Democratic theorists who disagree about many other things have long agreed on treating freedom and equality as crucial values for democracy. I aim to show in this essay that solidarity should also be understood as a vital good of democracy, one inseparable from these more familiar democratic values and deserving of comparable attention. The vision I offer of solidarity’s crucial role in democracy is at odds with some influential works of democratic theory. But it resonates with newer developments in political thought, including a thriving interdisciplinary literature on solidarity, and with contributions to democratic theory and adjacent fields that have converged on calling attention to the role of contentious political practices in sustaining democracy. In this essay I seek to reflect on the latter intellectual currents and develop a theory of solidarity that elucidates them.
In making the democratic case for solidarity, I take a broad view of what should count as a democratic practice. The vision I develop portrays democracy as something more than collective decision making that sums up individual political preferences, or a process that subjects political demands to discursive scrutiny. In particular, it includes as part of democratic life many forms of contentious politics, from demonstrating to disobedience, and also embraces all kinds of vital political work that enable equal participation in voting, deliberating, and protesting. As diverse as all these democratic practices may be, one crucial aspect of all of them—according to the view I am advocating—is that they should be understood as involving political agents continually creating for each other the conditions to act as free equals. Acknowledging such solidary action’s democratic significance, then, entails affirming unavoidable political interdependence.
The need for solidarity in democratic life is clearest at times when it is starkly evident that democracy and the conditions needed for it to thrive are continually endangered and in need of active reinforcement. Groups that feel threatened by democratic inclusion, or ones that think they can better achieve their ends if democratic institutions and practices are weakened or bypassed, are on the rise in the United States and around the world. At such times, it becomes especially clear that a more robust kind of acting together is required than the voting and voicing of reasons that are envisioned in some of the influential works of democratic theory with which I engage. The problem of solidarity, I hope to show, is built into the challenge of creating and sustaining all the needed forms of democratic action.
I do not build my case for the integral relationship of solidarity to the familiar democratic goods of freedom and equality by advancing novel premises that are unfamiliar to existing democratic theory, or even by positing distinctive new conceptions of equality and freedom. Nor do I set out to introduce a new, stand-alone theory of “solidaristic democracy.” Instead, I set out to uncover, first, the weaknesses of prominent works that do not treat solidarity as a crucial democratic good, and next, an immanent movement toward solidarity in one school of democratic theory and in some related but distinct fields. In particular, I show in the following section how some well-known exemplars of two preeminent traditions in democratic theory, the “standard” representative and the “classic” deliberative models, are undermined by not theorizing solidarity as a democratic good. Since these works do not even consider solidarity as a potential criterion, though, the weakness does not manifest as an explicit rejection of solidarity. Instead, it appears as a gap between the roles the works assign to democratic agents and all the practices needed to sustain the equal freedoms each tradition sets as its goal. At this point, my intervention faces a challenge. Is it possible, beginning only with a sense of these works’ shortcomings, on the one hand, and their commitment to equality and freedom, on the other, to demonstrate the vital importance of solidarity for democracy? To answer this question, in the second and third sections I turn to Jürgen Habermas’s argument for the co-originality of solidarity with freedom and equality, and then use it as a key for interpreting three distinct developments in political theory that all make a place for contentious, extra-institutional practices in democracy.
In the second section, I first analyze Habermas’s argument, crafted as a contribution to discourse ethics rather than to political philosophy. Then I show how a concept crucial to that argument, interdependence, can be translated from its context of moral agency to the context of political agency. This reconceptualization of interdependence makes it applicable to democratic theory. In the third section, drawing on this translation, I explore an immanent movement toward solidarity in three distinct literatures: in newer accounts of deliberative democracy that make room for contentious political practices, in newer accounts of disobedient political action that emphasize its contribution to democratic vibrancy, and in newer accounts of republican political thought that democratize the approach while centering labor activism. In particular, I show how these literatures illustrate forms of political interdependence and thus show that the goods that actors seek through contentious democratic politics cannot be enjoyed without attention to solidarity.
In the fourth section, I articulate the conceptualization of solidarity that grows out of my analysis. I conceive of solidarity as the propensity of a group of interrelated people to develop and safeguard the shared resources necessary for any of them to exercise their freedoms and enjoy their equality, where those resources include power, know-how, skills, dispositions, social vision, concepts, and language. Solidarity, so envisioned, involves political agents creating for each other the conditions that make the enjoyment of equal freedoms possible. After proposing this definition, I use the rest of the fourth section to highlight and elaborate on some of its features and implications. I call attention to how the elements of my conception correspond to the forms of interdependence explored in the previous two sections, and emphasize the entwinement of solidarity, so conceived, with action. Finally, I address the question of the scope of such solidarity. I think the language of this definition is general enough to capture solidarity at different scales, from the solidarity exhibited by movements to solidarity among citizens of a polity—and even to solidarity enacted globally. Still, I acknowledge that differences in the scale of solidarity may entail important variations in how solidarity is experienced and enacted. Attending to distinctions of scale, however, should encourage theorists to recognize the way solidarity enacted at one scale can relate to solidarity enacted at another scale, and especially to recognize the interrelationship between the solidarity enacted by movements and the solidarity that is possible (and needed) among members of a polity.
I have said that my demonstration of the integral relationship between solidarity, freedom, and equality makes sense of recent developments in deliberative democratic theory, labor republicanism, and theories of disobedience, all of which highlight democratic protest and movements. My argument about democracy and solidarity also connects to and provides a way of understanding significant contributions of the last 20 years that in varying ways also connect solidarity and democracy (Brunkhorst Reference Brunkhorst2005; Kohn Reference Kohn2016; Reference Kohn, Sangiovanni and Viehoff2024; Schwartz Reference Schwartz2009; Valdez Reference Valdez2023). I address aspects of these contributions throughout my essay when they touch on my argument.
The Undervaluing of Solidarity and Its Consequences
Decades ago, Carole Pateman (Reference Pateman1970) helped to launch a literature that distinguishes and analyses different models of democracy. Since then, major synthetic works that, in different ways, continue in this tradition of discerning the varying tendencies at work in contemporary democratic theory have explored the way the major approaches treat equality and freedom as crucial democratic values, and at the same time have found little evidence of commensurate attention to solidarity (Chambers Reference Chambers2024; Held [1987] Reference Held2006; Macpherson Reference Macpherson1977; Scudder and White Reference Scudder and White2023). But rather than attempt any comprehensive assessment of how many works of democratic theory consider the significance of solidarity for democracy, I focus in this section on a few highly regarded works that are representative of two “models” or approaches to democratic theory: the “standard” representative theory of democracy and “classic” deliberative theory. I explore what these works say about the characteristic conduct and motivation of democratic actors, as well as about the conditions needed to sustain democracy as they understand it. Then I highlight, in a preliminary way, shortcomings of these approaches—deficits that can ultimately be seen to be entwined with their undervaluing of solidarity.
