Friendship and solidarity

Durkheim on positive solidarity

In The Division of Labor, Durkheim was explicitly concerned with moral integration under conditions of advanced societal differentiation, for which he chose the term ‘organic solidarity’. As he puts it, ‘above all we must determine the degree to which the solidarity…[the division of labour] produces contributes generally to the integration of society’, whereby solidarity is a ‘wholly moral phenomenon’ (2013, pp. 51–52). The tensions around the incomplete shift from mechanical to organic solidarity are much discussed and need not be restated here. What is of interest to this discussion is another, relatively neglected distinction. In his discussion of law – for him the empirical manifestation of solidarity – Durkheim distinguishes between negative and positive solidarity. He describes both mechanical and organic solidarity as types of ‘positive solidarity’ insofar as they are more or less integrative depending on the degree of societal differentiation. But he also uses the notions of negative and positive solidarity more narrowly, namely with reference to the operations of modern, restitutive law (p. 322). The distinction rests, in the first instance, on the difference between legally mediated relations that ‘link things directly to persons, but not persons with one another’ (p. 91). Although central to solidarity, these relationships are negative in the sense that while ‘disputes are forstalled, there is no active co-operation, no consensus’ (p. 92, original emphasis). An example Durkheim gives is property rights (‘real rights’). In the second instance, Durkheim suggests a necessary interrelatedness of negative (contractual) and positive (affective) solidarity. Only together can they result in social integration because negative solidarity on its own ‘is not a true solidarity’ (p. 94).

Positive solidarity comes into greater relief still when Durkheim states that ‘for a man to acknowledge that others have rights, not only as a matter of logic, but as one of daily living, he must have agreed to limit his own’ (2013, p. 94). Not satisfied with what is essentially a definition of negative liberal freedom, he goes on to say, ‘consequently this mutual limitation was only realizable in a spirit of understanding and harmony’ (p. 94). But what, he asks, drives ‘these reciprocal sacrifices’? The answer is worth reproducing at some length:

It is customary to distinguish carefully between justice and charity, that is, the mere respect of others’ rights, from every act that goes beyond that purely negative virtue. In both these kinds of practices may be seen two independent strata of ethics: justice, by itself, might constitute its basic foundation; charity might be its crowning glory. The distinction is such a radical one that, according to the protagonists of a certain kind of ethics, justice alone is needful for the smooth functioning of social life. ⁵ Altruism is scarcely more than a private virtue, which it is laudable for the individual to pursue, but which society can very well do without. Many even view its intervention in public life with some disquiet.…In reality, for men to acknowledge and mutually guarantee the rights of one another, they must first have a mutual liking, and have some reason that makes them cling to one another and to the single society of which they form a part. Justice is filled with charity, or to employ once more our expression, negative solidarity is only the emanation of another solidarity that is positive in nature: it is the repercussion of social feelings in the sphere of ‘real’ rights which come from a different source. Thus there is nothing specific about justice, but it is the necessary accompaniment to every kind of solidarity. (pp. 95–96, my emphases)

Although using the terminology differently, Durkheim’s is an early formulation of Habermas’s much-commented upon dictum ‘[j]ustice…requires solidarity as its reverse side’ (1989, p. 244). ⁶ Inextricable from one another, positive solidarity needs justice to hold society together via law, the ‘visible symbol’ of solidarity (Durkheim, 2013, p. 52). Modern law, as the institutional and formalised interpretation of collectively contested norms of justice, receives its integrative force neither merely by threat of legitimate violence, nor from a sense of duty alone, nor from a longing for peace (pp. 94–95), but from ‘social feelings’. Ever defensive of society as the origin of meaning-constitutive and regulative social facts, for Durkheim, positive solidarity is more than ‘the other of justice’. As its necessary condition, it refers to those residual sediments of the collective consciousness that despite processes of social differentiation have remained the stuff of human bonds even in those societies whose morality has been described as ‘postconventional’, grounded in universalisable, formal principles of justice (Kohlberg, 1981) – in societies, that is, that are bereft of a collective consciousness with any claim to a meaning-constitutive totality.

