé worried that the abstract universalism of Kantian philosophy had failed to clarify the relationship between formal and substantive equality and had proved unable to motivate citizens to respond to urgent social problems. In order to address these concerns, the Radical Republicans, led by Léon Bourgeois, introduced the concept of solidarity. Solidarity was intended as a reinterpretation of the third principle of the famous slogan of the French revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. For the Radical Republicans, solidarity provided a way to justify the provision of public goods and to overcome the tension between liberty and equality.

Today, the concept of solidarity is not widely used by political theorists, and, at least in North America, it plays only a marginal role in public life. One challenge is that the term solidarity can be used in very different ways. The term is French in origin. According to the 1765 Encyclopédie Commercial, the term solidarity had a distinctive legal meaning. Solidarité referred to the obligation of a group of borrowers to discharge the debt of others (Brunkhorst, 2005). It was taken up by Auguste Comte and other sociologists who used it to describe the cohesiveness of a group (Metz, 1999). Solidarity has also played an important role in Catholic theology. Since the mid-twentieth century, it has been one of the primary principles of Catholic Social Teaching, where it describes the individual and collective obligation to help those in need (Scholz, 2008).

In her book Political Solidarity, Sally Scholz distinguishes between political, social, and civic solidarity. Social solidarity is the bond between members of a community united by shared characteristics. Civic solidarity implies reciprocal obligations among members of a political community to protect the vulnerable. Political solidarity is the term that she uses to describe the relations between members of a social movement or activist group, but it involves something more than just mutuality and cooperation among members of the group. It also entails a moral relationship to the cause itself and a set of obligations to the larger society (2008, p. 13). The primary duty is activism aimed at transforming the structural relations that produce injustice. While these three forms of solidarity differ, they also share some important features. All forms of solidarity are ways to mediate between the individual and the group. Solidarity binds people together, but it does so without giving absolute priority to the individual or the group. Most significantly, solidarity is a moral relationship that involves positive obligations (2008, p. 19).

This preliminary analysis helps us identify some of the promising and perhaps also problematic features of solidarity. Solidarity links the social, political, and moral together. It also provides an alternative framework that addresses some of the critiques of ideal theory. It is a distinctively political approach that recognizes the social sources of power and therefore provides a more adequate account of political action. The social ties among groups of activists or citizens can help solve the problem of moral motivation and explain why it is necessary to place the needs of others ahead of one’s own interests. When members of a group have high levels of interdependence, they are more willing to prioritize the needs of others or to see interests as collective. This provides a way for the powerless to partially overcome asymmetries of power, but social solidarity can also be a source of injustice. The solidarity among members of political groups such as the Klu Klux Klan can serve unjust ends and mutual aid, and cooperation among privileged actors can exacerbate rather than mitigate inequality. As several contributors to this volume insist, solidarity must draw on and not replace normative theory.

This volume also contributes to the emerging literature on solidarity by exploring the relationship between solidarity and public goods. One of the most pressing, yet unacknowledged, problems in distributive justice is the need to account for the distribution of public goods. Standard approaches (Dworkin, 2000; Rawls, 1999) either neglect public goods or treat them as private goods (Vallentyne, Steiner, & Otsuka, 2005). Rousseau argued that public goods like festivals and civic spaces play a crucial role in fostering the solidarity among citizens that it makes it possible to reconcile equality and freedom. For liberal theorists, on the other hand, the provision of public goods poses a distinctive challenge. Why should the state force everyone to pay for goods that are preferred by some but not all citizens? Barring a few extreme cases (like national security), the decision whether to supply these goods as public goods – free of charge and non-exclusionary – is a political decision, which requires explicit moral justification (Miller and Taylor in press). This is especially important in the case of non-universal public goods – goods that are not in everyone’s basic interest.

The contributions to this volume explore different features of the political, moral, and civic approaches to solidarity. The papers advance, and in some cases transform, the dominant way of interpreting these concepts. The first two papers defend two different moral theories of solidarity: a theory of epistemic deference (Kolers) and an account of the noninstrumental value of social connectedness (Hussein). In his article, Waheed Hussein asks, ‘Why Should We Care about Competition?’ He argues that liberal democracies should place limits on the allocation of goods through competitive institutions. These limits are justified because of the threat that competitive institutions pose to the value of human sociability and in particular from the noninstrumental value of a form of social connectedness that he calls ‘mutual affirmation.’ This approach improves on the instrumental argument, which holds that excessively competitive institutions are morally defective because they impede the formation of a rich network of social attachments, which is necessary for maintaining just arrangements over time. Hussein also shows that these ideas provide the basis for a powerful argument in favor of social provisions for public goods – e.g. a strong public healthcare system moderates the stakes in labor market competition, preventing the competition from descending into a life or death struggle.

In ‘Solidarity as Environmental Justice in Brownfields Remediation,’ Avery Kolers focuses on the maldistribution of public bads, specifically the environmental degradation that blights and contaminates poor and minority communities. His paper poses a challenging question for the political theory of solidarity. According to Scholz, membership in a political group like the environmental justice movement requires both a moral commitment to the cause and a responsibility to cooperate to discharge collective responsibilities (2008, p. 85). What happens when these two obligations seem to conflict? In Louisville, the residents of the poor neighborhoods that were most directly affected by contamination opposed a remediation plan that was endorsed by experts and allied environmental justice activists. Kolers argues that a moral theory of solidarity requires ‘action on another’s terms’ even if this means deference to judgements that one disagrees with.

