Solidarity: between gift, contract and obligation

Marcel Mauss showed that the gift is never free in the strict sense: it creates a debt, calls for a counter-gift and installs a relation between people. That is what makes its strength, since it weaves a bond, and its fragility, since it places the receiver under obligation.

Solidarity through gift is valued for its human dimension and its local anchoring: it sees situations, adapts, mobilises people rather than procedures. It is reproached for its irregularity, since it depends on the generosity available, and for the asymmetry it installs between donor and beneficiary.

It also has a political characteristic often neglected: it leaves the donor the choice of beneficiary. That freedom is an attraction for its supporters and an objection for its critics, who see in it the risk that some distress may never find a donor.

In the insurance logic, everyone contributes for a risk that all run: illness, accident, loss of employment, old age. The benefit is then a right acquired by contribution, not an aid. That changes the position of the beneficiary, who receives not a favour but the performance of an undertaking.

This logic produces stable rights without humiliation, and that is its main merit. It has an acknowledged limit: it protects first those who have been able to contribute, which leaves out the most precarious situations, and therefore presupposes a second scheme alongside.

It finally has an effect on consent: the visible link between what one pays in and what one receives makes the levy more acceptable. That is an argument its supporters advance, and which comparisons between funding systems tend to confirm.

The third logic is that of a compulsory levy assigned to recognised needs, independently of any prior contribution by the beneficiary. Its justification is a collective duty, its strength is to cover everyone, including those who have been able to pay nothing in.

Its supporters see in it the only truly universal solidarity, and the only one capable of dealing with the situations the other two leave aside. Its critics stress that it is the only one of the three not to rest on consent, and that it makes the link between effort and benefit less visible, which may weaken support for the whole.

No existing system rests on a single logic. In France, insurance dominates for pensions and health, fiscal obligation for minimum benefits and a growing share of funding, the gift for voluntary-sector action and neighbourly help.

This combination is not a disorder: each logic handles certain needs better. Political disagreement therefore rarely bears on the principle and almost always on the distribution, that is, on which need belongs to which logic.

Two people equally attached to solidarity may defend very different schemes depending on the logic they favour, and believe themselves in disagreement about ends when they diverge about mechanism.

A questionnaire that only asks whether you are in favour of solidarity therefore teaches nothing. What informs is knowing which of the three logics you judge legitimate for a given need, and what you accept to pay in return.