Feilbogen’s essay surveys French solidarism as an answer to a modern problem: how individual mind, property, achievement, and responsibility are bound up with collective life. It opens from social psychology rather than policy alone:
Die Frage der Beziehungen zwischen der Psyche des Individuums und dem kollektiven Denken rückt immer mehr in den Vordergrund der modernen Psychologie.
English translation: The question of the relations between the psyche of the individual and collective thought is moving ever more to the foreground of modern psychology.
The question quickly becomes economic and moral. Pure liberalism pictures society as an aggregate of self-reliant agents and defends nonintervention; socialism tends to treat individual wealth and entrepreneurial profit as products of social labor. Feilbogen argues that France forced both positions to compromise. Its socialists remain attached to self-determination, while its individualists cannot deny that private action has public consequences.
Der individualistische Sozialist und der sozialistische Individualist fühlen, daß nur noch eine Wand »dünn wie Papier« sie trennt.
English translation: The individualist socialist and the socialist individualist feel that only a wall "thin as paper" still separates them.
The word “solidarity” gives this convergence a conceptual center. Feilbogen first recovers its Roman-law sense: several debtors can be bound to one obligation, so that the standing of each changes with the performance of all. The formula supplies the social metaphor that later thinkers expand from liability to interdependence.
Jeder wird also in dem Maße von seiner Verpflichtung frei, als die anderen geleistet haben; jeder wird in dem Maße verantwortlich, als die anderen mit ihrer Leistung im Rückstande sind. Sie haften einer für alle und alle für einen.
English translation: Each is therefore freed from his obligation in the measure in which the others have performed theirs; each becomes responsible in the measure in which the others are in arrears with their performance. They are liable, one for all and all for one.
Feilbogen then sketches a genealogy through Say, Bastiat, Spencer, Renouvier, Marion, Gide, Henry Michel, and Léon Bourgeois. The liberal writers are important not as solidarists but as unwitting precursors: in trying to prove that private enterprise benefits everyone, they admit that economic life is already socially mediated. Renouvier’s school gives the mediation a moral form, developing a social individualism in which the person remains the end, but can become fully personal only in and through others.
Bourgeois is the central systematizer. He refuses any supra-individual social substance, yet insists that no one begins from nothing. Language, security, education, science, tools, roads, inherited culture, and cooperation are received before they are earned. From this comes the doctrine of social debt: surplus wealth or education signals obligation, not merely merit.
Es gibt nur Individuen, aber jedes von ihnen hat den Anspruch und die Aufgabe, zu einem höheren Typus emporzusteigen. Dies kann nur geschehen, wenn jedes Individuum, welches einen Überschuß an Vermögen und Bildung über den Durchschnitt besitzt, sich als Schuldner der minder günstig gestellten Individuen fühlt.
English translation: There are only individuals, but each of them has the claim and the task of rising to a higher type. This can happen only if every individual who possesses a surplus of means and education above the average feels himself a debtor to the less favorably situated individuals.
Bourgeois’s legal bridge is the quasi-contract. Society is not founded on an actual contract among isolated individuals, but whoever benefits from inherited social labor enters a contract-like relation with others. Feilbogen presents the practical consequences as republican and reformist: free and continuing education, insurance against ordinary risks, protection of an existence minimum for willing workers, and institutions that translate dependence into justice rather than charity.
The last section records objections raised in the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Critics fear an indeterminate debt, democratic confiscation, hostility to great inventors and entrepreneurs, and a leveling morality that would weaken creation. Feilbogen treats these objections seriously. Solidarity must discipline egoism, but it must also preserve initiative, inequality of function, and individual development.
Die soziale Schuld ist elastisch, aber sie ist nicht unbegrenzt.
English translation: The social debt is elastic, but it is not unlimited.
The essay therefore ends with a balanced account of solidarism as both philosophy and civic language. Its strength is to connect social psychology, moral education, political economy, and social insurance under one secular principle. Its weakness is the elasticity that makes it mobilizing but potentially vague. Feilbogen’s final emphasis is that French solidarism is not a sentimental appeal to benevolence: it is an attempt to give interdependence a grammar of obligation while leaving the individual as the bearer of moral progress.
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