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Solidarity

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What to expect

Celebrated thinker Rowan Williams explores the shared burdens and hopes that make solidarity possible.

From its use as a rallying cry by the labour movement to its central place in struggles for racial justice, the idea
of solidarity is often invoked as the answer to inequality and conflict. And yet, as both a term and a practice,
solidarity is tantalizingly slippery. We are encouraged to ‘show solidarity’, but how can we truly realize it?

As Rowan Williams argues in this impassioned book, solidarity is not something fixed to be achieved, but a process of mutual recognition. From its origins in the French Revolution to the Nueva Solidaridad in Mexico City and the Solidarnosc movement in Poland, Williams traces solidarity’s myriad forms through its deep influence on Catholic social thought, its transformation in the hands of thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jan Patocka and the creative struggle so central to the writings of Gillian Rose.

He reveals solidarity to be a constant exercise in self-scrutiny and dialogue in which we find that true recognition
lies not in asserting that others are ‘just like us,’ but rather in affirming their claim to be ‘fully themselves’. It is in this work of recognition, this possibility of communion, that true hope can be found.

Critics Review

With his customary vision and unique form of attention, Rowan Williams... draws on the widest, carefully focussed, range of thinkers, each one illuminating the same dilemma – how to be together on a shared and bitterly contested planet? Rowan Williams has written a guide book and a plea. For anyone struggling with these issues, Solidarity should be indispensable.
Jacqueline Rose
A magisterial vision of true comradeship.
Slavoj Žižek author of Quantum History
A treasure trove of wisdom and insight. Its quiet optimism brings, in darkened days, a guiding light which gives the reader hope, despite the encircling gloom, that we might learn to live together with growing understanding, awareness, and a renewed sense of self.
A. N. Wilson author of Goethe: His Faustian Life
In this pioneering book, Williams argues for solidarity as a genuinely new ideal and something that cannot be reduced to some combination of compassion and communalism. It is at once a window on the human condition and justice in action. This is vintage Williams.
James B. Murphy, Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, USA and author of How to Think Politically
Against cynics and opportunists, Rowan Williams compels us to reinvest in our shared existence in the name of a better world and a more just future.
Zahi Zalloua, Editor of The Comparatist and author of To Exist as a Problem, Being Black, Being Palestinian
In these torrid days of enmity, war and political delirium, Rowan Williams' meditation on how to work towards a world of solidarity, peace and truthfulness comes as a breath of fresh air. He shows us that solidarity is less a choice than a predicament and that it can be done badly or better, but never perfectly.His eloquent case for a life and thought of human and planetary solidarity calls us to renounce the comforts of innocence and cynicism and to risk submitting ourselves to a work of recognition that will leave us and our world strangely changed.
Howard Caygill, author of On Resistance

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