It is for good reasons, then, that from a legal perspective, Durkheim’s ‘positive solidarity exists essentially as a mystery’ (Greenhouse, 2011, p. 176). For the ‘mystery’ of shared, binding sentiments resists formal integration into cognitive conceptions of justice. This is not the place to seek to reconcile the tensions. It suffices to note positive solidarity as constituting an affective social fact whose shape has been variously conceptualised: in Aristotle’s philia politike in the context of Athenian democracy and its contemporary iterations in civic or political friendship; the notion of ‘sympathy’ as integrative moral sentiment in commercial society (Silver, 1990; Smith, 2006); Hegel’s ‘love’ tempering Kantian justice (Honneth, 2007a); various forms of patriotism, from veneration of the patrie and Jacobin lip-service to fraternity, to nationalist-fascist ‘blood and soil’ ideology and its categorical negation in ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas, 1996; Muller, 2007; Schama, 1989); communitarianism and the ethic of care (Gilligan, 1993; Sen, 1999); ‘the sense of justice’ with its negative evidence guilt and shame (Rawls, 1963); those ‘needs of strangers’ that go beyond the mere provision of essentials to sustain life (Ignatieff, 1984); advocacy for a public life that beyond turning on civility turns on decency (Margalit, 1996; Markus, 2001); the need for ‘resonance’ with self and others as panacea for alienation and reification (Rosa, 2019); a felt, intentional mutuality that, while non-legislable, can flourish only when anchored in democratic participation in all spheres of life (Honneth, 2017). Among these conceptions, Honneth’s approach is especially helpful, not least because it limits the reach and role of Durkheim’s positive solidarity.

Honneth: Solidarity as mutual concern

In The Idea of Socialism, Honneth seeks to reconcile ‘individual freedom and solidarity’ understood as a ‘for each other’ that, rather than limiting our freedom, is the precondition for self-determination in polity, economy and personal life (2017, pp. 20, 19). ⁷ It can only be attained on the basis of equal participation requiring the ongoing deconstruction of barriers to the free communication of needs. What differentiates this conception from liberal conceptions that perceive solidarity as a secondary consequence of the enactment of private freedom or market transactions is its intentionality. Taking his lead from Daniel Brudney (2014), Honneth argues that subjects can only act for each other if their aims rather than merely ‘overlapping’ are ‘intertwined’ in the pursuit of common purposes. In a later clarification Honneth arrives at two further elements of solidarity: awareness of interdependencies including the mutuality of well-being (derived from Durkheim) and the rejection of affection as basis for solidarity (2019, p. 702). The latter particularly needs discussing.

When imagining a socialist society, Honneth is not imagining a friendly society. On this he is unequivocal, stating that he ‘didn’t want to make solidarity closer to what is normally called friendship. I never wanted to have a picture of…a society of members who love each other or who have positive emotional relations to each other’. Honneth jettisons ‘emotional attitudes like altruism’, but also ‘fraternity’ and any ‘reference to positive emotional attitudes like those in friendships and love relationships’; they are dissolved in the sufficient condition for solidarity: the mutual awareness of interdependencies including each other’s well-being (2019, pp. 702–703). Honneth does not repudiate the bonding significance of emotions per se; his is not a cognitivist account. Rather, Honneth permits only those emotions to enter into his conception of solidarity that give appropriate expression to a ‘for each other’ in the context of a society of strangers where anonymity and difference rather than communal familiarity and similarity characterise social experience. The term he uses is ‘concern’ (Anteilnahme) which for Brudney – who finds references to the notion in the early Marx and as ‘an underground current’ in Rawls – is a fitting descriptor of an attitude that, although a form of love in the broadest sense, lends itself to solidary feelings whose specific object is ‘unknown others’ (2014, pp. 450, 461). The normative line to be drawn around the concept is that beyond which feelings of belonging to a cultural community trump the rule of law. The normative remit it articulates is that ‘members of society can satisfy the needs they share with all others – physical and emotional intimacy, economic independence and political self-determination – by relying on the sympathy and support of their partners in interaction’ (Honneth, 2017, pp. 107–108).

