The Critique of Possessive Individualism

The Philosophy of Solidarism: Alfred Fouillée

Alfred Fouillée was a philosopher and prolific writer who first brought together a number of ideas that became the key elements of solidarism: a naturalist account of solidarity; the theory of collective property/social debt; and a normative principle of obligation. His starting point was very close to the position of Renouvier, who was an important influence on his intellectual development. Following Renouvier, Fouillée argued that economic liberty was an important dimension of political liberty. He enthusiastically embraced worker cooperatives and mutual aid societies, institutions that were built on the principle of solidarity and could potentially increase equality while reconciling individual freedom and property rights. Initially he expressed the hope, which he shared with other republicans of the center and left, that it would be possible to solve the “social problem” without state intervention. Eventually, however, he recognized that mutualism and cooperation could do nothing to help the least fortunate, who had little to contribute to mutual benefit associations; moreover, the model of mutual aid placed all of the responsibility for solving social ills on the shoulders of workers rather than society as a whole. This was unfair because it absolved elites of responsibility, even though they were the ones who benefitted most from social cooperation.

For the proponents of solidarism, solidarity was more than just a feeling of benevolence or fraternity. According to the 1765 Encyclopédie Commercial, the term “solidarity” had a distinctive and precise legal meaning. Solidarité referred to the obligation of a group of borrowers to discharge the debt of others. It was the opposite of a limited liability corporation. The members were each liable for the entire contracted obligation. ²⁰ In the 1800s, however, the meaning expanded considerably, and solidarité was used as a synonym for fraternité, the third of the key principles of the French revolution. Solidarity was also connected to the Christian ideals of charity and brotherly love. Fouillée refocused the concept and linked it back to its earlier meaning as collective responsibility for debt. He defined solidarity as a way of describing society’s obligation to repay a debt owed to its poorer members.

Fouillée begins his book La Propriété Sociale et la Démocratie with the claim that all products are the collective work of the individual and society (l’oeuvre commune de l’individu et de la société), and they therefore contain a dimension of both private and social property. Both socialism and laissez-faire are incomplete because they deny this hybrid character. Denial is a way of avoiding the difficult task of determining the respective shares. Fouillée makes it clear that his focus is not the common property of the state of nature. He notes that modern societies do not have large amounts of unclaimed and unused property. The kind of terra nullis that John Locke thought existed in the Americas no longer exists: “with civilization, everything ends up being occupied, enclosed by fences.” ²¹ The type of property that Fouillée describes as social and collective includes the physical, technological, intellectual, and social infrastructure of modern society. He also includes collective power, or democracy, as a component of the common-wealth. Social property is created by diverse contributions by a vast array of people over generations and is the patrimony of all members of society. He argues that this “richesse collective” (common-wealth) could be effectively employed by governments and used to subsidize a universal insurance system that would provide for those in need. At the same time, however, he recognizes that the market system of free enterprise has generated growing material prosperity. ²²

Fouillée’s goal was to develop an alternative to the laissez-faire ideology that he thought predominated in the United States, and the statism of both right (Bismark) and left (the socialist party in France). He approached this task from his position as a philosopher and asked about the scientific basis of the right to property. Answering this fundamental question, he thought, could provide some guidance about the practical issues of redistribution and state intervention. He criticized the individualist (laissez-faire) school on the grounds that it fundamentally misconstrued the nature of property. Only the God of Genesis created something out of nothing. Humans, by contrast, create products and value by shaping or giving form to existing objects such as soil, stone or wood. According to Fouillée, the exclusive right to private property rests on a mistaken conflation of shape (forme) and substance (fond). ²³

Fouillée asks what rights humans have in relation to substance (the unformed material conditions of life) and notes that there are two important dimensions of this question: the right of the first occupant and the right of the last occupant. While the former has received considerable attention, the latter has been ignored. The right of the first occupant stems from labor. Modifying the classic Lockean account, Fouillée points out that improvement through labor justifies a partial claim upon the product, in proportion to the labor invested. In a state of natural abundance, the materials may have little value since anyone can take what they want, but under conditions of scarcity—and this is the situation faced by the “last occupant”—these materials become the source of considerable value. ²⁴ At this point, the acquisition of individual, private property does harm those who come afterwards and no longer have access to the same opportunity to transform labor into property. Writing in the seventeenth century, John Locke anticipated this objection and conceded that unlimited acquisition did, in a certain sense, violate fairness since it meant that similarly situated people had vastly different opportunities to acquire property and material things. ²⁵ He insisted, however, that this disadvantage was outweighed by a greater advantage. The landless laborer could not simply acquire private property by cultivating unclaimed common land, but he could still gain a share of the benefits of the system of private property as a whole. Locke argued that enclosure and cultivation of common land yielded enormous gains in productivity, which was shared with the laborer. To support this claim, Locke notoriously insisted that a landless laborer in England had a better standard of living than a native king in the wilds of America. ²⁶