“Standard” theories of democracy emphasize familiar procedural features of representative liberal democratic polities, and elucidate the values and goods these polities are thought to uphold.Footnote 1 Robert Dahl’s mature theory, summed up in his book Democracy and Its Critics, serves as an excellent example.Footnote 2 In it, Dahl (Reference Dahl1989, 86, 100, 105) first develops a “strong principle of equality” that combines an ethical commitment to treating every person’s interests equally with a “presumption” of personal autonomy—the latter holding that “everyone should be assumed to be the best judge” of their interests. From “strong” equality—this joint commitment to equality and autonomy—Dahl then derives “criteria” for a representative democratic process. These criteria include “effective participation,” “voting equality at the decisive stage,” “inclusiveness,” and “enlightened understanding” (106–52). In addition to being grounded in autonomy and equality, this strong egalitarian process, Dahl argues, is integrally linked to the enjoyment of freedoms, including ones related to expression and political organization (88–91).Footnote 3 Dahl’s presentation of his case is elegant and powerful, allowing him to derive from “strong equality” a set of concrete democratic criteria that are at once plausible to a range of democrats and useful for identifying the weaknesses of actually existing polities.
But while it serves as an excellent prototype, Dahl’s later work also exhibits limits, even understood on its own terms. Dahl depicts lay political actors as reflecting on their interests, communicating these interests to elected officials and others, and voting in pursuit of their interests. And he tries to show that the combination of these many autonomous acts of reflection, expression, and choice promotes democratic ends—that is, promotes strong equality—when the acts are coordinated within the framework of a democratic process. In this sense, he depicts citizens as engaging in actions that are arguably necessary to reproduce democratic institutions and relations. But while necessary, these acts of voting and communicating preferences do not appear to be sufficient to reproduce key features of the democratic process that Dahl himself identifies, such as institutions that ensure “voting equality at the decisive stage,” “inclusiveness,” or “enlightened understanding.” Dahl’s model, that is, only imagines citizens acting within established and secure democratic institutions. He does not depict ordinary citizens as establishing those institutions, or performing work that sustains the institutions—work often done, in the best of times, by election officials, civil rights activists, legislative staffers, volunteers, and journalists.
The problem appears more serious if we turn our attention from what might be called the routine working of “strong” egalitarian democratic institutions to times when democracy faces conditions that threaten it. Dahl’s discussion of the democratic process does not consider the possibility that democracy may be continually imperiled or frequently in need of renewal and protection. And he does not say what should be expected of citizens in such times. Yet the grounds for thinking of democracy as continually at risk can readily be found in Democracy and Its Critics itself. It is just that Dahl (Reference Dahl1989, 8) assigns these matters—the creation, preservation, and preconditions of democratic institutions—to what he calls the “almost entirely empirical” portions of the book. The result is that attention to these issues does not have an effect on his normative conception of the democratic process itself, or on the role he assigns to members of the demos. In the empirical sections of his work, Dahl argues, for example, that democracy requires a society in which power and political resources are widely dispersed (178, 252, 267). He admits that “significant inequalities in power … exist today in all democratic systems” and this entails a constant danger of falling short of “the criteria of the democratic process” (271). He argues as well that the democratic process cannot be secure unless democratic beliefs are “embedded in [a people’s] habits, practices, and culture” (172), a condition that would seem to be threatened whenever exclusive, inegalitarian, or authoritarian beliefs take hold. So it is not surprising that he observes that exclusions from suffrage have been common and durable in history, that instances of minority rule have abounded, and that once institutions enabling minority power are established, they are difficult to eradicate (186, 235, 267). But these crucial insights into the actual historical precariousness of democratic institutions do not affect how Dahl envisions the participation of lay actors in the “democratic process” itself. Dahl provides no obvious answer to key questions. What has to be done to sustain democracy when it is undermined by inequalities of power, when it is threatened by actors who hold undemocratic beliefs, or when such actors work to exclude other members of the polity from participating equally? And who should do this work?
So whether we consider more perilous or less perilous times, Dahl’s vision of a democratic process and the role of democratic agents is characterized by a deficit that can be viewed in several ways. We can see it, first, as a failure to envision all the forms of action needed to create and sustain the kind of democratic process that he favors. We can also view the deficit as a disparity between what citizens generally do, according to Dahl, and all that has to be done to reproduce “strong” egalitarian political institutions, especially (but not only) when democracy is imperiled. And we can see the deficit as the vertical dependence of supposedly autonomous citizens, even in times less hazardous for democracy, on institutions that are needed to ensure that their acts of voting and expressing preferences are coordinated in a way that upholds “strong equality.”
Certain influential works of classic deliberative democratic theory, while they expect more of citizens, ultimately embody similar deficits.Footnote 4 These contributions to the “classic” literature by scholars such as James Bohman, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson differ sharply from Dahl’s “standard” theory of democracy. In particular, they downplay electoral practices in favor of a form of political discourse in which members of a polity exchange with each other reasons for the positions they espouse (Bohman and Richardson Reference Bohman and Richardson2009, 253; Chambers Reference Chambers2003, 309; Reference Chambers, Allen and Mendieta2019, 94; Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996, 53; Reference Gutmann and Thompson2004, 3; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010, 65–66; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012, 1, 4–5).Footnote 5 Despite notable differences, there is also significant common ground with standard theory as to the democratic goods and values invoked. Authors of these influential works of classic deliberative theory generally agree that exchanging reasons for policies and law is important because it is the primary way that members of a polity can respect each other as free and equal persons (Bohman Reference Bohman1998, 401; Cohen Reference Cohen, Bohman and Rehg1997, 72, 73, 74; Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson2004, 3, 96; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010, 66). These theorists also generally coalesced over time around the view that roughly the same major institutions identified by the standard theory provide a supportive environment or structure for free and equal democratic deliberation (Bohman Reference Bohman1998, 400; Chambers Reference Chambers2003, 308; Reference Chambers, Allen and Mendieta2019, 95; Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson2004, 31).
In these works, deliberative citizens, unlike the lay democratic actors of Dahl’s standard theory, are not assumed to focus their political conduct only on determining their own interests, and then speaking and voting accordingly. The classic deliberative approach makes more stringent demands on such agents, calling for them to demonstrate “reciprocity” and “mutual respect,” for example, and to offer not just any reasons but reasons that appeal to others as free and equal persons (Bohman and Richardson Reference Bohman and Richardson2009; Gutmann and Thompson Reference Gutmann and Thompson2004, 3–4, 98–101). In this sense, these contributions to the classic deliberative approach call on citizens to engage in a wider range of actions necessary to reproduce relations of equal freedom.
Yet in these works we again find citizens engaging in some of the activities that are necessary—but not in all the activities that would be sufficient—to reproduce democratic relations and institutions in many circumstances. As one prominent proponent of deliberative theory would later write, the classic approach specifies these “obligations of political actors” not for all political and social circumstances but for “highly favorable conditions” (Fung Reference Fung2005, 398). And deliberative theorists themselves would come to argue that such advantageous conditions cannot be taken for granted, since conditions threatening to deliberation and democracy are endemic. Groups and individuals who reject democratic norms are common, as are other dangers: inequalities embedded in the institutions of political deliberation, social and political structures that marginalize some groups, other structures that give advantage to moneyed interests, and hegemonic ideologies that rigidify deliberation (Fung Reference Fung2005, 404–12, 415; Holdo Reference Holdo2019, 604–7; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010, 81–82; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012, 3, 7; Smith Reference Smith2013, 137; Young Reference Young2001, 671, 686–87). Deliberators might well offer others reasons that fully respect them as free equals, as these works of classic deliberative theory require, and yet do little or nothing to overcome such threats and barriers to democracy. So in many cases there is a gap between giving others reasons that respect them as free deliberative equals and actually creating and sustaining all the conditions that ensure others’ political freedom and equality. But these essential works of classic deliberative theory never made the sorts of challenges to democratic politics just mentioned (or the practices that would be needed to respond to them) central. And so their work exhibits deficits similar to those found in Dahl’s standard democratic theory. These shortcomings can again be viewed in different ways. The lay democratic agents they describe do not do everything needed to sustain democracy when it is threatened. These citizens must rely on others to engage in many of the kinds of action that are needed to reproduce relations and institutions of equal freedom. Or to put it more simply, these works do not designate agents who robustly defend democratic goods from recurrent perils.
