Radical republicanism and solidarity
| Author | Margaret Kohn |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119881313 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Radical republicanism
and solidarity
Margaret Kohn
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following ques-
tion: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence
on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists
who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two
components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial
society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture,
social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In
this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social
property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was
deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite
power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be
approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised
outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for
regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were
also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power.
Keywords
Mutualism, republicanism, social rights, solidarity, structural domination
Is republicanism a useful approach for thinking about contemporary economic
inequality? The traditional republican concerns about the relationship between
property, liberty, and the dispersion of power provide a promising starting point
for thinking about economic inequality. Building on Richard Dagger’s essay
Corresponding author:
Margaret Kohn, Department of PoliticalScience, University of Toronto,100 St. George, Toronto, ON Ontario
M5S 1A1, Canada.
Email: kohn@utsc.utoronto.ca
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119881313
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2022, Vol. 21(1) 25–46
“Neo-republicanism and the civic economy” (Dagger, 2006) a growing literature
has explored the republican critiques of the market and structural domination
(Bryan, 2019; Gourevitch, 2013; Thompson, 2018; White, 2011). Yet there are
also reasons to doubt whether classical republican ideas are appropriate under
contemporary circumstances. Martin McIvor points to the tension between the
classical republican understanding of freedom as individual self-government and
freedom as submission to a democratically determined collective interest (Mclvor,
2010: 255). Another concern is the way that the neo-republican theory of non-
domination focuses attention away from forms of domination that are not pro-
duced intentionally by individual agents. The central contribution of Marxist and
feminist theory was an understanding of structural domination, and this concept
must retain a central place in our understanding of domination in industrial, urban
societies (Young, 2011, 2013).
In the 19th century, transformations wrought by industrialization and urbani-
zation raised the following question: how can individuals retain their independence
in a quickly changing world created through speculation, debt, wage-labour, and,
increasingly, distant bureaucratic government? This concern about the possibility
of independence in a world of interdependence, however, was not a new one. In his
influential book The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock noted that classical republi-
cans worried it was impossible to be truly free of domination in commercial and
industrial society (Pocock, 2016). Radical republicanism provided a new approach
to this problem. Given the constitutive character of dependence, radical republi-
cans focused on the distribution of power and the mechanism for mitigating struc-
tural domination. Radical republicanism was the source of new arguments about
the need for democratic control of economic life and for new tools to manage the
risks and vulnerabilities produced by the market.
My focus is on a strand of radical republicanism that emerged in late
19th-century France, particularly “solidarism,” a term I use to describe a group
of radical republican thinkers who placed solidarity at the core of their ideology
(Audier, 2010). I draw on the writings of four thinkers. Charles Gide and Celestin
Bougle
´were scholars who wrote books describing and promoting the solidarist
approach (Bougle
´, 1904; Gide and Rist, 1915). Alfred Fouille
´e was a prolific inde-
pendent philosopher whose ideas influenced solidarism, and Le
´on Bourgeois was
the political leader and leading exponent of the movement (Bourgeois, 2013).
Solidarism included a descriptive account of economic interdependence and a nor-
mative theory that emphasized the obligation to share the social value created
through the division of labour. The descriptive and normative theories were also
linked to a distinctive theory of the state (Blais, 2007; Hayward, 1961). This theory
of the state was an alternative to the night watchman state and the dominant social
contract tradition. The solidarists argued that a voluntarist, consent-based theory
did not capture the way unchosen relations of interdependence and attendant
obligations preceded the creation of the state (Bougle
´, 1904: 12). For the solida-
rists, the legitimacy of the state was more substantive than procedural. The state’s
legitimacy stemmed from its role as an instrument of social justice rather than its
26 European Journal of Political Theory 21(1)
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