The Challenges of Sustaining Solidarity

The building of solidarity is proposed across many philosophical traditions as a solution to the problem of collective action, that is, how to motivate disparate individuals to commit to a common cause or shared good, where that commitment involves some kind of personal sacrifice or cost. Solidarity itself is generally described in terms of an affective experience of being linked with or feeling connected to others which, as a result, motivates working in collaboration with them or taking some kind of action on their behalf. All kinds of communities have been called solidaristic: labor unions, nation‐states, the global feminist movement, and so on. In what follows, we examine the goals of solidarity and where it comes from, before focusing on three specific challenges that solidarity can face: member identification, deep disagreement, and exhaustion in the face of (often unsuccessful) solidaristic action. Armed with a more robust account of the challenges to solidarity, in a tentative conclusion, we offer some directions that can be pursued to sustain solidarity over the long term.