Fouillée astutely identified both the strength and weakness of this argument. He agreed that “civilized” (e.g., economically developed) societies had indeed developed the knowledge, technology, infrastructure, transportation networks, and markets that dramatically increased material well-being, and he also conceded that the market system (private property, commodification of labor and individual freedom) played a role in unleashing the creativity and initiative that generated growth. The problem with Locke and his nineteenth-century followers like Bastiat was that they would not acknowledge that landless laborers seldom got a fair share of the social product. The market system had no way to ensure that landless laborers actually received any share, let alone one that was proportional to their contribution or one that was larger than the share they would have received if the system of common property had not been dismantled. Fouillée agreed that the market system created an enormous stock of common-wealth but also recognized that this meant very little if there was no way of ensuring that it be used to meet everyone’s basic needs.

The paradox of “private property” is that the institutions and ideologies that generated an enormous stock of social wealth also prevented it from being used for its original purpose. Even Locke admitted that the fundamental purpose of the right to property was securing “life” by meeting the material needs of all people. ²⁷ But the right to private property, when interpreted in an abstract and absolutist way, prevented some people from accessing the share of the common-wealth that they needed to survive and flourish. Many writers recognized this and emphasized the duty of charity as the preferred solution. Hospitals and poorhouses were often supported by religious orders or the voluntary contributions of wealthy individuals. ²⁸ In an increasingly secular age, however, the religious arguments in favor of charity became less prominent, and the doctrines of Social Darwinism and individualism posed strong challenges to secular theories of moral obligation. ²⁹

Fouillée thought that the concept of charity had to be reconfigured in order to address the problems of private property and the challenges of Social Darwinism. Fouillée’s position differed from Lockean charity in an important way. For Locke, the right to private property is in principle unlimited, but it is trumped by a higher obligation to preserve life. ³⁰ For Fouillée, existing private property is composed of a legitimate portion and an illegitimate portion, which was acquired when people mixed their labor with raw materials and then claimed the entire product, rather than just the value of their contribution, as their own. ³¹ To put this in contemporary language, we could call is “accumulation by dispossession.” ³² It is important to note that this argument does not apply only to agrarian, pre-industrial societies. Unlike earlier forms of republicanism, which took the yeoman farmer or independent craftsman as the model of independence, Fouillée was writing about an urban society with an advanced division of labor. The simplified account of labor and raw materials was intended to illustrate a logic that applied to complex industrial societies. The key idea was that labor productivity, including the entrepreneurial labor of the businessperson, is created by leveraging the value of an enormous amount of “material” that one does not and cannot own. This “material” includes social, technological, economic, and physical infrastructure. The upshot is that the social right to common property is just as strong as the individual right to private property. As many critics of Locke’s labor theory of property rights have pointed out, it is unclear why mixing my labor with material should make it mine. ³³ The reverse is just as plausible, if we assume that the ability to use labor is a social product. Mixing my labor could turn my labor into something that belongs to all, which is exactly Fouillée’s point. This argument introduces a great deal of uncertainty about how to allocate property, but it also provides a framework for justifying an assertion of social rights against those who have usurped the common wealth. In an increasingly secular age in which religious arguments in favor of charity were becoming less influential and the doctrines of Social Darwinism and individualism were flourishing, a new way of thinking about social obligation was necessary. ³⁴

Fouillée argued that individual freedom and social obligation could be reconciled, but he acknowledged that maintaining a balance between them was difficult, and he identified excessive individualism as a particularly powerful threat in his own day. In opposition to the dominant social contract tradition, which depicted people as atomistic individuals and derived political obligation from consent, Fouillée emphasized the sociality of the self. ³⁵ He noted that babies are born utterly dependent on their mothers, and they could not survive without the shelter, nourishment, and education provided by their families. From this starting point, obligation is not the result of intentional contract and choice; obligation precedes the ability to choose and it is not something that can simply be denied or avoided. The conscious and intentional component is the process of deliberating about the extent, distribution, and limits of obligation, as well as the best of way of meeting it. A theory and practice of social responsibility comes about through critical reflection that brings general principles and logic to bear on specific problems. Other solidarists, notably the politician Léon Bourgeois and the political economist Charles Gide, used these principles to justify new and controversial policies such as a national income tax, universal public education, and social rights.

