A Brief Defense of Fraternity

I’m reading Honneth’s book on Socialism. He has a brief section on the French Revolution and the motto liberty, equality, and fraternity. It has me thinking that fraternity gets short shrift.

Fraternity seems like some sort of arbitrary, feel-good aspect of the motto, and that there really isn’t an intellectual backing for it.

But here is the deal, it’s not arbitrary. Fraternity is a necessary element in this way: liberty in a vacuum is incoherent. It’s the freedom of “The Purge” movies. For example, you can’t be free to play soccer if everyone feels comfortable using their hands when they want to, or if they see a ban on hands to be a form of oppression.

Equality doesn’t make it alone, either. To be equal is to be the same in some respect while being different in another respect. If you are the same in every way, you aren’t equal, you are identical, which is going to cause a problem for individual liberty. Individual liberty enables my ability to choose how to be different from the others. Also, if I’m different from everyone in all respects, I can’t have a relationship with them in any respect.

Then the issue becomes, how do you negotiate what the relevant sameness is to secure equality and what the relevant differences are to allow for individual liberty? That’s where you need fraternity. Fraternity is what gets everyone at the table to negotiate the sameness and difference, and it secures the understanding that nobody can be ANYTHING if they don’t acknowledge and secure the relevant sameness and ability to choose otherness of the others. That’s fraternity. Furthermore, the something in common that holds people together should not be something given by nature, but it should be something they decide themselves in order for them to be a self-determining brotherhood/sisterhood.

(By the way, this is why Warren’s DNA test about her Native American claims was absurd on six levels, considering that the tribes have deliberated to determine rules concerning who is in and who is out, and those rules have little to do with DNA.) Also, fraternity secures that the differences required for liberty don’t jeopardize the sameness required for equality, and vice versa.