Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity

Book excerpt: Cultural Difference and Social Solidarity: Solidarities and Social Function explores solidarity as a social function bringing to the fore the critical value of the concept of solidarity in understanding contemporary societies. The first part of the book (Solidarities) provides different theoretical approaches to the conception and exploration of solidarity that depart from the traditional and dominant perspectives within which debates about solidarity take place. This part includes chapters on the origins of the concept of solidarity in French social thought in the nineteenth century; a critical discussion of the later Foucault’s augmentation of his concerns with a critical politics of difference with a politics of parrhesia; Theodor Adorno and the identitarian logic that underpins reconciliation between difference and solidarity in initiatives such as multiculturalism; Alisdair MacIntyre and his rearticulation of Aristotelian virtue ethics to explore the value of solidarity ingrained in the practice of politics as a means of developing solidarity; and a transitional chapter that explores the social function of postcolonial theory. The second part of the book (Social Function) seeks to explore particular cases in which solidarity is constituted. The cases are diverse in global location, level of association, focus on cultural, political and policy contexts, and different approaches to analysis. As such, they provide a set of cases from which different aspects of the problems of making and remaking solidarity can be explored. These chapters include a case study in Israel exploring solidarity and social cohesion through migration, globalisation, and modernising processes; a case study of the African Village Market in Sydney, Australia; an example of the complexities of solidarity and identity in the Slovene context; and an exploration of how state action in Turkey dissolves solidarity in a community through urban housing policies.