Why Solidarity is Not an Essentially Contested Concept

To say that solidarity is a contested concept is probably not a very controversial claim. One only needs to think of the many ways people call for solidarity in social and political struggles, which range from ‘black’ solidarity against racial injustice to solidarity amongst bankers during the financial crisis. At the same time, solidarity is equally contested in theoretical debates – as is evidenced, for instance, by the tension between ‘solidarity among’ and ‘solidarity with’ or the apparent incompatibility between descriptive and normative conceptions of solidarity. Yet, is solidarity – following Gallies influential notion – also an ‘essentially contested concept’? Famously, Gallie held that in order for a concept to qualify as ‘essential contested’ it has to be the case that, even though there is no way of identifying any one of the competing interpretations of the concept as the ‘correct’ one, the advocates of these competing interpretations still agree that they are ultimately talking about the same thing. Among other things, this implies that they will be in agreement about a core meaning of the contested concept in question and thus also agree about the distinction between this concept and ‘neighbouring’ concepts. As I argue, however, neither can be said about solidarity. I start by providing a cursory overview of the emergence of solidarity as a concept with social and political meaning in the late 18th and early 19th century and show that even then solidarity didn’t have a core meaning. Rather, we find here a plurality of competing conceptions of solidarity. The explanation for this, or so I argue, is that – in contrast to many other concepts – the coinage of the concept coincided with its immediate use as a both flexible and powerful tool in theoretical and political struggles. I then go on to discuss how this leads to a widespread conflation of solidarity and similar concepts (such as fraternity, loyalty etc.), examine to what extent this is reflected in contemporary invocations of solidarity (both in theory and practice) and offer some thoughts on what this might mean for any further attempts of analysing this particular contested concept.