ABSTRACT
‘Solidarity’ is a term that has recently received a prominent place in a variety of debates in moral and political theory. Most particularist or ‘communitarian’ ethical theories want to describe the ethical dimension of social solidarity as a feeling of inter-connectedness or inter subjective interdependence arising from particular, collectively recognized norms or practices. Solidarity as a symmetrical vision of communicative relationships presupposes the asymmetrical capacity to be addressed by another who remains essentially foreign through the limit of the material. Solidarity is a problem for deontological moral theories. The hellenistic-hegelian vision of the concrete immediacy of ethical life, presents such theories with the claim that solidarity outweighs freedom; that the latter, as universalized, is underwritten by a doctrine of the autarkic, autonomous, spontaneous self, is itself a moment in a larger process of social solidarization. What emerges is thus a conflict between the freedom of the moral self and the solidarity of the intersubjective group; a conflict between liberte and fraternite.