With Habermas, toward Solidarity in Discourse Ethics and Beyond
A strand of Jürgen Habermas’s writings over three decades points out a way to respond to the deficits of these influential works of democratic theory. Habermas shows that it is possible to make the case for solidarity starting only with a commitment to equality and freedom, the values already emphasized by the proponents of standard representative theory and classic deliberative theory discussed in the previous section. In particular, he demonstrates that solidarity is inextricably linked—internally related—to freedom and equality. But the relevant writings do not in themselves show how to remedy the weaknesses of the dominant approaches to democratic theory. That is because Habermas’s aim, especially in the earliest of these works, is not to argue for incorporating solidarity in democratic theory. Instead, he demonstrates the co-originality of solidarity, equality, and freedom in the realm of moral judgment, often thought to be the domain of reflective, isolated individuals. It is only in later writings that he intriguingly advocates for the need for a more robustly political understanding of solidarity. But in these later contributions, Habermas does not follow through on the gesture toward political solidarity nor explore its role in democratic life.
Habermas’s (Reference Habermas1990a) initial case for solidarity is rooted in discourse ethics, his project showing that moral judgment is only possible in interpersonal dialogue, and so must be explored through investigating the presuppositions of genuine discussion (Carrabregu Reference Carrabregu2016; Chambers Reference Chambers, Bächtiger, Dryzek, Mansbridge and Warren2018). He begins with the problem of human vulnerability.Footnote 6 It is common in political philosophy to highlight one kind of vulnerability: the way that social forces can threaten individuals from the outside. But an exclusive focus on such worries can lead us to neglect the way that social relations and institutions do not just confront individuals from the outside. Such relations also constitute individuals, producing them as individuals capable of autonomous moral reflection and choice, Habermas argues. Humans need others to recognize them and to serve as models, interlocutors, and mutual interpreters in order to develop over time as distinct and capable selves—an insight that Habermas draws from G. W. F. Hegel and George H. Mead. Humans are interdependent at a very deep level, and this interdependence points toward a distinct kind of vulnerability. Since humans “are individuated only through socialization,” and since “competent subjects are constituted as individuals by growing into an intersubjectively shared lifeworld,” according to Habermas (Reference Habermas1990c, 199), they are “vulnerable and morally in need of considerateness.” So moralities that are tailored to respond to human vulnerability must “solve two tasks at once,” Habermas contends: they must “emphasize the inviolability of the individual” and “protect the web of intersubjective relations of mutual recognition.” That is, they must attend to principles of both justice and solidarity, where solidarity “refers to the well-being of associated members of a community who intersubjectively share the same lifeworld” or to “the vital fabric of ties of mutual recognition” (200).
The posited vulnerability and interdependence mean not only that solidarity and free individuality are co-original, but also that the latter depends on the former. It is impossible to “safeguard individual persons without safeguarding the vital web of relationships of mutual recognition,” Habermas (Reference Habermas and Wren1990b, 243–44) insists. Individuals can only “acquire and assert their freedom intersubjectively” or through “relationships of mutual recognition” (240).
We should pause to consider what solidarity means (and does not mean) to Habermas at this point. It refers, first, to the protection of intersubjective relations, something that Habermas (Reference Habermas and Wren1990b, 244) takes to be so closely tied to safeguarding the “equal freedoms of unique and self-determining individuals” as to be simply its “reverse side,” an aspect “of the same thing.” Solidarity also means, more simply, “empathy and concern for the well-being of one’s neighbor” (Habermas Reference Habermas1990c, 200). But “neighbor” here is broadly construed. Crucially, Habermas (Reference Habermas and Wren1990b, 244–45) is not claiming that those who behave solidaristically must be members of a preexisting nation or ethnic group.
This case for solidarity plays out almost exclusively on the terrain of discourse ethics (Carrabregu Reference Carrabregu2016, 508), and it can be difficult to trace the implications of principles of discourse ethics for more fully political thought. Theorists have sometimes struggled with this challenge—as they have done, for example, when trying to build a compelling practical account of deliberative democracy from Habermas’s “idea of rational discourse,” meant primarily as a contribution to metaethics (Chambers Reference Chambers, Allen and Mendieta2019, 95). Yet in works that appeared 20 years after the ones just explored, Habermas calls for a more robustly political understanding of solidarity, something needed to respond to the challenges Europe faced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Such a political theory of solidarity, he writes, would not be responsive just to a “moral” command. Instead, it would be an obligation that would depend “on the expectations of reciprocal conduct.” Solidarity in such cases would not be based on a pure or self-denying commitment to act morally but on “an interest in the integrity of a shared form of life that includes one’s own well-being.” An account of political solidarity would not only reflect on the universal dependence of individuation on socialization, but also on concrete, political forms of interdependence and the possibility of related forms of reciprocity. Habermas argues that such solidarity is required under conditions of “systemic interdependencies which connect the fates of citizens of different political communities ‘behind their backs’” (Habermas Reference Habermas2014, 11).
Despite the attractive political turn and the reference to “democratic” balance, Habermas offers few details here about the interdependencies that might characterize shared political associations, or about how political solidarity relates to specifically democratic concerns. His call for a more robustly political understanding of solidarity raises but does not address the question of whether it is possible to extend his earlier analysis of the internal relation of solidarity to freedom and equality—whether it is possible, that is, to identify internal relations between solidarity, on the one hand, and freedom and equality, on the other, at the level of political life and institutions, rather than the level of discourse ethics.
It is useful to term the type of interdependence Habermas identified in his writings in the 1990s as “moral,” because it is integral to moral agency. Habermas (Reference Habermas and Wren1990b, 244) argues that socialization and shared communicative structures, appropriately cared for, are essential for the creation of individuals who are able to engage autonomously in moral reflection and choice and so are able to enjoy the “equal freedoms of unique and self-determining individuals.” It is possible to identify at least three analogous kinds of political interdependence, ones integral to what we might term political agency. Recognizing these forms of political interdependence points toward an internal relation between solidarity, freedom, and equality at the level of political interaction. Each illustrates a way that political agents must jointly create for each other the circumstances under which they and others can enjoy equal freedoms, and more generally, the conditions for democracy.
First consider “practical” interdependence, the sort of interdependence that is characteristic of political action and practices. Democratic action—the enacting of democratic freedoms, whether they involve voting, debating, or demonstrating—can only be engaged in by people who possess the relevant power, where power is understood to mean “the capacities to act possessed by social agents in virtue of the enduring relations in which they participate” (Isaac Reference Isaac1987, 22; see also Giddens Reference Giddens1979, 93). Even actions seemingly as routine as casting a ballot or emailing an elected official require lay democratic agents to exercise some kind of power. Moreover, such actions also require agents to apply relevant rules and to utilize needed resources. All these requisites of action—these capacities to act, rules, and resources—are features of enduring social and political relations that must, in turn, be reproduced and sustained by large numbers of people through their activities and practices (Giddens Reference Giddens1979, 49–95). Political relations and the related rules, resources, and forms of power, then, are all best understood as both the “medium” of political practices—making political action and practices possible—and the “outcome” of practices, the product of their enactment (69). Voters rely on an electoral system to cast their ballots, and in casting their ballots they contribute to sustaining or reproducing the electoral system. The same is true of political speech or protest: any person’s ability to freely express their beliefs and voice their demands, whether in a city council chamber or on the street, rests upon powers and capacities derived from an array of social relations and institutions that in turn can only be maintained through the action and practices of many others. Of course, as discussed in the previous section, the reproduction of electoral systems that allow people to participate as free equals requires more than voters and voting. At the best of times, it also requires the activities of election officials, civil rights activists, campaigners, and volunteers. And crucially, whenever democratic life is threatened or when its preconditions are undermined, even more robust forms of political action such as mass street protests, strikes, and boycotts are often needed to sustain democratic relations.