Read alongside Honneth, Durkheim’s positive solidarity takes on sharper contours: unlike Durkheim, Honneth insists on a concept of solidarity that rejects any reference to fraternity, friendship, altruism or charity; like Durkheim, Honneth understands the necessary basis of social integration in mutual concern and interdependencies that, more than merely functional, describe an intentional we-orientation; and like Durkheim, Honneth seeks to account for societal differentiation. What Honneth adds to Durkheim’s vision is an emphasis on shared goals and purposes hammered out in democratic will formation; and (like Habermas) he charges ‘the democratic public sphere, occupied by deliberating citizens’ with ‘integrative steering’ of functionally differentiated spheres of action (2017, pp. 97, 96). Positive solidarity filtered through Honneth’s conception is socially integrative because it constitutes the collective-affective basis – but not the organising principle – of rationally organised, highly differentiated legal communities.

To reiterate, positive solidarity denotes no simple generalisation of fraternity nor is it a wall-erecting appeal to isolationism, cultural patriotism and nationalism. On the other hand, a society principally held together by negative solidarity is a society in which legal subjects are subjected to reifying juridification (Habermas, 1981, pp. 356–373), something appeals to positive solidarity seek to forestall At the same time, any discussion of solidarity as ‘social feelings’ cannot pass over questions about their motivations in the full and discomfiting knowledge that such feelings can – and do – turn antidemocratic. What the substantive content of positive solidarity is or ought to be – whether a republican or constitutional patriotism, an enlightened cosmopolitanism or some other form of generalisable sentiment – is up for debate (see Nussbaum, 1996). We can assume, however, that positive solidarity requires, at minimum, a felt concern for unknown (and we might add ‘unlike’) others. The capacity for such concern is learnt in relations with concrete, loved others because solidarity is more than an abstract notion based on abstract principles that need only be operationalised as required.

Friendship’s moral significance

Martha Nussbaum reminds us that experiential moral learning ‘takes place in the experience of the concrete’, friendship included: ‘Trusting the guidance of a friend and allowing one’s feelings to be engaged with that other person’s life and choices, one learns to see aspects of the world that one had previously missed’ (1992, p. 44). To illustrate, take Henry Miller’s reflection on his encounters with a friend:

To come into his presence gave me the sensation of being undressed, or rather peeled, for it was much more than mere nakedness which he demanded of the person he was talking to. […]

Hamilton altered me profoundly, as only a rare book, a rare personality, a rare experience, can alter one. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and yet not to feel enslaved or attached because of the experience. (Miller, 1961, pp. 148–149)

Describing the profound personal changes effected by his intimate friendship with Hamilton, Miller intimates what is involved: a preparedness, built on trust, to be vulnerable, to being emotionally, psychologically ‘undressed’, so that he could exercise his capacity to bring down his defences. David Velleman (1999) has written about such voluntary defencelessness as a central element not only of love but, although learnt in affectionate relationships, as vital to empathy and respect for non-intimates even if vulnerability vis-à-vis strangers requires more circumspection. An open self, receptive to another, invites new insights, a change of values, even moral epiphanies, revelations that, however momentary, restructure our attitudes, and tint the lens through which we perceive ourselves and others with a different, more translucent hue.

For a young Siegfried Kracauer, who was yet to find out how difficult his long and intimate friendships with Ernst Bloch and especially T.W. Adorno were to become (Später, 2020), the mutual building of selves is a distinguishing element of friendship: ‘However close the acquaintance might be situated: as long as he is only an acquaintance, he does not participate in the construction of our self, does not give continuous nourishment to the imagination, and his image does not live in us as invisible companion on our path’. In friendship, on the other hand, the ‘image of the other rests in his [the friend’s] soul’ (2011, pp. 38, 55); it is a guiding image, a reference point for our moral compass, especially, though not exclusively, in times of self-doubt. We calibrate our moral sense by way of friendship’s mutuality. Similarly, Marilyn Friedman refers to the friend as ‘moral witness’. Friends witness each other’s moral perspectives, permitting the ‘vicarious participation in the very experience of moral alternatives’ (1993, p. 199).

