Necessary Conversations: Has solidarity come to an end?
Milagros Pérez Oliva, Hatim Azahri and Jorge Galindo opened the Necessary Conversations series at Esade’s Institute for Social Innovation by asking whether solidarity has broken down — or whether we have simply stopped recognizing it.
In a warm, living-room-like setting filled with armchairs, coffee tables and soft lighting, David Murillo, Associate Professor of the Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability at Esade and moderator of the session, opened the first edition of Necessary Conversations with a blunt question: Is this the end of solidarity? Even without a dog in the room, the question still had bite.
It was an important question — and a recurring one. Murillo recalled that more than thirty years ago he was already reading Richard Sennett on the corrosion of character and Robert Putnam worrying about half-empty bowling alleys. So part of the debate, he suggested, is an honest one: are we facing something genuinely new, or simply a more acute version of a phenomenon we have been describing for decades?
Article published in Esade Do Better