While researching
an upcoming book on economic personalism we delved a little more deeply into
the subject of solidarity than we had previously. This is natural, for solidarity and
personalism are inextricably linked with the social doctrine of Pope Pius XI on
which the Just Third Way is, in part, based.
 |
| Louis O. Kelso |
Economic
personalism as understood in the Just Third Way integrates the insights of
Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler in the area of finance and, most importantly,
the principles of economic justice with the social doctrine of Pius XI. The three principles of economic justice are:
·
Participation or participative justice,
·
Distribution or distributive justice, and
·
Social justice, or the principle of
feedback and correction when participative justice and distributive justice get
out of balance.
As we said,
however, today we’re interested in solidarity, which is more than just a “feel
good” word. In the Thomist personalist thought
of Karol Józef Wojtyła (Pope John Paul
II), the concept of solidarity holds an important place. It provides a link between individuals as
individuals, and individuals as members of groups, a key distinction in the
social doctrine of Pope Pius XI.
 |
| Pope John Paul II |
Thus, as Wojtyła would later state after his
elevation to the papacy, solidarity is a “virtue,” but not in the strict
philosophical sense. In the encyclical he
issued on the twentieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio he explained
that solidarity —
. . . is above all a question of
interdependence, sensed as a system determining relationships in the
contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious
elements, and accepted as a moral category. When interdependence becomes recognized in
this way, the correlative response as a moral and social attitude, as a “virtue,”
is solidarity. (Solicitudo Rei Socialis, § 38.)
Specifically,
solidarity, a characteristic of groups per se, is a principle that fulfills
and completes that general justice which permeates all virtue, a sort of “general
charity.” Thus, solidarity appears to relate to social charity as legal justice
relates to social justice, viz, a general virtue as it relates to a
particular virtue. A general virtue is
one that, unlike a particular virtue, does not have a defined act or a direct
object.
General Virtue
|
Particular Virtue
|
Legal Justice
|
Social Justice
|
Solidarity
|
Social Charity
|
 |
| Pope Pius XI |
Solidarity is not
a particular virtue, nor does it exclude non-Christians, as some authorities
have tried to maintain. That is, solidarity is a virtue Christians necessarily
have, not one that is exclusive to Christians: “Solidarity is undoubtedly a
Christian virtue. In what has been said so far it has been possible to identify
many points of contact between solidarity and charity, which is the
distinguishing mark of Christ's disciples.” (Ibid., § 40.)
In the context of
Wojtyła’s Thomistic personalism, then, solidarity describes an awareness of
rights and duties within a particular group that define how sovereign
individuals relate as persons to one another and to the group as a whole. All people as members of a group have
solidarity because they are members of a group.
In Wojtyła’s
thought, solidarity is an essential prerequisite for social justice, for (as we
have discussed elsewhere) only members of groups can carry out acts of social
justice. By this means cooperation is
achieved, not by absorbing people into the group or collective, but by mutual
interaction and give-and-take in exercising rights and attaining the common
goals and aspirations of the group.
 |
| David Émile Durkheim |
Solidarism as
conceived by Wojtyła is in sharp
contrast to that of, e.g., the sociologist David Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). Durkheim, whose conception of God was a
“divinized society” (Fulton J.
Sheen, Religion Without God. New York: Garden City Books, 1954, 54), held that only the collective has
rights. Individual ethics are merely
expedient and necessarily give way before the demands of social ethics. As
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) put it, for Durkheim, “religion is the group’s
worship of itself.” (Joseph A.
Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954, 794.)
Thus,
commentators who assert that solidarity is a Christian version of collectivism are
attempting to analyze a key concept of social virtue by excluding an important
aspect of all social virtue. That is, they
fail to take into account the fact that human beings are “political animals”:
individuals with inherent rights (and thus personality) who naturally subsist
in a social environment with others who also have rights.
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