Abstract
This article aims to clarify the role of “solidarity” in the development of the German Sozialstaat as a variation of concepts that sustain the ideal formation of the welfare state.
Although previous studies have emphasized the historical importance of the social democratic milieu and its labor movement under the concept of solidarity in Germany, they have not taken into account the conceptual usage in the concrete legalization processes of social insurance through debates about social problems.
From the perspective of semantic analysis, which focuses on the differences in the efficiency of the concepts in various organizations or institutions, this paper scrutinizes the discourses of politicians in the ruling party and bureaucrats from the 1860s to the 1880s. It thus attempts to learn about the social problems they faced and how these were dealt with using the vocabulary of solidarity as a semantics of sovereign practices.
For policymakers in this period, one reason for social problems like poverty and the deterioration of the working environment was that both employers and employees failed to recognize their own interests. Thus, policymakers found it necessary to define both sides of interests and construct “the solidarity of interests（Solidarität der Interessen）,” thereby intervening in the private systems of insurance.
These findings indicate that the connotation of “Solidarität” in 19th-century Germany worked not only as a fighting concept for the labor movement but also as a notion to justify political intervention, connecting the divided interest groups. The concept of solidarity, a historical branch of “the social,” was refined in Germany under the rationality of sovereign practices, thus reducing other possibilities of conceptualization.