Throughout Fouillée’s work, he stressed the importance of ideas in general and theories of moral obligation in particular. He was not an idealist because he rejected the metaphysical view that God or reason or a transhistorical Idea was the source of definitive solutions to the human condition, but he also dismissed the positivist assumption that value-free observation could generate objective solutions to social problems. Scientific observation could show us the means that are most suited for particular ends, but could not provide direction about what ends we should pursue. One of Fouillée’s most famous books, Morale Des Idées-Forces, advances an argument about the force of ideas, which he saw as rationally grounded, but also as tools of persuasion, social reform, and political activity. ³⁶ The force of ideas was a term that linked together reason and rhetoric, two concepts that are often understood as opposites today. He emphasized that democratic politics must be based on deliberation, by which he meant the exchange of reasons, but he also recognized that persuasion has an affective dimension. The force of ideas also stems from their ability to make sense of inchoate intuitions and experiences in a way that generates greater clarity, resolve, and meaning. Solidarism was one such idea. It was rationally defensible, but also could powerfully capture the imagination and serve to link together a number of related but not identical struggles.

The Political Economy of Solidarism

The theory of solidarism drew not only on philosophy but also on the new empirical social sciences. The emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology and the growing importance of the division of labor reinforced the conviction that the social must be a primary object of inquiry. ³⁷ Émile Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity had enormous influence in late nineteenth-century France. In contrast to mechanical solidarity, which emerged from shared beliefs and similar lifestyles, organic solidarity described the kind of interdependence that stemmed from specialization and differentiation. ³⁸ This concept made it possible to see the division of labor not only as a source of class conflict but also as the basis of a new kind of solidarity. At the same time, increasing urbanization made it obvious that individuals were connected with one another through urban infrastructure and through what we today call the externalities of private action: sewage in the street, industrial pollution, noise, etc. ³⁹ Research on infectious diseases made it clear that even something as apparently private as one’s own body could have enormous impact on others. According to the solidarists, increased vulnerability to the effects of others’ actions changes the nature of our responsibilities. ⁴⁰

The solidarists acknowledged that the mere fact of inter-connectedness did not automatically generate a corresponding sense of obligation towards others. ⁴¹ In fact, a goal of the theory was to encourage critical thinking about the sentiment of natural solidarity that people often feel toward family or social class, and to promote a more comprehensive understanding of solidarity. In Solidarité, Bourgeois advanced the notion of quasi-contractual obligations. ⁴² This was intended to challenge the dominant view of rights, which was understood first and foremost as the individual’s ability to control his property for his own benefit. Bourgeois built on Fouillée’s argument that private property (in the sense of productive property or capital) was mistakenly treated as individual private property, when in fact it was a social product that had been illegitimately appropriated by capitalists. Bourgeois expanded the original argument about moral obligation into a claim about of legal obligation.

According to Bourgeois, the existing French legal code recognized a wide range of “non-conventional contracts.” ⁴³ This concept of “quasi-contract’’ ⁴⁴ was used to describe obligations that were legally binding, even though they did not rest on the explicit consent of the parties. For example, the obligation of an heir to repay debts of the deceased would fall into this category. Bourgeois drew on the general idea of quasi-contractual obligation, and the notion of debt in particular, to justify the progressive taxes necessary to pay for redistributive measures such as a minimum income, public insurance, and universal education. According to Gide, “as a result of the division of labor, of the influence of heredity, and of a thousand other causes which have just been described, every man owes either his forebears or his contemporaries the best part of what he has, and even of what he is.” ⁴⁵ For the solidarists, the way to pay off this debt is to make those with a disproportionate share of the social product redistribute it to “the disinherited,” those who have “suffered loss” through the operation of natural solidarity. ⁴⁶ The solidarists acknowledged that this debt could be repaid in different ways, and conceded there could be no perfect way of calculating the exact amount owed to specific individuals; the quasi-legal concept of debt was intended to provide a normative principle to justify redistribution.

