“As in physical organisms the unity is made up of separate limbs, so among reasoning things the reason is distributed among individuals constituted for unity of co-operation.” (Marcus Aurelius, vii, 13; Rendall’s translation.)
[1252] Discours sur l’Esprit positif. In the Cours de Philosophie he frankly pays it this well-deserved compliment: “It is a truly capital idea, and thoroughly modern too.”
[1253] Social biology dates from the publication of Professor Schäffle’s great work Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers (1875-78); possibly from the publication of Rodbertus’s work—at any rate, Rodbertus accuses Schäffle of plagiarism. See also Spencer’s Principles of Sociology. Aristotle had already ventured to say that “an animal is just like a well-ordered city,” a proposition that might well be inverted.
[1254] There are still a few adherents left. See M. Worms’s book, Organisme et Société, and Lilienfeld’s Pathologie sociale.
Herbert Spencer, who was the pioneer of the analogy, had abandoned it; and Auguste Comte, the godfather of sociology, took good care to put sociologists on their guard against the method, which he considered irrational.
[1255] “The enormous development of steam communication and the spread of the telegraph over the whole globe have caused modern industry to develop from a gigantic starfish, any of whose members might be destroyed without affecting the rest, into a μέγα ζῶον which is convulsed in agony by a slight injury in one part.” (Nicholson, Effects of Machinery on Wages, p. 117.)
[1256] It was in 1889, if we mistake not, that the term “solidarity” was proposed as the title of a new economic school in a lecture entitled L’École nouvelle. This lecture was published, along with others, in a small volume entitled Quatre Écoles d’Économie sociale (1890, Geneva) (L’École libérale, by Frédéric Passy; L’École catholique, by Claudio Jannet; L’École socialiste by M. Stiegler; and L’École nouvelle, by M. Gide). The characteristics of the various schools are summed up as follows: The one is the school of liberty, the other of authority, while the third is the school of equality. Gide then proceeds: “Were I asked to define what I understand by the New School in a single word, I should call it the Solidarity School. Unlike liberty, equality, and fraternity, solidarity is not a very high-sounding word, nor is it a mere ideal. It is just a fact, one of the best-established facts of history and experience, and the most important discovery of our time, and this fact of solidarity is becoming better established every day.”
It would have been better, perhaps, to have spoken of a new movement rather than of a new school, seeing the variety of schools, some of them actually opposed to one another, such as the school of Biological Naturalism and the Christian school, the Anarchist school and the State Socialist school, that have adopted solidarity as a part of their creed.
[1257] M. Léon Bourgeois’s La Solidarité appeared originally as a series of articles contributed to the Nouvelle Revue in 1896. These were published in book form in the following year. The different aspects of the question have been dealt with in a series of lectures delivered by various authors at the École des Hautes Études sociales under the presidency of M. Bourgeois himself, and published in a volume entitled Essai d’une Philosophie de la Solidarité (1902). An association for the propagation of the new ideas was founded in 1895 under the name of La Société d’Éducation sociale. An International Congress was called together on the occasion of the 1900 Exposition, but since then the signs of activity have been few.
French books and articles dealing with the subject are plentiful enough. We can only mention La Solidarité sociale et ses Nouvelles Formules, by M. d’Eichthal (1903); the annual report of L’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques for 1903; M. Bouglé’s book Le Solidarisme (1907); and Fleurant’s La Solidarité (1907). There is hardly a manual for teachers published which does not contain a chapter devoted to this question.