What is the Point of Solidarity

This paper recovers the intergenerational dimensions of solidarity—explicit in late-nineteenth-century French solidarism’s idiom of social debt—yet less developed in much contemporary solidarity theory as such. First, it distinguishes intragenerational distributive justice from intergenerational commitments and argues that each is structured by a different temporal logic: contemporaneous redistribution among versus non-simultaneous obligation across cohorts. That temporal mismatch matters politically, especially as technological change likely sharpens it by speeding up skill obsolescence (e.g., automation in labour markets and, more recently, generative AI). Second, and challenging accounts that reduce solidarity either to charity or to boundary-policing membership, a brief genealogy of French solidarism reframes obligation as owed rather than merely given. On this view, solidarity is not only a device for mutual aid in the present but an institutional practice aimed at maintaining equal civic standing over time, without necessarily understanding power as neutral “interdependence.” The third part is ar the heart of the paper and operationalizes the contested “progressive dilemma”—the tension between egalitarian redistribution and openness - in an intergenerational key. It illustrates this shift through recent domestic measures and EU instruments, including recovery programs, and green-investment funding under crisis. The conclusion situates these dynamics within contemporary polarization debates and draws implications for sustaining solidarity over time without depoliticizing its distributive stakes.