The final component of solidarism is an explicit defense of the economic theory that is implicit in the critique of dispossession: the theory of rent. It builds on Ricardo’s famous definition of rent as “unearned increment.” ⁴⁷ Ricardo pointed out that the same amount of labor and capital, when applied to the same amount of land, can yield vastly different amounts of revenue for the owner. The difference between the two yields is “unearned increment,” and this makes it possible to distinguish between the value that is created through the labor of the entrepreneur and the capitalist. Gide points out that rapid urbanization and the resulting increase in land prices is a striking illustration of this phenomenon. He notes that a quarter acre of land in Chicago which cost $20 in 1830 was valued at $1,250,000 in 1894. ⁴⁸

Rent, however, is not simply a term that applies to land and real estate. It applies to all analogous differences in revenue from identical inputs. Several factors help explain the different rate of return: some factors may be natural like soil fertility; others, like demand for the product or position relative to the market, are social. In the case of the quarter acre in Chicago, the increased value did not reflect entrepreneurial activity or improvement, but simply the fact that other people decided to build a bustling city around it, a city that for many complicated reasons became the dominant metropolis of the region. This concept of rent underpins the solidarist idea of the social product and the normative theory derived from it. The unearned increment that is created socially does not naturally belong to the property owner and should be reallocated to benefit society. In principle, this could apply to agricultural land, but the most striking examples of rent occur in places where the division of labor, infrastructure, and social networks inflate the value of land and labor. The solidarists were the first to propose a version of the theory of the urban common-wealth and to use it to justify social rights: free public education, including adult education and enough leisure to learn; comprehensive insurance against disability, illness, and poverty; and a basic standard of living.

The Critiques

Liberals, socialists, and conservatives all objected to solidarism, but for different reasons. In this section, I will consider four criticisms: (1) that solidarism is based upon implausible philosophical naturalism, (2) that it is based on a mistaken understanding of economics, (3) that it is indeterminate, and (4) that it leads to statism. While I cannot provide a full analysis of each of these issues, I hope to provide a sense of the main responses to these critiques and of the richness of the debate.

The “naturalist objection” is that dense social ties created through the division of labor and urbanization do not logically entail that obligations should be distributed in any particular way. This is a version of the Humean argument that it is illegitimate to derive “ought” from “is.” Gide concedes that solidarity by itself does not furnish a principle of moral conduct, ⁴⁹ but he also makes a number of interesting points in response to this objection. He suggests that “solidarity supplies us with a leverage of incomparable strength.” ⁵⁰ He explains that the social ties created through the division of labor are like the rope attaching two mountain climbers. ⁵¹ Their fates are linked; if one falls, his partner may save him or be dragged to his own death. This is a prudential argument, and a dimension of practical reason rather than a moral argument: once they are aware of its scope, interdependence can motivate elites to accept their obligations by showing that it is in their interest to do so. Interdependence also serves to reinforce a sense of responsibility and a deeper understanding of social position. Proponents promoted solidarism as an ethical ideal in order to encourage elites to extend recognition and care towards a larger circle of people. ⁵² Bourgeois’s concept of debt is another way of answering the moralist’s objection. The common-wealth is created to benefit everyone, and those who have taken more than their share owe a debt to the dispossessed.

Fouillée also addresses the naturalist critique in his more elaborate philosophical discussion of solidarity. ⁵³ He rejects the moralist assumption that it is impossible to derive is from ought. According to Fouillée, this argument rests on an outdated, dualist metaphysics which treats spirit and nature as opposed to one another; either there is nothing other than pure experience, in which case the idea of a critical theory becomes impossible, or, following Kant, we can know general rules of conduct through reason, but these rules are abstract and provide little guidance about how to weigh conflicting obligations. Fouillée wrote a book-length study of Kantian idealism, in which he developed some of the criticisms introduced by Hegel. It is beyond the scope of this project to summarize these arguments, but the key idea that emerged from this study was a philosophical approach that resembles what Jürgen Habermas called “reconstructive science.” ⁵⁴

For Habermas, a reconstructive science is an analysis of the already operative potential for rationality contained in everyday practices such as communication. ⁵⁵ It has a descriptive component, insofar as it starts with actual forms of interaction, but then it draws out the presuppositions that are not observable but are nevertheless implicit in the practice itself. Implicit in the practice of communication, for example, are claims about truth, rightness, and validity.

