Solidarity

Etymology: Latin in solidum → French solidarité → English solidarity

In Roman law, the phrase in solidum described a form of joint liability. When multiple debtors owed a sum in solidum, each was responsible for the entire debt, not just a portion.¹ The obligation bound them together. If one could not pay, the others absorbed the full burden.

The French solidarité emerged in the 1840s, initially as a legal and then a philosophical term. Auguste Comte used it to describe the mutual dependence of individuals within society. Émile Durkheim later built an entire theory of social cohesion around it, distinguishing between mechanical solidarity in traditional societies and organic solidarity in industrial ones.²

In English, solidarity took on political force in the labor movement. Trade unions adopted it as a principle: an injury to one is an injury to all. The word migrated from contract law to the picket line.

In 1980, the name became globally famous when Polish workers at the Gdańsk Shipyard formed Solidarność, an independent trade union that challenged Communist rule. Led by electrician Lech Wałęsa, it grew to nearly ten million members within a year.³

10,000,000, Members that Solidarność, the Polish trade union, reached within approximately a year of its founding in 1980.

Solidarność was the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. Its emergence contributed to the broader unraveling of Communist governments across Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s. Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and became president of Poland in 1990.⁴

Durkheim had argued in 1893 that industrial class society replaced the solidarity of shared identity with a solidarity of interdependence, where each person's specialized role bound them to everyone else.⁵ A word born in Roman debt law, refined by French sociology, and forged in a Polish shipyard.

Timeline

• 1840s, Solidarité emerged in French, initially as a legal and philosophical term.
• 1893, Durkheim published The Division of Labour in Society, building a theory of social cohesion around solidarity.
• 1980, Polish workers at the Gdańsk Shipyard formed Solidarność, the first independent trade union in a Soviet-bloc country.
• 1983, Lech Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize for leading Solidarność.

Endnotes

1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "solidarity."
2. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1984).
3. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
4. "Lech Wałęsa," Nobel Prize biography, Nobel Foundation.
5. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society.