Sometime in the 1980s, a number of key left-wing ideas were threatened with extinction. One of them was “ideology”, in the sense of false consciousness. False consciousness was the term Engels coined to refer to those values adopted by the working class, which caused them to act against their own interest. But to call a statement false seemed to imply some absolute truth against which it could be measured, and notions of absolute truth had become about as plausible as the Virgin birth. The word “bourgeois”, once on every leftist’s lips, also fell into disuse. Steel-hard revolutionaries in the 1970s used to declare that they refused to resort to the bourgeois law courts – thus raising the thorny question of whether they would also refuse to call the bourgeois fire brigade.
The concept of solidarity – the subject of the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s wise and imaginative book – became similarly unfashionable. This was partly because changes in late capitalism led to smaller production units, and thus to slimmed-down workforces. There were fewer fellow workers to feel solidarity with. In Blairite Britain, the idea was associated with the spanner and the flat cap. It was difference and diversity, not unity, that postmodern culture chose to value. It bred a rather fuzzy individualism (“be yourself”, and other such mindless mantras). Solidarity was becoming hard to distinguish from soulless uniformity. There were group identities in plenty, but they aimed at a specific goal; when that was achieved they would inevitably disappear.
Working-class solidarity, however, is more than just instrumental. It prefigures a different kind of social order, one in which cooperation will be a value in itself. Aristotle argued this case long ago, while Marx thought that enjoying each other’s company was part of our “species being”, built in to the kind of animals we are.
By the turn of the century, the fact that the practice of solidarity had helped to topple apartheid in South Africa and transform the political landscape of Poland had almost faded from memory. There had also been too many negative examples of it – tribalism, death-dealing cults and what Williams calls “ecstatic collectivity”. The ancients knew this as the Dionysian side of life, and thought it deeply dangerous. Besides, is solidarity possible without an enemy, or does it depend on demonising the Other? Would the British have had much identity over the centuries without their hatred of the French? Would Celtic survive without Rangers?
Always allergic to easy answers, Williams is sceptical of “I Am Charlie Hebdo/a Gazan/an Israeli” T-shirts. There’s something objectionably privileged about proclaiming one’s identity with a group without sharing their pain. In any case, identification isn’t primarily about how you feel but what you do. Nor should it be uncritical. Williams rejects nostalgic appeals to a simple-minded being-together, which can easily be exploited to exclude those seen as alien to that community. He’s right of course about this, but it might imply that strangers are always to be welcomed. Those who speak of inclusiveness should ask themselves whether it stretches to drug traffickers or neo-Nazis.
What the book wants is a form of solidarity which acknowledges difference, conflict and otherness. We should neither try to assimilate the experience of others, nor insist that there’s an unbridgeable gulf between us. Solidarity is in one sense a fact about humanity (without cooperating, we perish), but this interdependence, for Williams, needs to be converted into political value. This mutual making of identities won’t happen once and for all – it’s a continually reinvented project – and will always be imperfect. Others are never wholly transparent to us, any more than we are ever wholly transparent to ourselves. The only problem with this argument is that not many people are likely to disagree with it.
Williams thinks that the currently modish concept of empathy must be treated with suspicion. It seems to override what some philosophers call the natural separateness of bodies, which is simply a fact about us, not a reason for existential anguish. It’s not that I can’t have your pain, but that the idea of having someone else’s pain doesn’t make sense. I can’t have your ears either. The fact that we don’t have unmediated access to others is only a problem for people in bad French films who dream of some wordless intimacy between souls. Sometimes, Williams points out, we have to make sense of not making sense of others’ viewpoints. Nor will feeling your suffering necessarily inspire me to do anything about it, not least if I’m a sadist. Empathy can’t do the work of solidarity. How will knowing what someone is feeling distribute resources more justly, or resolve inequities of power? One should try to stand “at” the place of the other, Williams suggests, not “in” it.
Surprisingly, the book doesn’t turn here to a discussion of the Christian concept of agape, or love. Strikingly, agape isn’t a matter of feeling. This is why the paradigm of love for the New Testament is love of strangers and enemies, who are hardly likely to kindle a warm glow in one’s breast. One of the points of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that a lot of Jews of the time regarded Samaritans as a particularly low form of life. Love, for Christianity, is a social practice, not a sentiment. One can leave the latter to the various strains of erotic or romantic emotion currently on offer in late capitalism. Feeling a repugnance for the homeless is neither here nor there as long as you help them out. They’re asking for a roof over their heads, not a lingering embrace. Love for the Christian Gospel is an obligation, which is one reason why it can’t be a feeling. Nobody can be obliged to feel pity or boredom.
Running as a subtext beneath Williams’s reflections is a concern with the body. In one view, the body is what shuts us out from each other, thus making any true solidarity unattainable. Sealed off from each other by the walls of the flesh, our inner life remains impenetrable. To counter this dismal doctrine, the book turns to the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, according to which the body is inherently expressive. I don’t need to “infer” or “deduce” what you’re feeling, since it’s usually as much present in what you do as meaning is present in a word. Anyway, how do I come to know my own inner life? By growing up in a language which allows me to put a name to what I’m feeling. Language is a public affair. Talk of an inner life is potentially misleading. I can only know that I’m envious or furious because I’ve been initiated into a common culture. In this sense, solidarity is there from the outset.
Rowan Williams writes in what one might call a liberal Anglican style. His rolling sentences are packed with judicious qualifications, anxious to do justice to all parties. But charity isn’t just a matter of good manners. It also means being able to call something “fatuous” or “nonsense”; this Williams does. If his style is liberal, his political stance is socialist. The book reflects with impressive erudition on a range of European philosophers, but the seed of its concept of solidarity was sown in the apartheid era in South Africa, where Williams worked for a while. There’s a moral passion and political anger in these pages which is neither very liberal nor very Anglican. Instead, one can hear the echo of the author’s homeland, a Wales renowned for the resilience of its labour movement. The archbishop who bowed to the Queen has been pushed further to the left by a world in desperate straits. In a memorable phrase of his, the dual threats we confront are “religious fascism and soulless techno-consumerism”. He might have added that the former is mostly a reaction to the latter.
Much of Williams’s vision of solidarity depends on the idea of dialogue, which is indeed familiar to Anglicans. But what of those who refuse to acknowledge they are being acknowledged – who won’t be drawn into fruitful conversation or allow their standpoints to be generously accommodated? What of those who regard this as a Western diplomatic game and contemptuously hand back their entry tickets? There’s a word for some of these refuseniks: terrorists. The terrorist’s bomb is meant to shatter communality, not just people. There are those who reject the prospect of negotiation between their own interests and those of others because they don’t see them as lying on the same plane. On the contrary, they see the plane as defined in advance by its adversaries. This doesn’t leave much room for hope. Since hope is a Christian virtue, however, it’s not surprising that this virtuous author should claim that the good isn’t ever wholly destroyed. Perhaps we should postpone our verdict on that until Trump leaves the White House, if he ever does.
Solidarity: The Work of Recognition
Rowan Williams
Bloomsbury Continuum, 320pp, £16
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[Further reading: Kanye West has always been a poet of self-pity]
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This article appears in the 08 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall
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