Fouillée does something similar with social cooperation. He begins with the fact of social cooperation and then asks what presuppositions are implicit in the practice. The most important presuppositions are mutual benefit and dignity. If these are violated, then there are grounds for criticizing the specific form of cooperation as distorted and therefore illegitimate. Fouillée’s opponents, the classical economists, agreed that social cooperation should be mutually beneficial. They argued that the voluntary, consensual character of market relations is precisely what distinguishes them from oppressive relations such as slavery or feudalism. Fouillée felt that abstract philosophy was extremely limited because it could not answer this objection. He thought that abstract reason could not distinguish between the formal consent of the market and substantive, genuine mutual benefit. In a purely formal sense, an individual who consents to sell his labor does so because he benefits; even hard, demeaning, or poorly paid labor is preferable to the alternative, when the baseline is unemployment, hunger, and need. According to Fouillée, however, the idea of social cooperation implies something more than just agreement that reflects the bargaining power of the respective parties. It implicitly rests on the idea of receiving a benefit that is proportional to one’s contribution. Like Habermas’s ideal of undistorted communication, this is difficult to put into practice, but this does not itself undermine its function as a constitutive ideal.

The second line of criticism comes from the economists rather than the moralists. It builds on the point raised above about the relationship between consent and power. The economists challenged the accuracy of the solidarist notion of debt. The classical economists insisted that wages reflect each individual’s contribution to the social product. The distributions that result from voluntary exchange are fair because both parties consent to the labor contract, and therefore there is no “debt.” The solidarists made two responses. First, they pointed out that this is a distorted picture of exchange because it hides the fact that contracting parties do not start out on a footing of equality. According to Gide, the classical economists would have to view Esau’s exchange of his birthright for a bowl of pottage as fair. Gide reminds his readers that Esau agreed to this exchange when he was on the point of death. He did consent and, in the short term, benefitted from the exchange, but that does not mean that it was not an exploitative arrangement. For Gide, the piece-worker and the rubber tapper in the Congo are modern day Esaus. ⁵⁶ The example of the Congo, a notoriously brutal colony which was privately owned by King Leopold, reminds the reader of the role of violence in the current allocation of wealth. The first response is that pay reflects the bargaining power of the parties rather than their contribution, but there is a second response. Gide also notes that a business- or crafts-man often introduces some new process or innovation only to be bankrupted when a competitor adopts the innovation, sells at a lower price, and dominates the market. In a “winner-takes-all” marketplace, the profit from a new product is captured by one dominant player, even though it is developed through the contributions of many competitors. They key idea is that the allocation of benefit does not reflect desert. ⁵⁷

The first version of the economic critique, the claim that everyone gets what they deserve on the market, is unpersuasive, but the economists also had a more persuasive argument that is almost the inverse. They emphasized the indeterminacy of the theory of social debt, pointing out that there is no objective way to decide who deserves what. The concepts of social product and social property are most useful when used to criticize and de-naturalize the absolutist theories of private property that were hegemonic in the late nineteenth century, theories used to discredit the idea of economic regulation and progressive taxation. Yet while soldiarism legitimizes the concept of a social share, solidarism does not explain how to divide the social product between private and public shares or among individuals.

Once having justified the concept of social debt, Bourgeois drew on related but distinct arguments for guidance in addressing the issue of redistribution, and interestingly, some of these arguments are ones that are today associated with liberal-egalitarian theory. First, Bourgeois argues that individuals are only responsible for the consequences of their choices, not for conditions caused by bad luck. He uses this version of luck egalitarianism to justify comprehensive social insurance. ⁵⁸ Second, in his Essai d’une Philosophie de la Solidarité Bourgeois suggests that the scale of solidaristic initiatives should be decided through democratic deliberation under the guidance of a thought experiment that looks a great deal like Rawls’s veil of ignorance. ⁵⁹ He asks people to imagine what they would demand and what they would accept if they did not know their own social position. These two points are interesting because they remind us that some influential arguments associated with liberal theory are not intrinsically linked to an individualistic ontology. They may be even more persuasive when reconnected with the idea of the common-wealth.

In his own day, Bourgeois’s critics faulted him for presenting a theory that could justify a whole range of solutions, from a minimalist safety net to a socialist revolution. Of course, this indeterminacy may have been strategic. He was the leader of the dominant group in the National Assembly and the principle of solidarism helped him to appeal to socialists and liberal-republicans alike. From a contemporary perspective, a certain degree of flexibility can also be viewed as a positive feature in so far as it recognizes the need for democratic deliberation about what is a fair way to share common-wealth. ⁶⁰ The theory of solidarism forces us to pose this question and provides some tools for answering it, while also recognizing that the answer will vary in different historical periods and cultures. For example, a deeply religious society might devote a large portion of the common-wealth to endowing religious institutions, and a more individualist society might adopt a minimum income.

