In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Rouven Symank, “Durkheim’s Empire: The Concept of Solidarity and its Colonial Dimension.”
When we think of the concept of solidarity, what typically comes to mind is the morally positive idea of cohesion and mutual support within groups. Political theorists tend to cite examples of solidarity among oppressed people jointly resisting empire, or among workers seeking to collectively improve their labor conditions. Yet, as political theorist Rouven Symank argues, situating the concept of solidarity within its historical context reveals how it interacted with the political project of integrating colonies into imperial economic and legal orders. In a recent APSR article, Symank shows how the concept of solidarity emerged at the high tide of French colonialism, and was used in efforts to improve understanding of colonized societies and promote developmentalist reforms.
The modern scientific concept of solidarity is frequently traced to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who, in his seminal 1893 book The Division of Labour in Society, distinguished between mechanical and organic solidarity. For Durkheim, “mechanical solidarity” referred to social cohesion found in small-scale, so-called “primitive” societies where people shared similar values and tasks. Although the concept is often understood as referring to pre-industrial European society, Durkheim’s models of “pure” mechanical solidarity were in fact both ancient societies and colonized societies at the time. By contrast, “organic solidarity” referred to social cohesion rooted in a division of labor, typically found in modern industrialized societies.
For Durkheim, societies gradually progressed from mechanical to organic solidarity. Accordingly, the study of societies characterized by mechanical solidarity shed light on the development of social cohesion in modern societies. Durkheim was wary of the idea that society moves through stages, and he did not consider mechanical solidarity inferior to organic solidarity. Rather, he saw mechanical forms of solidarity as already containing all of the elements of organic solidarity, like an embryo that grows into a human being. Although Durkheim’s sociological method can thus be contrasted with racist, proto-fascist, and essentialist views that circulated among anthropologists at the time, the “historical” material he drew on to understand society in its “pure” and undifferentiated form was largely produced by anthropologists, missionaries, ethnographers, medics, and administrators in contemporary colonies. Durkeim investigated mechanical solidarity not by reading history, but by reading ethnographies.
“Solidarity, in this period, became both a subject of sociological study and a tool for promoting a less coercive form of colonial governance.”At the turn of the twentieth century, the Durkheimian concept of solidarity came to influence new practices of governing French colonies. Despite Durkheim’s own critical positions on colonialism, the concept was adapted to advance understanding of colonial societies and make governmental practices more scientific, more effective, and ostensibly more humane. Although Durkheim was not an advocate for colonialism, he nonetheless argued that the state plays an important role in the evolution from mechanical to organic forms of solidarity through promoting the division of labor under modern law. He further argued that, as the division of labor increased in European industrial society, the development of organic solidarity could foster social progress towards the “ideal of human brotherhood” both within and between nations.
After Durkheim’s death in 1917, however, these ideas took on a distinctly colonial dimension. Marcel Mauss —Durkheim’s student, collaborator, and nephew— viewed sociology as a tool for promoting greater solidarity among “civilizations.” Solidarity, in this period, became both a subject of sociological study and a tool for promoting a less coercive form of colonial governance. The colonial administrator Albert Sarraut subsequently employed the concept of solidarity to promote colonial policies that sought to foster interdependence between colonizing nations and colonized subjects. Over time, in the hands of French colonial administrators, the concept of solidarity became a guise for colonial exploitation.
By placing Durkheim’s concept of solidarity in its historical context, Symank’s article shows how the concept of solidarity —now frequently associated with positive moral values of national cohesion— was instrumental to justifications for colonial exploitation. Such an approach to the concept of solidarity prompts reconsidering how concepts are used in practice, and how they can come to hold new meanings and serve unexpected political purposes.
- Ewa Nizalowska is a PhD candidate in political theory at Cornell University with research interests in American political thought, feminist theory, and theories of political economy and empire. Her dissertation examines how early to mid-twentieth-century radicals theorized the organization of economic power in the United States and strategized for its rearrangement. Her work has been supported by, among others, the American Political Science Association, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and the Yan P. Lin Centre at McGill University
- SYMANK, ROUVEN. 2024. “Durkheim’s Empire: The Concept of Solidarity and Its Colonial Dimension.” , American Political Science Review, 1–14.
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