Yet, moral learning is not simply about the acquisition of what counts for the right and the good, about a kind of gleaning of how to ‘do moral’. The diminished need for discretion in friendship enables an unselfconscious opening up that can lead to moral self-calibration. Emerson wrote that in the company of our friend, we ‘may think aloud’ (Emerson cited in Vernon, 2006, pp. 157–158). Thinking aloud is conducive to learning because it is risky, and it is risky because presumably most of us at times think the unthinkable. Friendship’s intimacy allows us to speak the unspeakable, to say what not only from the standpoint of public morality and ‘community sentiment’, but even – and perhaps especially – against our own better judgement, may well be highly problematic, even indecent. Intimate friends will make allowances because they recognise each other’s idiosyncrasies which include, aside from everything we might find laudable, fallibilities, errors and lapses in judgement.

Not only are deviations from moral convention both enabled by and indicative of personal trust and freedom of action (Luhmann, 2014, pp. 47–59; Suttles, 1970), they give substantive meaning to Friedman’s (1993, p. 205) point that friends value each other for their ‘whole particularity’. Whether commensurate or incommensurate with morality writ large, friends are willing to offer glimpses not only of their private but at times even their secret lives because they can trust that the friend’s interpretation of unmanaged self-presentations is weighed up against a fuller understanding of who they are based on a shared history. That is not say that friendship is therefore easier to negotiate than other bonds of affection. Far from it. As in all close bonds, a shared history can also lead to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, difficulties (Smart et al., 2012). It is simply to indicate that in friendship empathy is both specific and unspecific; it is oriented to the whole complexity of the other even if it can never be fully grasped; it denotes friendship’s generosity, crucial to learning to respond empathically not only to intimates but to unknown others. For LaFollette, any close personal relationship seems to suffice for the development of an ‘inclination to generalize [empathy] to others’ because they widen ‘our moral horizons’ (1996, p. 208). I suggest this needs to be qualified. What is required is intimacy, that is, the self-chosen realisation of trust, respect and equality in the context of care and affection. And it is on those grounds that friendship especially, as non-institutionalisd instantiation of intimacy, offers the potential for experiential moral learning.

That potentiality of friendship is apparent from the earliest part of the life course. Children’s friendships are to be noted here, not least because ‘the family’ has overwhelmingly come to be seen as singularly decisive concerning children’s moral and social development. There is, today, a long list of critiques of the family both as a concept and concerning its idealised status in socialisation theories that does not need to be addressed here. It suffices to select one crucial aspect: even a cursory glance at children’s friendships shows that they are the first extra-familial relationships in which a kind of morality is constructed that goes beyond duty and obligation and ‘contain[s] principles of solidarity and care’ (Keller & Edelstein, 1991, p. 256). Crucially, they are the first intimate relationships constructed on self-generated, that is, ‘equal’, terms. This is in contradistinction to adult–child bonds where respect is unilaterally demanded (Piaget, 1932: 44) so that moral learning, at least for a time, takes place in a context of parental ‘hegemony’ and child obedience to authority (cf. Duveen, 2013). Grounded in a fundamental equality, experiences of friendship especially ‘are likely to form the basis of children’s acquisition of concepts such as justice and courage or care’ (Bukowski et al., 1996, p. 258). Already between children, then, friendship provides ‘increasingly structured opportunities for the acquisition of practices of cooperation within a relationship of equality’ (Keller & Edelstein, 1991, p. 255), enabling us from the early years to experience the lineaments of care and affection vital to the development of a moral sense (Johansson, 2008; Scramaglia, 2000; Walker et al., 2016) as the affective basis for the cognitive apprehension of justice and fairness (Habermas, 1989; Kohlberg, 1981).

Even if we account for the ‘co-primacy’ of cognition and affective moral motivations (Gibbs, 2014), experiential moral learning is skewed to the emotions to the extent that it does not result from rule following, but accrues from feelings of profound mutual respect instantiated in encounters with a concrete other. While none of this is in principle alien to other interpersonal bonds, the typical social constitution of intimate friendship appears to make it particularly conducive to such learning. Of course, it can only be realisable to the extent that a given relationship offers that realisation to friends. But in principle at least, intimate friendship provides optimal conditions for moral learning because here intimacy is self-generated by friends to the greatest possible degree. This is a central practical implication of friendship’s institutional deficit. It enables from an early age the concrete actualisation of intimacy and thus a comprehensive understanding of solidarity as felt concern for unknown others.