A second, related sort of political interdependence might be called “skillful.” Among the resources a person needs to act democratically are skills, dispositions, and habits that are also social products—capabilities internalized as part of what Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1977, 72) calls “habitus,” a kind of how-to, or a “strategy-generating principle” (see also Giddens Reference Giddens1979, 52, 72; Topper Reference Topper2005, 156–79). It may appear that all the how-to needed to vote successfully can be summed up in purely individual ability and explicit, official rules. But even in the simplest cases, the entire process of casting one’s vote—from learning about issues and candidates, to registering, to locating a polling place, to standing in line, and so on—requires significant unwritten know-how that is not intrinsic to individuals. The moment the act of voting becomes problematic—because machines break, lines are long, or a polling location has suddenly changed—then such “habitus,” such internalized know-how, becomes even more important for success. Contemporary vote-suppression tactics no doubt count on this fact, discouraging more votes than they directly prohibit. The upshot is that a person’s ability to enjoy political autonomy—to enact equal freedoms—rests on utilizing a know-how that is not intrinsic to individuals, but is shared and must be acquired socially.
A third sort of political interdependence might be designated “ideological.” One’s ability to decide how to act politically depends on one’s ability to make sense of the political world, and that in part requires coming to share in a worldview that is not one’s own sole creation. With respect to democratic life in particular, identifying possibilities of freedom, equality, and autonomy, on the one hand, and instances of oppression, domination, or subordination, on the other, depends on adopting or sharing in a set of beliefs and attitudes that one does not create for oneself. Karl Mannheim ([1936] Reference Mannheim1985, 29; see also Freeden Reference Freeden2006; Geertz Reference Geertz1973) points to the importance of acknowledging the social dimension of all ideological visions, rejecting the “fiction of the isolated and self-sufficient individual”:
[I]t is far from correct to assume that an individual of more or less fixed absolute capacities confronts the world and in striving for the truth constructs a world-view out of the data of his experience. … [K]nowledge is from the very beginning a co-operative process of group life.
Individuals need others to help them make sense not just of existing practices, but also of new democratic opportunities and challenges as political circumstances and institutions change—a shared vision to help them recognize laws, movements, and forces that may undermine democracy, and a shared language to deploy while engaging in and describing democratic responses to such threats.
Identifying these forms of political interdependence provides a way to make good on Habermas’s gesture toward a fully political theory of solidarity. But my theorizing of these forms of interdependence does not constitute an interpretation of Habermas’s work; it is something more like a plausible response to or an extension of it. Habermas argues in earlier works that, since individuals become competent moral agents only through integration into social relationships (Habermas Reference Habermas1990c, 199), we cannot safeguard individuals “without safeguarding the vital web of relationships of mutual recognition” (Habermas Reference Habermas and Wren1990b, 243–44). I argue that something similar is true of political agents and agency. Connecting solidarity to interdependence, of course, has a long history, going back far earlier than Habermas to at least Émile Durkheim. In fact, it is particularly important to note that some recent theorists who take solidarity to be essential for vibrant democracy also closely tie solidarity to interdependence (Kohn Reference Kohn2016, 13–31; Reference Kohn, Sangiovanni and Viehoff2024; Schwartz Reference Schwartz2009, 28, 32). I build on this long tradition by identifying “practical,” “skillful,” and “ideological” interdependence. These forms of political interdependence demonstrate that it is impossible to protect political equality, freedom, and autonomy without actively caring for and reproducing capacities and resources needed to enact and enjoy such democratic goods. Next, I show that the identification of these forms of political interdependence provides tools for interpreting another development toward theorizing solidarity for democratic theory, one visible in the growing incorporation of noninstitutional, contentious political practices as part of a vision of democracy.
Toward Solidarity in Theorizing Contentious Democratic Politics
I have argued that there are gaps in Dahl’s standard representative theory and in certain influential works of classic deliberative theory: gaps between the kinds of political action needed to sustain democracy, especially when it is under threat, and the kinds of activities citizens are portrayed as doing in these works. These gaps, discussed in the first section, encourage a search for work investigating the democratic significance of practices that transcend routine voting and exchanging reasons—work that understands more contentious political practices as crucial for democracy. Meanwhile, my critical analysis and adaptation of Habermas motivates a search in such work specifically for evidence of the kinds of interdependence I delineated in the second section, a search for common resources necessary for the enactment of equal freedoms. I focus my search for signs of political interdependence and its recognition in three significant contemporary literatures: newer contributions to deliberative theory that recognize the importance of contentious practices, newer contributions to the literature on civil disobedience that emphasize the democratic value of unlawful protest, and newer work that revives the tradition of activist labor republicanism. Each of these literatures grows from its own distinctive intellectual ground and follows a different course. Each arrives at the intersection of democracy and protest from a different direction—one stretching democratic theory to encompass contentious practices, and two linking traditions that have long stressed oppositional practices to democratic theory. But the tendencies also mirror each other and converge in several ways. The thinkers in question all rebel against narrower readings of their traditions: classic deliberative theory, the classic theory of civil disobedience, and both traditional republicanism and neorepublicanism. (For this reason, and for simplicity, I will refer to the recent authors in all three traditions as “revisionist.”) The new approaches make democratic peril and vulnerability—threatening forms of domination and exclusion—central rather than peripheral to their analyses, and they focus directly on political agents who strive to meet those dangers and challenges. I will show that in doing all these things, they highlight political interdependence—the ways in which agents are inherently dependent on each other for the resources they draw upon to engage in democratic life. Their arguments, then, demonstrate that democratic actors must jointly create for each other the conditions under which they can enjoy their equal freedoms and autonomy. In this way they make the case—mostly implicitly, but sometimes explicitly—for solidarity as an integral democratic good.
Democracy and Contentious Politics in Three Revisionist Literatures
The deliberative embrace of contentious political practices seems to respond, in part, to criticisms of the classic approach. Detractors argue that its expectations for democratic agents are too confining and that under many circumstances, adhering to them could lead to outcomes that hinder rather than advance deliberation’s egalitarian and emancipatory aims. Some deliberative scholars have argued for loosening classic deliberative duties, others for recognizing new or alternative duties, and still others for a shift to a perspective in which deliberative duties are downplayed in relation to the achievement of broadly deliberative outcomes at the level of the political system (Fung Reference Fung2005; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012; Smith Reference Smith2013; Young Reference Young2001).
