Dissident Voices 291Th is so cio log i cal variant of solidarism had its earliest intimations in such
initiatives as workers’ cooperative movements and mutual aid societies.
Th ese bodies were or ga nized on the principle that the members would look
aft er one another, providing assistance to one another in the face of the
many (and ever growing) uncertainties and disruptions of modern indus-
trial life. Th e British philanthropist and industrialist Robert Owen was a key
early fi gure in this movement. But it was in France, during the Th ird Repub-
lic (from 1875 onward) that it had the largest po liti cal impact. In the fi eld
of economics, it was associated with the writing of Charles Gide. In sociol-
ogy, the work of Gabriel Tarde revealed a strong solidarist infl uence. In poli-
tics, its principal champion was Léon Bourgeois, later to become one of the
founding fathers of the League of Nations (and recipient of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1920).
Th e foremost intellectual fi gure of this version of solidarism was Émile
Durkheim, France’s most prominent sociologist of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. He presented a picture of modern society as com-
prising a densely interconnected web of activities, with all parties constantly
relying on others. In the legal sphere, the most prominent spokesman of
the solidarist vision was the legal phi los o pher Léon Duguit, who was di-
rectly infl uenced by the writing of Durkheim. He was also an outspoken
opponent of voluntarism and, in par tic u lar, a fi erce opponent of the notion
that a state— or, for that matter, any corporate body— could be regarded as
having anything like a distinct legal personality of its own. States, he in-
sisted, are merely mechanisms that can be employed by what ever persons
happen to be, de facto, in the position of controlling them.
Some hints of the solidarist persuasion were evident, too, in the work of
a Chilean lawyer named Alejandro Álvarez, who would later achieve great
prominence as a solidarist spokesman. In the pre- 1914 period, he was
better known for another of his roles: as an advocate of a distinctively
American (i.e., Western Hemi sphere) system of international law. But
there was early evidence of a solidarist frame of mind. In the late 1890s, he
studied in France under Louis Renault, to whose inspiration he credited
his legal outlook. Th is was revealed in a book on the subject of codifi cation
of national law, written in 1904 on the occasion of the centennial of the
French Civil Code. Álvarez was accordingly not speaking of interna-
tional law on this occasion, but he did indicate his commitment to certain