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Mario L Small, The Challenge of Seeing Beyond our Differences: A Review of “Inventing the Ties that Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 4, June 2022, Page e28, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac016
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The extraordinary degree of political polarization in the United States and other nations has motivated social scientists to examine how to battle disinformation, detoxify political discourse, collaborate across ideological differences, and build social solidarity. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta, a distinguished contributor the literature on social movements, probes what is needed to build solidarity. Her book has three objectives: (1) “to identify the limitations of styling civic solidarity on a relationship of egalitarian intimacy, to be arrived at by way of mutual self-disclosure,”; (2) “to identify alternatives, real instances of solidarity that have scaled the usual barriers of self-interest and difference, and that have scaled the cultural barrier that stands between what is often praised as civic cooperation and what is some-times denigrated as political contention”; and (3) “to argue that the basis for those alternatives lies in our capacity to invent relationships we do not actually have” (pg 6).
