Solidarity

The Work of Recognition

By Rowan Williams (Bloomsbury, 320 pages)

The language and logic of “solidarity” pervades the moral discourse of our day. Yet the very pervasiveness of the term runs the risk of making “solidarity” language trite from overuse. This overuse might lead us to assume that solidarity is nothing more than a given fact and that all persons are entirely transparent and knowable to each other. It can then become mere sentimentality, or, more terribly, a form of domination, of projecting one’s own understanding and ideas onto others. This empties solidarity of its moral power.

Rowan Williams, theologian and former archbishop of Canterbury, intervenes at precisely this point by rescuing solidarity from banality through a serious philosophical reappraisal. He argues that solidarity names a project. It is a project grounded in recognition of oneself as essentially relational, of the irreducible integrity of another’s experience, and of our common vulnerability. Solidarity names the ongoing, co-laboring work of mutual recognition, which, according to Gillian Rose, is “the heart of the ethical” and thus the foundational work of an ethical social order.

The book has three sections. The first explores fundamental questions of solidaristic ethics: What counts as a human? What is empathy? What are human rights? Williams approaches these questions with nuance, drawing readers into deeper consideration of questions that may at first seem obvious. Williams establishes an understanding of solidarity that requires the ongoing co-labor “in which I and the other secure one another’s human . . . flourishing within an extended human pattern of such mutuality.” This work is “always incomplete, always lost, always sought again, always hoped for.”

Next, Williams examines the history of solidarity through Catholic social teaching and theorists like Jan Patočka, Józef Tischner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet these explorations are not simply historical surveys. They are occasions where Williams draws out important resources of these thinkers’ “practiced theories,” which contribute to his own project. From Patočka, Williams derives a “solidarity of the shaken” in which solidarity emerges from the recognition of human struggle and trauma (polemos). From Tischner, Williams takes the orientation of the human person to the Good as a shared basis for a solidarity that does not require conflict. Finally, solidarity takes on an explicitly theological flavor through Bonhoeffer’s treatment of Christ’s taking on “representative responsibility” (Stellvertretung) for humanity in our common guilt before God. Drawing on Bonhoeffer, Williams shows that solidarity begins not with shared likeness but with the utter unlikeness between humanity and God, which is addressed through the passion of Christ.

The final section of the book becomes explicitly theological, showing how Williams’s social vision leans on a metaphysical and theological commitment. He explores solidarity through the Christian language of “bearing another’s burdens” and “communion” to highlight both our common vulnerability and the impossibility of knowing another outside of mutual labor that is possible only because it is grounded in God’s eternal solidarity with and for us. Our work is an ­embodiment of that divine grace.

Rowan Williams has once again offered a tour de force of moral, political, and theological thought. He does here what he does best: he takes a concept that has become shopworn and trite and, by opening it to a lingering contemplation, reclaims its moral and theological richness, significance, beauty, and power.

—Matthew Moser

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