The final objection to solidarism is probably the most important and enduring one. Socialists like Jules Guesde argued that the theory rested on a fundamental and intractable error. Guesde insisted that the solidarists erred in treating the state as a neutral expression of social forces when it was really an agent of the capitalist class. ⁶¹ French socialists dismissed the possibility that the state would act against capitalist interests. They also worried that the concept of solidarism itself would function ideologically to legitimize, strengthen, and mystify the state. This would be extremely counter-productive; while the state might occasionally act paternalistically to meet some of the workers’ demands, in the last instance it would not promote popular interests. The socialist and communist movements advanced this critique of the ideological function of solidarism with great clarity and fervor. This critique might be one of the reasons solidarism disappeared as a political theory in the early twentieth century, even as its legacy lived on in the form of policies such as pensions and the system of progressive taxation. ⁶²

The small number of contemporary theorists who have made any reference to solidarism have picked up on the problem of the neutrality of the state. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber suggests that a naïve belief in the progressive potential of state power ultimately rendered solidarism incoherent. ⁶³ In Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri admit that their theory of common-wealth resembles solidarism (or what they describe as theories of “social capital/property”) but they insist that it differs in one key respect. They argue that the theory of social property falls “back on social democratic proposals for government activity to guarantee social reproduction” whereas their alternative is “outside of private or public management or command.” ⁶⁴ This criticism seems a bit disingenuous, given that Hardt and Negri themselves end up calling for a minimum income, which is a classic social democratic proposal that can hardly be implemented without a state. ⁶⁵ Still, it is worth considering whether the critique is correct. Does solidarism treat the state as the agent exclusively responsible for distributing the common-wealth, and if so, does this dimension of the theory render it incoherent?

In response to the first part of the question, the answer is yes and no. Solidarism was a normative theory that was used to justify a political program composed largely of state initiatives, especially the introduction of progressive taxation to finance free public education, public goods, poor relief, and unemployment/accident insurance. An important debate among solidarists was whether it was a theory of moral obligation or a theory of social rights. Fouillée asked whether the concept of social debt implied an individual, justiciable right to a specific remedy such as a job. Writing in 1884, he cautiously rejected this latter remedy as unworkable. According to Fouillée, it would be just as incoherent to say that a worker has a right to a job as to say that a poet has a right to readers. ⁶⁶ Yet he also criticized the view that private or state charity could be an adequate solution to poverty and need. His main goal was to justify the state’s obligation to solve social problems, and he did so by using the concept of “reparations.” ⁶⁷ He argued that corporations and associations, under civil law, have collective obligations to rectify wrongs that they have committed. Society should be viewed as a large association and the state as the agent which acts on behalf of the collective obligation to “repair” injustice.

The twin concepts of social rights and state obligation were the distinctive features of solidarism. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to describe solidarism simply as a synonym for social democracy. Thinkers like Bourgeois, who came from the French republican tradition, were concerned about the harm of dependence and wanted to foster the preconditions of non-domination. They worried about what Tocqueville had called the benign despotism of a paternalistic but powerful centralized state. ⁶⁸ This is one of the reasons why mutual aid societies and cooperatives continued to play a very important role in the solidarist program. The idea was to foster independent cooperative organizations not only as a way to promote the goal of sharing the common-wealth more equitably but also as a way of decentralizing power. The commons was intended both as an alternative to the state and as a normative principle guiding the state. Indeed, anti-statism can become a form of governmentality, as Foucault astutely pointed out. During the Paris Commune and the Spanish Civil War, anti-statist movements struggled to implement what Miguel Abensour has called “democracy against the state.” ⁶⁹ This involves a set of institutions to decentralize power and norms to inform and inspire practices of government. One recent attempt to put this idea into practice was made possible by a law passed in 2014 by the City Council of Bologna, Italy. Entitled, “Regulation on collaboration between citizens and the city for the care and regeneration of urban commons,” this legislation decreased centralized, bureaucratic control in favor of a flexible, rhizomatic form of subsidiarity. ⁷⁰ The law was passed by the local government but its intent is to provide the space and tools for experiments in autogestion. This initiative is in the spirit of the solidarism, which tried to augment the power of non-elites by creating opportunities for self-government and preventing domination.

