Rejoinder from sociability to solidarity: reply to commentators

Abstract

© L p i I’d like to thank my commentators for their insightful and challenging replies. My aim in the paper was to stimulate creative thinking about solidarity in diverse societies, and these seven comments represent exactly the sort of constructive analyses I was hoping to prompt. I can’t address all of the issues raised by the commentators, but let me begin by emphasizing that my concern is with social justice, which I take to be a much more ambitious goal than simply hospitality, “conviviality” or “everyday sociability”, in Glick Schiller terms. I take it as a given that people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds are perfectly capable of living sociably as neighbours: in fact, humans have always done so. We clearly do not need national solidarity to generate this capacity. But I do not believe that everyday sociability is sufficient to achieve social justice, or to build and sustain a redistributive welfare state. Social justice, at least as understood within the social-democratic/liberal-egalitarian tradition, requires not just the civilities and hospitalities of everyday life, but a commitment to building a society of equals, which in turn requires active state measures to address unchosen disadvantages in people’s life chances. The recent explosive rise in inequality across the Western societies indicates that we are moving farther and farther from this goal. So the central challenge of social justice as I see it is not how to enable people to live together peacefully as neighbours, but rather how to mobilize people to support policies that address disadvantage. And the most cursory glance at human history would indicate that the existence of everyday sociability does not, by itself, generate a commitment to social justice in this robust sense. Throughout human history, everyday civilities have gone hand-in-hand with acceptance of deep social stratification. In my paper, I argued that this should not be surprising, since everyday sociability rests on a different normative logic than that of a social-democratic welfare state: an ethic of hospitality and conviviality is not the same as an ethic of social justice. Glick Schiller clearly disagrees with this: she thinks that everyday sociabilities are sufficient to sustain a commitment to social justice. But she gives no evidence for this claim, and does not address my argument that they rest on a different normative logic. Her focus on the importance of local-level conviviality is shared by other commentators (eg., Baubock & Engbersen), and is a central trope in the recent European literature on city-level interculturalism (eg., Zapata-Barrero, 2011; Oosterlynck, Loopmans, Schuermans, Vandenabeele, & Zemni, 2016). But the existence of convivial neighbourhoods tells us nothing about whether state policies regarding health care, education,