ABSTRACT

In the United States, social solidarity is the forgotten sibling among the family of democratic values-“liberty, equality, and fraternity”—that suffused the democratic social revolutions from the French revolution onwards. While schoolchildren in the United States are taught that our revolution fought for the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the less liberal individualist and more democratic collectivist, anti-feudal French revolution spoke of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” (Subversive instructors will inform students that Jefferson decided in favor of the more felicitous “pursuit of happiness” over Locke’s more blatant “pursuit of property.”) The concept of “fraternity” or “solidarity” (in gender neutral terms) implies that in the course of constructing the common enterprise of democracy, members of a democracy develop a capacity for empathy toward and trust in their fellow citizens.