Solidarity born of crisis : the development of solidarity from the French Revolution until the present, with EÌmile Durkheim and JuÌrgen Habermas
The aim of the thesis is to chart the development of the term solidarity as it appears in the European social and political thought tradition. It traces the emergence of the term in its modern form from around the time of the French Revolution to the present. The thesis is divided into three parts, the historical background in France in the early nineteenth century; the consolidation, application and limiting of solidarity theory by Durkheim and its final exhaustion in Habermas's political thought. A historical perspective is maintained throughout the thesis. However this is not a straightforward intellectual history of a concept. The historical analysis that is present, particularly in the first third of the thesis, is given to show the relationship of solidarity to crisis. Placing the theoretical debates of solidarity into a historical picture allows for a comparative and linked progression to become visible. This helps to demonstrate that solidarity discourse tends to react to social and political reality, in a way that is rarely appreciated in the literature. The central claim is that writing on solidarity cannot be made sense of unless it is historically situated. Solidarity is a chameleon concept changing
Elliott, Alexander
HM0717 Solidarity. Unity
Solidarity born of crisis : the development of solidarity from the French Revolution until the present, with EÌmile Durkheim and JuÌrgen Habermas. The aim of the thesis is to chart the development of the term solidarity as it appears in the European social and political thought tradition. It traces the emergence of the term in its modern form from around the time of the French Revolution to the present. The thesis is divided into three parts, the historical background in France in the early nineteenth century; the consolidation, application and limiting of solidarity theory by Durkheim and its final exhaustion in Habermas's political thought. A historical perspective is maintained throughout the thesis. However this is not a straightforward intellectual history of a concept. The historical analysis that is present, particularly in the first third of the thesis, is given to show the relationship of solidarity to crisis. Placing the theoretical debates of solidarity into a historical picture allows for a comparative and linked progression to become visible. This helps to demonstrate that solidarity discourse tends to react to social and political reality, in a way that is rarely appreciated in the literature. The central claim is that writing on solidarity cannot be made sense of unless it is historically situated. Solidarity is a chameleon concept changing
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