Contributors to the new literature on disobedience are like the deliberative revisionists in the sense that they press for changes to an approach—the classic theory of civil disobedience—characterized by rigorous political duties. Their recognition that many movements advancing equality and freedom have not actually adhered to the classic duties of civil disobedients—generally because doing so would have foiled their legitimate aims of advancing justice—has led revisionists to a thorough rethinking of the classic model. Some have argued for a significant liberalization of the category of “civil” disobedience, while others have argued for an alternative model of disobedience to go alongside it (Brownlee Reference Brownlee2015; Celikates Reference Celikates2016a; Reference Celikates2016b; Delmas Reference Delmas2016; Reference Delmas2018). Meanwhile, many of these critics of classic civil disobedience have either made or embraced a rebuttal to the classic claim that disobedient protest undermines democratic authority, showing that such protest, in the face of democratic deficits, often actually enhances a politics of equality and autonomy (Celikates Reference Celikates2016a; Reference Celikates2016b; Markovits Reference Markovits2005).
Finally, some recent work on labor republicanism responds to yet another constellation of problems: intertwined questions surrounding the contrast between slave and master, which has animated republicanism since ancient times. Historically, many republicans have clearly believed that avoiding the slave’s domination can only be achieved by an exceptional and politically active few, while others have provided no compelling answer to how this promise of republican freedom can be extended to all. And republicans have only rarely shown an interest in making labor, the slave’s life activity, central to the ideology’s account of domination and liberation. These difficulties, which potentially call into question whether republicanism can ever be a variety of democratic theory, provide the backdrop for Alex Gourevitch’s (Reference Gourevitch2011; Reference Gourevitch2015) analysis of nineteenth-century American unionists, who are shown to have universalized republican freedom by focusing on workplace domination, labor activism, and strike action.Footnote 7
The Imperilment of Democracy and the Need for Contentious Political Action
The continual imperilment of democracy and democratic goods is central to all these arguments. The newer contributors to deliberative theory acknowledge not just contingent individual conduct that flouts classic deliberative duties, but also broader, pervasive conditions that can prevent inclusive, egalitarian discourse from thriving, such as institutional rules of discourse that prevent real inclusion; structural inequalities that advantage some and disadvantage others in the exchange of ideas and arguments; deep-seated, hegemonic ideologies that highlight some issues and make others invisible; and marginalization, a phenomenon that combines structural and discursive features (Fung Reference Fung2005, 404–12; Holdo Reference Holdo2019, 604–6; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012, 2, 3, 7; Smith Reference Smith2013, 68–70, 137; Young Reference Young2001, 670–71, 686–87). For revisionist philosophers of disobedience, the path toward recognizing the continual susceptibility of equality and freedom begins with two of classic disobedience theory’s intertwined assumptions: that where a constitution establishes liberal, representative institutions, threats to equality and freedom are generally marginal, and that activists must either obey the law or disobey only according to carefully crafted rules of civility. In response to these suppositions, some theorists have shown that the potential for “democratic deficits” and “rigidifying tendencies” is integral to the very workings of representative institutions (Celikates Reference Celikates2016a, 988–91; Reference Celikates2016b, 40–43; Markovits Reference Markovits2005, 1921–23). Other revisionists have in effect argued that familiar injustices in liberal societies, such as police violence, are significant enough to impose a duty of resistance on the very same agents upon whom classic theory imposed an obligation to obey (Delmas Reference Delmas2018). Traditional republican theory, in contrast to the other schools at hand, has always recognized the continual threat of domination. But the revival of labor republicanism has brought into focus a concrete form of domination that is pervasive and enduring: the domination that structures the capitalist workplace (Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2015, 106–16).
Because these revisionist thinkers recognize the seriousness of the dangers posed to democratic life, they endorse a range of forms of collective action that are often contentious and extra-institutional—actions and practices that are different in kind or have a different social location from those previously endorsed by democratic theory. They acknowledge the need for activities beyond those highlighted in the influential works of democracy I discussed in the first section. Almost all the historical and contemporary examples of these forms of action that revisionists draw on involve activists, social movements, and movement organizations as agents.
This recognition of collective action as a crucial means of creating and recreating democratic conditions is a key step in the case for solidarity as a democratic good. It is possible to demonstrate this in two ways. First, and more simply, it is generally accepted that those who engage in collective action—most especially, social movements—require solidarity to endure. Scholars often simply make solidarity a definitional characteristic of movements (Diani Reference Diani1992, 7; Melucci Reference Melucci1985; Tarrow Reference Tarrow1998, 4-5, 119). So insofar as these forms of collective action and the movements and movement groups that carry them out are necessary to sustain democracy, it would be fair to conclude that solidarity must also be necessary to sustain democracy. But while this line of argument is more or less plausible, its logic may be too cursory to be fully satisfying.
And from the same materials, another case, one richer and more substantial, can be made for solidarity as a democratic value. In arguing that forms of contentious political action are often needed to build and protect democracy and democratic goods, the revisionist scholars also provide evidence of the interdependencies that characterize such collective action. They demonstrate the reliance of democratic agents on capacities and resources that are socially produced and shared. And this shows that political, democratic goods such as freedom and equality are co-original with solidarity, that they cannot be safeguarded—or domination and oppression staved off—without also caring for political capacities and resources that are socially produced. Adopting Habermas’s analysis and extending it to politics, we can recognize the work of caring for such resources as solidaristic.
Practical Interdependence in Democratic Contentious Politics
“Practical” interdependence, as I defined it, refers to the insight that a given person’s ability to exercise their freedoms and enact their equality rests upon capacities to act derived from social relations that can only be maintained through the regular efforts, the activities, and the practices of many others. This recognition is built into the ways the revisionists have incorporated contentious politics in their visions of democracy. Labor republicanism offers the broadest and most explicit statement of this interdependence. The thinkers of the Knights of Labor, according to Gourevitch, recognized that the traditional republican ideology of the independent producer, who possessed in themselves the capacities for equal freedom, simply did not match the conditions of the modern industrial economy. Because of “combination” in business and the growth of the factory system, “the relation among workers” had changed irrevocably (Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2015, 116). “Labor was now inescapably organized on a collective basis, as an integrated activity requiring conscious coordination among workers,” and so “it was nearly impossible for the individual, on his own, to exercise much control” over the conditions of work (117). The existing industrial system provided scant resources for workers to exert their freedom as long as they acted alone. Those seeking freedom—the avoidance of domination—had to rely on each other and make use of different powers bestowed on them by the structure of work; they had to depend on “cooperation”—strikes and boycotts—to avoid domination in industry (118, 165).
Revisionists within the deliberative democracy and disobedience literatures, while less explicit about the underlying social relations of interdependence, also acknowledge in their arguments that, when faced with various forms of democratic peril, some political actors need to engage in familiar forms of collective action to create the conditions under which they and others can experience relevant forms of freedom and equality (Curato Reference Curato2021; Fung Reference Fung2005; Holdo Reference Holdo2019; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Estlund, Føllesdal, Fung, Lafont, Manin and Martí2010; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012; Mendonça and Ercan Reference Mendonça and Ercan2015; Smith Reference Smith2013; Young Reference Young2001). For deliberative revisionists, a crucial realization is that ordinary democratic agents acting within normal deliberative institutions often lack the resources and capacities they would require to exercise equal freedoms, and that contentious, extra-institutional protest is needed to redress this insufficiency. Archon Fung (Reference Fung2005, 415) argues that “a large portion of political reality” consists of “unreformed” institutions in which some hold disproportionate power, influence, and bargaining positions, to the detriment of others. In such cases, protest campaigns that may include “disruption and coercion” serve to empower disadvantaged agents through joint mobilization, help them to develop “skills and capacities,” and “generate political pressure” that checks more powerful parties, keeping them from exploiting their resource advantages—all “necessary to create fair and inclusive deliberation” (403, 408, 411). Iris Marion Young (Reference Young2001, 673, 675, 684) argues that when powerful interests are able to constrain the terms of deliberation, “picketing, leafleting, guerilla theater, large and loud street demonstrations, sit-ins, and other forms of direct action, such as boycotts,” are necessary alternatives to ordinary deliberation because they are needed to protect some people from the “injustice” to which conventional discourse, carried out under circumstances of structural inequality, would otherwise lead. The revisionist scholars of disobedient protest who show how such activism can actually enhance democracy also demonstrate that the conditions needed for anyone to exercise democratic rights depend on others acting in ways that create and sustain those conditions. Daniel Markovits (Reference Markovits2005) contends this is because democracy is continually prone to “deficits” that sometimes must be overcome by disobedient collective action. Robin Celikates makes the point even more powerfully by casting disobedient collective action as a form of “constituting” power. Disobedient collective action, according to this view, can be seen as “reclaiming the political capacities of citizens” (Celikates Reference Celikates2016b, 43). In a similar vein, Erin Pineda (Reference Pineda2021, 113) reports that many activists in the civil rights movement recognized that they were “creating and maintaining ‘institutions that enable public participation in the exercise of power’” and understood this as one meaning or variety of “freedom.”