Mara Marin’s article also examines the politics of social movements against injustice. She theorizes solidarity in the context of racial oppression and offers a structural account of solidarity. The paper develops such a notion of solidarity in conversation with the views proposed by Tommie Shelby (2002, 2005) and Robert Gooding-Williams (2009). Against the idea that such solidarity requires a shared ethno-cultural identity, Tommie Shelby defends the ‘common oppression view’ of solidarity, based solely on the victims’ shared condition of oppression. According to Shelby, all victims of racial oppression can be reasonably expected to endorse a set of principles that will move them to common action. By pointing to the highly controversial nature of claims made in politics, Robert Gooding-Williams sheds doubts on the idea that such principles exist. Defending a view of politics as action-in-concert, marked by reasonable disagreement, Gooding-Williams advances a non-foundational view of solidarity constituted through the controversy of politics rather than derived from pre-political commitments or interests. The problem with such a notion, however, is that it is unable to link the unjust structures to the political action, and thus, it is unable to effectively transform social reality. Drawing on Iris Young’s notion of ‘gender as seriality’ (Young, 1997), Marin defends a notion of ‘structural solidarity,’ distinguished by its ability to direct action along material patterns of inequality and disadvantage, as a better notion of solidarity under structural and intersecting conditions of oppression.

In his article, Charles Lesch explores solidarity from a different perspective. Lesch asks ‘What Undermines Solidarity?’ and turns to the work of Rousseau, Kant, Durkheim, and Levinas to answer this question. He examines Rousseau and Kant’s sophisticated accounts of social pathology and argues that both provide grounds for doubting the assumption that solidarity will emerge organically out of liberal–democratic political systems, as long as they are rational or deliberative. Rousseau and Kant show that every society has informal power relations in which some are dominant and others quiescent and, if left unchecked, these forms of dependence will create a dynamic that is ripe for exploitation, abuse, and domination. They will lead not only to macro-scale social instabilities, but also micro-scale cruelties. Lesch argues that these everyday forms of dependence are inimical to the social trust and respect that are needed for solidarity. They are not eliminable by shared political principles or deliberative practices alone. He concludes that research should pay more attention to the affective, non-rational, and esthetic dimensions of solidarity.

The next two papers address the social value of property and its moral implications. Margaret Kohn, in ‘Solidarity and Social Rights,’ provides a distinctive theoretical foundation for social rights grounded in French nineteenth-century ‘Solidarism.’ Social rights to land, housing, food/water, and development, despite gaining formal recognition in some countries, are yet to be fully constitutionalized and universally guaranteed. Kohn argues that this is no coincidence: it is a consequence of an inherent ambivalence within liberal theory toward the tension between social structure and individual right. The liberal approach lacks a convincing account of how social circumstances affect individual autonomy and therefore cannot provide a satisfying account of social rights. It ends up – counterintuitively – endorsing illegitimately intrusive mechanisms for distinguishing the unlucky from the lazy. Kohn shows that solidarism, which explicitly accounts for the creation of social value in property, possesses the theoretical resources to include both social structure and individual right. The important difference between solidarism and liberalism, with respect to rights, is ontological: according to the liberal approach, a person is an autonomous individual who reflects about the principles that would secure their autonomy given that they share the world with others. On the solidarist account, persons are born vulnerable and dependent. Social ties sustain us, and therefore, we should repair and strengthen them. This moral obligation stems more from the human condition of precarity and vulnerability than from individual autonomy. The normative implication is that we must use social wealth to promote the flourishing of all members of society. In solidarism, therefore, individual flourishing and social circumstances are complementary, thereby providing a coherent account of social rights.

In ‘Justice as a Claim to (Social) Property,’ Rutger Claassen is more skeptical as to the analytic distinction between solidarism and autonomy. Claassen is interested in the distinction between right-libertarianism, in which individual property claims are central to justice, left-libertarianism, and egalitarianism, in which property claims are derivative. Does solidarism exist outside of this analytic framework, as a distinct theory of property relations and justice? Claassen argues that solidarism in fact exists within this framework and as a close cousin of left-libertarianism. The motivation driving this analytic examination is an attempt to unpack the political allure of right-libertarianism, which has proved immensely successful in grounding the morality of capitalism. To the extent that egalitarian theories aim to promote social justice by demonstrating that they are morally superior to right-libertarianism, they have to provide a convincing account of property, personhood, and political community. Claassen argues that despite solidarism’s aim to identify property claims as social claims and provide an alternative account to right-libertarianism, the underlying moral obligation in solidarism is nevertheless a non-property-based fundam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The theory and politics of solidarity and public goods
• 2 Solidarity as environmental justice in brownfields remediation
• 3 Why should we care about competition?
• 4 Racial structural solidarity
• 5 What undermines solidarity? Four approaches and their implications for contemporary political theory
• 6 Solidarity and social rights
• 7 Justice as a claim to (social) property
• 8 Engaging the reluctant taxpayer
• 9 Why the intrinsic value of public goods matters
• Index