Philosophy Speakers Series

March 25, 2022

3:00pm – 4:30pm (MDT)

Register in advance for this free online lecture

Solidarity in social movements: a We-perspective

With its seeming exclusionary and irrational tendencies, solidarity always has a difficult relationship with liberalism. However, there is growing philosophical interest in reviving solidarity for building progressive movements. One common strategy is to create a sharp distinction between two forms of solidarity: social and political. Social solidarity is defined as a fellow-feeling, ontologically rooted in shared identity, and psychologically group-ish. This is the old and dangerous form of solidarity exploited by national chauvinists. By contrast, political solidarity is idealized as an overlapping commitment to emancipatory goals, ontologically grounded in common oppression, and psychologically individualistic. This is the new and safe form of solidarity, detached from essentialist and irrational identity politics while fostering unity and endurance. In this paper, I argue that this strategy fails and offer an alternative. Drawing on the social-scientific research on social movements, I show that the distinction between social and political solidarity collapses in practice. I then reconstruct an alternative and messier picture of solidarity, which I call “We”-mode solidarity. As an affective group commitment to a “We”-identity, We-mode solidarity opens up new opportunities and challenges in the revival of solidarity, which lie less in suppressing identity politics and more in narrating meaningful stories of who “We” are.

Agnes Tam is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. She is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies. Her research focuses on the empirical and normative phenomena of “We”-agency and reasoning, and their implications for ethics and politics. Her work on “We”-reasoning has been published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Analyse & Kritik and through Oxford University Press and Routledge.