Skillful Interdependence in Democratic Contentious Politics
The revisionist writings also offer support for recognizing “skillful” interdependence. They recognize that an individual’s ability to enjoy political autonomy, or to enact equal freedom, rests on utilizing know-how, skills, and dispositions that, while internalized and made a part of individuals, are not intrinsic to them. These skills are instead socially developed and shared collectively. Knowing how to recruit an acquaintance for a march, how to create an effective message and convey it, how to stay calm in the face of hectoring counterprotesters, how to observe and share information about repressive police or immigration sweeps, or how to mount a sit-in all count as skills. Understandably enough, social movement scholarship has often focused on larger scales and longer durations: the level of “tactics” and “repertoires of contention” (McAdam Reference McAdam, McAdam and Snow1997; Tarrow Reference Tarrow, McAdam and Snow1997). But it has also explored the existence of movement organizations that attempt to develop and propagate skills and dispositions—organizations such as the Highlander Folk School, crucial to the American civil rights movement (Morris Reference Morris1984, 141–49). Scholars whose work brings together deliberative democracy and the study of social movements have shown how movements can in general be seen as developing “repertoires of knowledge practices” needed to develop “a common orientation for making claims and acting collectively to produce social, political, and cultural changes” as well as “democratic innovation” (Della Porta and Pavan Reference della Porta and Pavan2017, 298, 300). Pineda (Reference Pineda2021, 104) shows in her critique of classic disobedience theory that when activists with the Congress for Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee refused bail after being arrested for protest—“jail, no bail”—they meant it not as a gesture of respect for the legal system, but as an inward-focused practice intended to develop what could be described as a set of “decolonizing” democratic dispositions—in this case, attributes of courage and dignity directed toward self-emancipation.
Ideological Interdependence in Democratic Contentious Politics
The newer scholarship on deliberation, disobedience, and labor republicanism also illustrates the importance of “ideological” interdependence. Individuals need others to help them make sense of new democratic opportunities and challenges. They need a shared, collectively produced political vision that helps them to recognize laws, movements, and forces that may undermine democracy, and a shared language to deploy when they engage in and describe democratic activities. Due to its focus on political discourse, deliberative democracy has always been well positioned to incorporate this insight. In fact, even some contributions to the classic version of the theory recognized that movements often bring neglected problems to broader public attention, “introduce new themes into public discourse,” or cause “values or beliefs” to be “understood differently” (Bohman Reference Bohman1996, 132–42, 208, 209, 210). This crucial understanding about the collective sources of political ideas and vision is common to all three revisionist schools. But both the revisionist deliberative and the revisionist disobedience literatures go further, recognizing not just that democratic dissidents must call on and develop shared narratives and frames to guide them, but also that the work of sustaining and propagating such ideas and arguments often requires contentious action. Contributors to these literatures point out that ideologies by their nature are rooted in social structures and relations that make some ideologies hegemonic, and thus harder to challenge or change (Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012, 2, 3, 7; Young Reference Young2001, 686–87). Such entrenched conceptions, discourses, and forms of reasoning often make crucial democratic problems invisible (Holdo Reference Holdo2019, 604–6). These and related phenomena create “discursive blockages” and “deliberative inertia” for which there are no effective purely discursive remedies (Smith Reference Smith2013, 60). Both recent deliberative and recent disobedience scholars therefore argue that contentious practices, even illegal ones, are often needed to enable change in the dominant political vision, language, and forms of reasoning.
Solidarity in the Three Revisionist Literatures
In making the case that a contentious politics is necessary for the support of democratic life, then, the revisionist scholars have also illustrated practical, skillful, and ideological interdependence. They have provided support for the idea that any individual’s ability to enjoy equal freedoms depends upon the use of practical capacities that must be created and sustained through the activities of myriad others, as well as skills and ideological tools that are not innate or given but created and revised collectively. In this sense, then, these newer literatures also make the case that political agents cannot secure familiar democratic goods without attending to the maintenance of these collective resources. Translating Habermas’s understanding of solidarity for the context of politics, we can recognize caring for these practical, skillful, and ideological resources as manifestations of solidarity. We can now see that solidarity, equality, and freedom are internally related for political as well as moral agency.
For most contributors to these revisionist literatures who explore contentious democratic politics, solidarity remains only an implicit theme. But a few of these authors have made the connection between contentious politics and solidarity explicit. Revisionist accounts of disobedient protest have shown that, contrary to the idea that it undermines democracy, such action often promotes it, binding citizen protestors to each other horizontally and directing their energies toward overcoming democratic deficits. Candice Delmas (Reference Delmas2018, 129, 188) develops an argument for a duty of solidarity, which she defines as a duty of “meaningful cooperation and collective action to advance shared goals and values.” Her case for solidaristic duty arises in the course of her defense of a robust duty to resist, which she derives from overlapping arguments from a natural duty of justice, from fairness, and from political association. Pineda (Reference Pineda2021, 98–99, 104, 111, 125) demonstrates that many civil rights activists consciously pursued strategies that would build “solidarity,” linking solidarity to “practices of agency and liberation,” “self-liberation,” and the enablement of “broader, systemic liberation.” Gourevitch (Reference Gourevitch2015, 17) shows that nineteenth-century labor republicans also saw solidarity as central to their praxis, and defined the good as “habits of cooperation and collective action that the dependent cultivated in themselves so as to transform society.” They came to understand that the modern economy was already organized along collective, interdependent lines, and so came to believe they had to rely on cooperation—collective actions such as strikes and boycotts—to achieve the republican goal of nondomination. This solidarity they conceived as a radical revision of republican virtue, transforming it from an individual trait into a collective practice.
