Solidarity

Category: Fields of research

Solidarity is the process through which individuals organize around shared interests, survival, or common goals. It often develops in response to external threats or internal needs, and it is essential for social movements, political activism, and community organization. Strong solidarity reflects a group’s ability to survive, grow, and pursue collective interests effectively.

Leaders and institutions play a central role in building solidarity by promoting shared values, visions, and identities that unite members beyond everyday concerns. Ceremonies, rituals, and repeated collective events also strengthen feelings of belonging and cohesion, especially when they encourage interaction and emotional connection among participants.

Solidarity is not a fixed event but an ongoing process influenced by changing threats, opportunities, and member interests. Groups must continuously organize and mobilize resources, including people, ideas, and material support, to maintain unity. The strength of solidarity depends on whether members can agree on common agendas and are willing to commit personal resources to support them.

Social movements succeed when they sustain solidarity over time through repeated actions such as meetings, marches, and protests. These activities demonstrate group unity, reinforce commitment, and help leaders advance specific causes and social change.

Mechanical and Organic Solidarity

Émile Durkheim, in his first book, Division of Labor in Society (1893), observes the development and evolution from primitive to civilized societies, and pays special attention to the relationship between the type of economy and the division of labor, on the one hand, and the type of solidarity and morality in society, on the other hand. To explain this relationship, he introduces a division into two basic types of solidarity in society - "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity".

In societies of mechanical solidarity, the division of labor is very limited, and societies consist of segments that are functionally the same, while kinship relations govern relations within and between segments. This way of life and work influences the creation of "collective consciousness," which is completely within the individual consciousness, so individuals blindly obey the opinion of the majority and live following traditional rules. Individuals, among themselves, have the same patterns of actions, emotions, and attitudes, so they do not form separate personalities. The legal system is aimed at retributive sanction, that is, at punishing those who violate collective rules. The goal of the regulatory system is to establish moral balance. Moral and legal responsibility falls on the entire collective, while social status is mostly hereditary.

In societies of organic solidarity, which appear with the emergence of civilization, a complex division of labor is developing. Different experiences and functions in society lead to the creation of different personalities. The connection between individuals is based on different and complementary functions they perform, so this type of solidarity is called organic, because, as in a living organism, where each organ performs a specific function, effective cooperation is necessary for survival in this type of society. Since each person has a different function, there is a development of morality that promotes individualism in society, but individualism in which each person develops their own specificity, to better develop themselves and thus give the greatest contribution to the common good. At the same time, with the development of individualism, there is a decline in the collective consciousness. Durkheim rejects the idea that selfishness and selfish individualism can be the basis for building any kind of solidarity and cohesion in society. In a society of organic solidarity, the legal system is focused on contract law and the restitutive sanction.

Solidarity and Evolution

Alfred Espinas, who was influenced by the theory of biological evolution, believed that each person is a kind of society because it is composed of different cells that compete or cooperate with each other. Since we find social order in each individual organism, evolution follows a unique path from the first organisms to human society. Since society is analogous to the organism, solidarity in society corresponds to the cooperation of biological cells, and tradition corresponds to biological permanence.

Peter Kropotkin, in the book Mutual Aid (1902), presents the evolutionary theory of cooperation and solidarity in social animals. He concluded that mutual aid exists in all of the most successful species and that mutual aid is the most important factor in evolution. The struggle for survival takes place, above all, in relation to other species, and not within the species.

Solidarity versus Social Conflicts

Ralph Dahrendorf, in his book Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1957), claims that, at that time, the manual working class was going through the process of increased stratification. The differences in wages, prestige, and job security between unskilled and semi-skilled, on the one hand, and skilled manual workers, on the other, were constantly increasing. This stratification led to a decrease in solidarity within the working class and the emergence of different interests, as skilled workers struggled to maintain their better position. The stratification of the working class and the increase in intergenerational mobility lead to a decline in class solidarity and a reduction in class conflicts in society.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book Democracy in America (1835, 1840), argues that local associations, because they promote cooperation and solidarity, are precisely the factor that is the main barrier to excessive individualism and the emergence of an atomized society and dictatorship. Bryan Turner argues that social conflicts, economic and political inequalities, and conflicts over values are leading to increasing fragmentation and hybridity in culture, which poses a great threat to social solidarity.

Solidarity in the Small Groups

In the book, Social Psychology of Groups (1993a), Barry Markovsky and Edward Lawler developed the theory of group solidarity. These two authors, to better define solidarity, first define group cohesion as the level to which group members are directly interconnected to each other. Solidarity exists in groups with high cohesion and small intra-group conflicts. Defining solidarity through the structural features of the group enables the use of mathematical tools and computer simulations to analyze and predict the behavior of social networks.

References:

Amit-Talai, V. and Knoles, C. (Ed.) Re Situating Identities: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (1996);

Bellah, R. ”Civil Religion in America”, in Daedalus (1967);

Bernard, Boudon, Bouglé. Le solidarisme (1924);

Caldeira, Teresa P. R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (2000);

Coates, R. Race and Ethnicity: Across Time, Space, and Discipline (2004);

Coleman. The Asymmetric Society (1982);

Collins R. Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science (1972);

Comte. System of Positive Polity, 2 vols. (2018, in French 1851-1854);

Cooley. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (1909);

Dahrendorf. Class and Conflict in an Industrial Society (2022, in German 1957);

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks (1995);

Durkheim. Suicide, a Study in Sociology (2007, in French 1897);

- Division Of Labor In Society (2014, in French 1893);

- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (2012, in French 1912);

- The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method (2014, in French 1895);

Elias, N. & Scotson, J. L. The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, 2nd edn. (1994);

Emirbayer, M. (ed.) Emile Durkheim: Sociologist of Modernity (2003);

Emerson. „Exchange Theory: Part I: A Psychological Basis for Social Exchange”, and „Exchange Theory: Part II: Exchange Relations and Networks”, in Sociological Theories in Progress Joseph Berger (ed.) (1972);

Espinas, Fromm. The Sane Society (1955);

- The Art of Loving (1956);

- Marx's Concept of Man (1961);

- Socialist Humanism (1965);

Fauye, E. (Ed.) The Working Class and Urban Public Space (2000);

Goldman. What I Believe (1908);

- Anarchism and Other Essays (1910);

Hacker, A. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992);

Hechter. Principles of Group Solidarity (1987);

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (1972);

Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902);

Lockwood. The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (1969);