The second prong of the “statist critique” is the claim that, while the state might mitigate class conflict by remedying extreme social ills, its concessions to popular interests will never erode the power of capital. ⁷¹ Recent economic history seems to confirm this hypothesis. Despite a large welfare state, economic inequality has increased and the relative power of capital is growing. ⁷² There is also more direct evidence that casts doubt on the possibility of a gradual, state-directed transformation of the balance between private and collective ownership of capital. In the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democratic Party introduced the Meidner plan, which would have required corporations to issue new equity shares to be controlled by “wage-earner” funds. It envisioned the gradual and partial reallocation of capital to collective institutions controlled by trade union associations. Industrial and financial groups mobilized against the plan, which was halted after the Social Democratic Party went down to historic electoral defeat. ⁷³

Something like the Meidner plan seems like the best interpretation of the principle of solidarism applied to the conditions of economically developed industrial countries. It would be a way of realizing property-owning democracy by giving every person an ownership share in the common-wealth. Such a share could generate a minimum income that could serve a safety net or a way of subsidizing forms of production that are not oriented toward profit maximization: artistic creation, scholarship, artisanal crafts, care work, social enterprise, and democratic workplaces. It would do so by restructuring ownership rather than through the Sisyphean process of redistribution. While the state would have to play a decisive role in implementing the initial transfer of shares, it would not necessarily concentrate excessive power in the hands of the state, because the “citizens-funds” could be overseen by independent institutions such as public benefit corporations or trade-union councils. ⁷⁴

Given the failure of the Meidner plan, property-owning democracy based on “citizens funds” may seem unrealistic, but this is no reason to reject the underlying concepts of common-wealth, social debt, reparation, and responsibility. The theory of solidarism or social property is best understood as a political rationality that informs a range of different strategies. The more modest proposals include a return to more steeply progressive income taxes (which Obama was defending in his speech); protection of existing welfare programs; increased investment in public goods; public insurance arrangements; and distributive policies such as protection of labor unions and living wage legislation. These proposals would resonate more powerfully with citizens who are familiar with the concepts and arguments of solidarism. The more ambitious ideas include Piketty’s proposal for new capital taxes, Meidner-plan-style citizens, and preferential financing or tax benefits for worker cooperatives. Different polities will make different decisions about where to draw the line between public and private shares of the common-wealth, and these deliberations will not take place behind a veil of ignorance. They will take place among citizens who are also learning to see themselves as embedded in webs of obligation, as mountain climbers who are tied together because that is the safest way to reach the top.

Solidarism and the City

The solidarist theory of the common-wealth can also help us think about urban policy in new and creative ways and to imagine alternatives to the neo-liberal city. ⁷⁵ The city itself is a striking illustration of Obama’s claim, because it is obvious that no individual built the city by him- or herself. The city was created collectively by past generations and diverse contemporaries. In North America, many cities are made up of land cleared by indigenous peoples, immigrant farmers and African slaves, pavement laid by Chinese and Irish laborers, sewers run by Italian pipe-fitters, plazas designed by starchitects, and urban scenes pioneered by bohemians who now fall asleep in front of the TV by 10 o’clock. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre famously described the city as an oeuvre, a collective work of art that belongs to everyone. He introduced the concept of “the right to the city” to challenge the way that privatization and segregation were preventing working-class and poor people from sharing this inheritance. ⁷⁶

Once we begin to think in solidarist terms, a new set of policies becomes possible to imagine. For example, the concepts of social property and rent explain why it is legitimate to capture part of the value created through urban real estate markets and use them to pay for public goods. “Rent” highlights the fact that investments in different locations yield different returns and this difference is directly linked to location, which is value created by others. The government provides public transit, schools, urban infrastructure, and policing; neighbors foster community, aesthetics, and eyes-on-the-street; and businesses create opportunities for work, leisure activities, and consumption. Some of this social value can be captured and re-allocated to solve the social problems of urban life such as lack of affordable housing and transit infrastructure. Many countries including Canada and the United States do not tax the capital gains on the sale of a primary residence. Simply taxing this unearned increment at the same rate as other income could almost triple the budget for public housing in the United States. ⁷⁷ Inclusionary zoning, value capture, and community benefit agreements are all applications of the idea that some of the profit from real estate development should be reinvested in public goods. ⁷⁸

In San Francisco, transit activists used an updated version of solidarism to promote a novel way of funding public transit through a property tax levy on commercial real estate in the downtown core. They argued that a flourishing commercial/financial hub could not exist without a public transit system to move people from the low-density residential neighborhoods to the high-density commercial core. Transit activists emphasized that the value of downtown highrises and the commercial rents they command is sustained by a nexus of public–private inputs, but the profit is appropriated entirely by the private sector. The proposed transit tax was described as a way to recapture this value for the public.