Toward Solidarity in Democratic Theory and Practice: Summing Up and Looking Ahead
Solidarity Envisioned: Interdependence, Action, and Imperilment
The revisionist contributions to deliberative democracy, the study of disobedience, and republicanism vividly illustrate the three forms of political interdependence I posited in the second section, and so lend support to my argument that solidarity is internally related to freedom and equality in the sense that the goods actors seek through democratic politics cannot be enjoyed without attending to solidarity. In fact, a particular concept of solidarity emerges from reflecting on the examples of contentious democratic politics explored in these revisionist accounts and reading them in light of practical, skillful, and ideological interdependence. Recognizing these forms of interdependence that are so crucial for political agency at the same time entails acknowledging three kinds of resources that agents need to enact their equal freedoms. Extending and reformulating Habermas, I understand solidarity in the context of political agency as the act of doing what is needed to “safeguard” these vital resources. So the concept of solidarity that grows out of the analysis above can be described in this way: solidarity is the propensity of a group of interrelated people to develop and safeguard the shared resources necessary for any of them to exercise their freedoms and enjoy their equality, where those resources include power, know-how, skills, dispositions, social vision, concepts, and language. Broadly, this understanding of solidarity emphasizes that political agents continually create for each other the conditions in which they can take part in society as free equals. The specific language of this definition, especially the list of shared resources, is derived from my discussion of three forms of interdependence explored in the last section: practical (“power”), skillful (“know-how, skills, dispositions”), and ideological (“social vision, concepts, and language”).
Solidarity, understood this way, is thoroughly entwined with action. I set out in the third section to develop a concept of solidarity relevant to political agency. Each of the resources discussed in that part of my essay is needed for citizens to enact equal freedoms. Acting as free equals, that is, relies on power—socially produced capacities to act—and on skills and know-how, as well as on a shared, guiding political vision. But the reliance of political agents on resources that must be safeguarded by many citizens is not the only way that solidarity and action are connected according to this conceptualization. The relationship is, so to speak, reciprocal. That is because reproducing some of these resources involves action in turn, according to the structurationist sociology I drew on beginning in the second section. Structurationism emphasizes the way that action always produces and reproduces and (sometimes) reshapes social and political relations. And it shows that such relations are in turn the source of any power that political agents need to act. We can apply this understanding to the case of democratic protest. A boycott, for example, may simply cause a company that is collaborating with an oppressive regime to change its behavior or policies. But at the same time, the boycott will likely also help to sustain and build a movement—social relations that empower members—and it may encourage other supporters of the regime to withdraw their support for it, thus weakening oppressive political relations. Such effects can together create better conditions for citizens to enact their democratic rights. Similarly, it is through engaging in political action that agents can best develop skills that can then be taught to or adopted by others so that they, in turn, can act politically.
Democratic imperilment first came up in this analysis simply in the observation that classic deliberative and standard democratic theory treated the imperilment of democracy as a peripheral phenomenon, while the revisionist approaches to democratic theory that highlight contentious practices recognize that dangers to democratic life are continual and significant. The previous section shows something more: the forms of imperilment the newer approaches discuss—racial and economic structural inequalities that shape politics, hegemonic ideologies that hide democratic problems from view—are entwined with the vulnerability of democratic agents and thus with interdependence. Individual vulnerability and democratic imperilment represent different manifestations of the same social phenomena.
My conception of solidarity and my overarching argument that solidarity is an essential democratic good resonates with rich, insightful work produced in the last two decades. For example, Joseph Schwartz (Reference Schwartz2009, 28, 30) defines solidarity as “the readiness of individuals to aid other members of a common enterprise” and argues that “democratic citizens” must “take umbrage when their ‘fellows’ are excluded from the ability to participate in public life.” Whereas I try to show that any democratic theory that emphasizes equality and freedom should equally value solidarity—even theories that emphasize political democracy and have little to say about the social implications of democracy—Schwartz is especially concerned with social democratic policy and questions of “social rights and social insurance” (30).Footnote 8 By contrast, Hauke Brunkhorst (Reference Brunkhorst2005) understands solidarity to be inextricably linked even to political equality and freedom. But while Brunkhorst, in his rich historical account, holds that solidarity was “politically institutionalized” in the republican nation-state after the constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth century (56), my approach, beginning with my critique of Dahl, centers on the intuition that where citizens rely on established political institutions to secure their equality and freedom, those democratic goods are less secure than they should be. In fact, solidarity entails lay political agents creating for themselves and others the conditions necessary to enjoy their equal freedoms.
Sources of Solidarity
The conceptualization I propose leaves open the question of what may motivate or encourage solidary action. And in particular, it does not collapse solidarity into any such factor. This distinguishes my proposed conception from many contributions, such as Richard Rorty’s (Reference Rorty1989, 190–91) influential argument that solidarity is always solidarity with “one of us,” where the “us” is a national, ethnic, or religious group. As against this familiar assumption, scholars have both strongly contested the idea that common identity is necessary for solidarity and proposed many other disparate possible roots, such as empathy, loyalty, trust, shared interests, shared values, institutions and policies, and the fulfillment of duty (Banting and Kymlicka Reference Banting, Kymlicka, Banting and Kymlicka2017, 11–15, 28–32; Delmas Reference Delmas2018; Kolers Reference Kolers2016; Scholz Reference Scholz and LaFollette2013; Shelby Reference Shelby2005; Sirin, Valentino, and Villalobos Reference Sirin, Valentino and Villalobos2016; Warnke Reference Warnke, George and van der Heiden2022). What promotes solidarity is by no means an unimportant question. But for a variety of reasons, I think political philosophers need not rush to settle the matter. The propensity to act together is likely encouraged and inhibited by a wide variety of factors such as the ones just listed. And the circumstances under which solidarity may be called for—the groups and relations to be encompassed by it—surely vary significantly. If solidarity is as important to democratic life as I have claimed, the goal is for activists and citizens to explore various ways of building it—experimentally—rather than for scholars to tell them in advance how to do so. In any case, some of the posited explanations for solidarity, including ones focused on identity, explain less than they seem to at first, once we recognize that the causal variable in question is not fixed or exogenous to the political, historical processes under study. Working-class consciousness in England may have enabled solidarity and ultimately Chartist agitation for example, but the more interesting question, as E. P. Thompson (Reference Thompson1964) shows, is how class consciousness itself developed through long and difficult historical experience. Moreover, as Tommie Shelby (Reference Shelby2005, 60–100) shows, those trying to promote solidarity among members of some oppressed group will almost always do so against a complex background of interests, social positions, and identities, as has been the case for advocates of Black solidarity in the US.
Unequal Interdependence, Enduring Inequality, and Solidarity
According to the vision I am proposing, every person is dependent on others for the capacities and resources they need to participate in democratic life, and in this sense is also vulnerable to others. We should not hide this by treating the advantages some enjoy by virtue of their social position as if they were innate, natural possessions. But it is equally important to recognize that while all are dependent, social relations of interdependence in the real political world are far from equal. This pervasive, enduring inequality may explain why historical discourses of solidarity have run deepest among groups who have faced oppression and exclusion. Solidarity, of course, has long been recognized as a watchword of labor movements. Shelby (Reference Shelby2005, 12) seeks to develop an interpretive vision of Black political solidarity that is based not on a single common identity but “strictly on the shared experience of racial oppression and a joint commitment to resist it,” and so is dependent on a “diagnosis” of “the complex forces that constitute black oppression.” Shelby’s argument, I think, stands in a mutually supportive relation to the one I am advancing about solidarity and the defense of democratic goods. Juliet Hooker (Reference Hooker2009, 34–39, 40), somewhat like Shelby, theorizes solidarity as a product of “shared structural conditions.” But she also troubles this vision by exploring “racialized” solidarity, which “trains whites not to see the pain and suffering of non-whites.” Such racialized solidarity, she notes, undermines broader, transracial ties of solidarity.
About the Scale of Solidarity
The definition of solidarity I have posited is intended to be general enough to capture common features of solidarity enacted at different scales, whether by members of movement organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for example, or by citizens of the US, or even by activists engaged in solidary action with and for people on the other side of the globe. At each of these scales, political agents can create for others the conditions to enjoy equal freedoms.
