Solidarity began as a legal term for shared debt
Before it became a rallying cry, solidarity was a dry piece of legal jargon. In French law it described debtors who were jointly liable to one creditor, each answerable for the whole sum. Over the nineteenth century the word escaped the courts and became one of the most powerful ideas in French politics.
The legal roots run back to the Roman phrase in solidum, from solidus, meaning for the whole. French legal language used solidaire by the sixteenth century, and the Napoleonic code applied it to joint debts. After the Revolution, conservatives adopted solidarity in a looser sense, expressing a longing for stability amid upheaval. The utopian socialist Pierre Leroux gave it a non-legal meaning too, and Auguste Comte, often called the founder of sociology, tied it to altruism, shared responsibility as the opposite of selfishness.
Almost everyone then claimed it. The Paris Communards swapped the old slogan of fraternity for solidarity. Liberal economists bent it toward individual responsibility, while Charles Gide, who opposed them, even proposed it as the name for a new school of economics. By 1900, when a congress devoted to the new solidarity ran alongside the Paris World Fair, the word stood for almost anything progressive, and the Catholic Church used it as well. The sociologist Steven Lukes judged that it played nearly as large a role in France as individualism did in the United States.
Émile Durkheim gave it scientific shape in The Division of Labour in Society in 1893. Mechanical solidarity binds small traditional communities whose members share similar work, beliefs and lifestyles. Organic solidarity holds modern societies together through mutual dependence: farmers feed factory workers who build the tractors that farmers need.
In 1896 the politician Léon Bourgeois published Solidarité and coined solidarism as a political creed. He argued that each person owes society a social debt for the knowledge and technology inherited from others. Blending Durkheim with ideas drawn from Pasteur and Darwin, his solidarism became almost the official philosophy of the Third Republic, a middle path between classical liberalism and worker collectivism.
Source: Solidarity