The transit activists were unsuccessful in San Francisco, but in France, the birthplace of solidarism, the right to mobility has gained more traction. Free public transit is a feature of the “alternatives to austerity” agenda, and its supporters include both environmentalists and leftists. ⁷⁹ In 2008, the mid-sized town of Aubagne decided to make the public transit system free. A report commissioned by the city found, unsurprisingly, that use of the bus system increased by 173%. It concluded that free public transit facilitates the social, economic, and cultural integration of youth, the poor, and elderly people who cannot drive and also benefits the local economy. By abolishing transit fares, the city decommodified a basic need and financed this new public good through an increase in the versement transport (VT), a tax calculated on the basis of the payroll of companies with more than nine employees. The city promoted the policy with the clever slogan “Liberté, Egalité, Gratuité,” which rhetorically linked the political freedom of the French revolution (liberté) with the provision of free public goods (gratuité) that citizens could share. Twenty-three towns in France have free public transit. ⁸⁰

While San Francisco’s “Transit Assessment District” was not adopted, a similar logic has convinced law makers in cities across the United States to pass inclusionary zoning legislation. San Jose, a city near Silicon Valley with some of the highest real estate prices in the nation, passed a law requiring that new residential developments of at least twenty homes include below-market units for low-income buyers. ⁸¹ The California Building Industry filed suit, claiming that inclusionary zoning goes beyond normal local police powers and violates the constitutional prohibition on taking private property without compensation. The California Supreme Court ultimately reversed the lower court's decision and sided with the City of San Jose. The case articulates two very different approaches to the city. One is the solidarist approach, treats the city as common property and, given the conditions of scarcity, places limits on the market exchange of land to meet the need for affordable housing. It situates real estate development in the context of the social and physical infrastructure of the city and considers what is minimally necessary to sustain that infrastructure. The alternative neo-liberal approach abstracts from this context and focuses on the benefits accrued to the contracting parties without considering how these actions affect everyone else.

Conclusion

In court cases about inclusionary zoning, the removal of informal settlements, the privatization of public space, and the destruction of public housing, we see the relevance of the archeological work of unearthing the theory of solidarism. Judges are asked to decide between claims based on the right to private property and arguments that draw on social rights and the public good, concepts that need to be more fully and persuasively defended. Neo-liberalism—itself an archeological project—has been very successful at persuading people to perceive themselves and their relationship to others in a certain way, as possessive individuals rather than citizens linked together through common projects. Solidarism works on subjectivities in a similar way but with an opposite objective. It recasts public life as composed of ties of obligation. These ties are not described as webs that immobilize but, like the ropes linking Gide’s mountain climbers, they are supports that help us climb higher and protect us when we fall.

The text of solidarism is a palimpsest. Solidarism was a very influential theory, but its history has been almost entirely effaced. The contemporary traces take the form of social policies and claims about the public interest and social rights, but these claims, like Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, remain inchoate. This article has tried to provide a comprehensive account of solidarism that renders these claims intelligible and politically salient.

Given the theoretical sophistication of solidarism, it is puzzling that the concept has largely been forgotten. The main reason seems to be political and historical. In the early twentieth century, the ideological terrain was increasingly polarized between socialist parties that opposed collaboration with the capitalist state and bourgeois parties opposed to state intervention. Today the ideological terrain has shifted dramatically. Both the left and right basically agree on the legitimacy of a minimal welfare state and the capitalist economy but differ over the degree and form of redistribution. The right, however, has been more effective in the past twenty years at shifting the terrain by convincing people that privatization and low taxes increase freedom and unleash initiative that creates prosperity for all, or at least for those who deserve it. The left needs an alternative to the welfare-as-state-charity model, which has several defects. By describing recipients as those who have failed to achieve self-sufficiency, it depicts them as bare life. ⁸² This erodes equality and establishes a relationship of paternalism/dependency. The welfare-as-state-charity model also undermines political support by framing taxation as coercive (as a way of forcing the individual to give his resources to someone else). This frame can reinforce the view that the poor and working class are “takers.” ⁸³ This frame also reinforces the belief that the rich deserve the increasingly large share that they have claimed for themselves. The concepts introduced by the solidarists—social product, social debt, and reparation—provide an alternative frame. They do a much better job explaining why we should adopt some form of “property-owning democracy.” By eschewing abstraction and providing a specific account of the way value is actually produced through rent and the division of labor, solidarism provides a more convincing normative theory. Traces of this theory are evident in urban public policies, judicial opinions, and in Obama’s speech, but in order to inform and structure political debate, they must be made explicit and defended.