Still, it is important to acknowledge the apparent tension between first exploring the prospects for solidarity among all the members of a polity (as I did earlier in my essay) and then searching for the preconditions and signs of solidarity in social movements (as I did later). In the first section, I engaged with standard representative theory and classic deliberative theory on their own terms, emphasizing the scale they generally emphasize in their theorizing of democracy: an entire polity, usually a national polity. I tried to show that the routine activities of democratic agents envisioned by influential contributions to these approaches to democratic theory are not sufficient to sustain relations of equal freedom. And I suggested that this insufficiency should motivate theorists to acknowledge the need for solidarity. Solidarity at this scale could be termed, following Sally Scholz (Reference Scholz2008, 27), as “civic” solidarity, or solidarity pertaining to “the relationship between citizens within a political state.” Later, in the third section, seeking to adapt Habermas’s conceptualization of solidarity and interdependence for democratic theory, I tried to show forms of interdependence that are of great significance to movement participants and others who engage in forms of protest that build and sustain democratic relations, especially when democracy is threatened. Solidarity among movement participants could be termed “political” solidarity (33–38). What should we make, then, of this potential tension between the “civic” solidarity sought for at the end of the first section and the conditions and signs of “political” solidarity uncovered in the third section?
The tension, I think, is not just an artifact of my definitions or conceptualization. It reflects a real phenomenon, a problem that we can readily observe in political life: some of the most demanding work of solidarity—the most demanding activities required to safeguard the shared resources that enable all of the citizens of a polity to exercise equal freedoms—is often undertaken not by all those citizens, but by a fraction of them organized into movements or campaigns. That many people usually do not participate in strenuous but often crucial forms of political action is a well-established finding of political behavior research, which consistently shows a wide gap between the proportion of poll respondents who actually vote in an election year (80% in 2024) and the proportion who take part in any kind of march or protest in the same year (3.5% in 2024) (American National Election Studies 2025). It is also widely accepted that movements often do critical work to highlight and challenge injustices, forms of domination, and undemocratic political relations (Banting and Kymlicka Reference Banting, Kymlicka, Banting and Kymlicka2017, 5, 24–28; DuFord Reference DuFord2022; Fung Reference Fung2005; Holdo Reference Holdo2019; Mansbridge et al. Reference Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, Christiano, Fung, Parkinson, Thompson, Warren, Parkinson and Mansbridge2012; McKean Reference McKean2020, 147–78; Medearis Reference Medearis2005; Scholz Reference Scholz2008; Smith Reference Smith2013; Young Reference Young2001). Widely discussed research on “civil resistance” campaigns that challenge authoritarian regimes connects what we know about patterns of political participation to widespread recognition of the special role of movements. While emphasizing that the size of a “civil resistance” campaign is crucial, such research shows that the participation of a relatively small percentage of the population—perhaps just 3.5%—may be enough to dramatically increase the chances of success (Chenoweth Reference Chenoweth2021, 114–16).
We can hardly discuss the outsize role that relatively small numbers of people organized into movements play in building and sustaining democratic relations for the wider polity without acknowledging the contrasting scales of “political” and “civic” solidarity. But the phenomenon of movements acting in ways that foster solidarity in the broader polity also points crucially to interrelations between these two forms of solidarity. While the numbers of people actively involved in most movements may be relatively small, the solidarity exhibited by them is usually extended to nonmembers too. Consider again the solidarity shared by those who took part in “jail, no bail” campaigns during the civil rights movement. This solidarity, developed “inside the jail cell,” transforming “sites of fear and repression into sites for enacting courage, dignity, and agency,” offers a compelling example of solidarity experienced intimately, on a very small scale (Pineda Reference Pineda2021, 112). Yet it surely would be a mistake to assume that these activists experienced and enacted solidarity only in relation to their cellmates. Their remaining in jail also appears to have embodied solidarity with local Black communities and, despite tension over the tactic, with the broader civil rights movement (107–8, 115, 116, 124). The language I develop in this essay understands solidarity as the safeguarding of shared resources that are needed for the enacting of equal freedoms. Using this language, we can say that even while they are developing these resources for each other, members of movements or participants in civil resistance campaigns are generally also reproducing and protecting these resources for other groups whose democratic rights are in particular danger—and for members of the polity generally. The lunch-counter sit-ins that spread from Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 and the Monday evening marches that surged in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1989 demonstrate that the relative few who take part in a mass street protest or direct action can at once grow oppositional participation and power, confound and inhibit repression, divide opposing coalitions, invigorate dormant rights by exercising them, demonstrate and propagate political skills and dispositions that others can learn and deploy, and convey slogans and ideas to guide others, thereby making it possible for those many others to participate democratically in their turn (McAdam Reference McAdam1982, 134, 138–39, 165; Oberschall Reference Oberschall, McAdam, McCarthy and Zald1996, 111–15).
The solidary connections entailed in one movement’s collective action can also extend beyond the bounds of any national polity, as a growing body of work on global or transnational solidarity makes clear (Brunkhorst Reference Brunkhorst2005, 103–62; McKean Reference McKean2020, 147–78; Scholz Reference Scholz2008, 231–64; Schwartz Reference Schwartz2009, 27–45; Valdez Reference Valdez2023, 169–92). Such work suggests the interrelations between enactments of solidarity at different scales may be even wider and more complex than the investigation of “political” and “civic” solidarity suggests. Benjamin McKean (Reference McKean2020, 147–48) makes the case for solidarity campaigns connecting people who benefit from global supply chains, especially in Europe and North America, to distant workers who are exploited and endangered by them. Inés Valdez (Reference Valdez2023, 170, 188) culminates a critique of imperialist exploitation with a call to “enter solidaristic relations with other peoples affected by oligarchic projects of accumulation in order to contest the global political economy.”Footnote 9 McKean and Valdez both portray activists who are organized predominantly in one place as embracing a vision, alliances, and practices that expand the scope of their solidarism globally. In this sense, their works demonstrate interconnections between global and movement (or “political”) solidarity.
Still, despite the vitally important interrelations between enactments of solidarity at different scales, there is value in distinguishing between “political” and “civic” solidarity. The distinction helps us to focus on the recognition that there is something incongruous and unsatisfactory about the fact that movement participants do a disproportionate share of the work needed to sustain democracy at the level of the polity. And reflecting on what is unsatisfactory about this again highlights some basic themes of my intervention. Every citizen is enmeshed in political relations of interdependence—not just those who are particularly oppressed, and not just those who take part in movements that advance democracy. Each member of a polity, that is, relies on shared resources to enact their equal freedoms. But citizens do not contribute equally to sustaining those resources. It would be better if more took on this sustaining work and reproductive action. The broader and deeper a citizen’s participation in reproducing and safeguarding these resources, the more they can experience for themselves the kind of political autonomy that can reasonably be expected in democracy—not pure reliance on oneself, but reliance on the powers, skills, and languages one has a meaningful share in sustaining. Moreover, it seems plausible to think that involving more people in solidary action generally should make the shared resources that such action safeguards and reproduces more secure, more durable, and more robust. Solidarity is a distinct democratic good, according to my account, and one whose benefits can be enjoyed in some measure even if a disproportionate share of its work is done by relatively small numbers of people organized into movements and campaigns. But if solidarity is a democratic good, we should want it to be more secure and durable and its enjoyment more widely, fully, and richly experienced.
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