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This chapter explores the standard neoinstitutionalist account, arguing that it borders on circularity if it relies on the putative prior existence of shared interests and it underestimates the degree to which associations treat solidarity as an end in itself. Building on neglected theories of occupational community, this chapter shows that a surprisingly widespread theme in business associations' activity and discourse expresses collective identities, normative and status orders, and camaraderie that would make little sense strictly considered as strategic economic action. An important part of what American business associations do is produce solidarity in collective identity. The chapter offers a new and counterintuitive view of American business associations and the cultural embeddedness of capitalist economic action. The picture of the solidarity in business challenges several fundamental assumptions about capitalist economic action. It challenges the broad assumption that all there is to business is strategic, self-interested action.

Boundaries are the first necessary characteristic of democratic spaces. Boundaries facilitate the democratic affordance of recognition; they help communities to form. This chapter outlines the role of boundaries in constituting democratic communities by drawing on Aristotle’s concept of “political friendship.” In clearly bounded spaces, citizens are more likely to recognize their common interests and interlocutors—the things they share and the people they share them with. Boundaries thus help generate ties of political friendship. With this function of boundaries in mind, the chapter turns to the example of Facebook to explain how boundaries can operate in digital environments. It shows how design choices made by Facebook—notably, the dissolution of the boundaries imposed by the early .edu requirement and the more recent turn to reimpose boundaries with Facebook Groups—have clear consequences for the likelihood that Facebook users can develop political friendships with one another, thereby forming communities on the platform.

In this chapter, we discuss how video games promote family connection and communication, similar to other digital media technologies such as Skype and Facebook. Although video games are not intentionally designed to connect people, they provide a context for shared experiences that facilitate a sense of closeness and togetherness. The family shared experiences often organized around individual and family interests in video gaming and other topics. We provide examples of five families with diverse backgrounds to show the different ways family members build and sustain connections across generations and various aspects of their lives.

The common good has been represented as the sum of individual interests, the sum of shared interests, the common interests of members of a society, the benefit of a whole society, and a set of methods to achieve common aims. The concept depends on citizenship, a degree of equality and social inclusion; the key methods include measures to enhance voice, empowerment and engagement. The arguments for taking collective action to achieve the common good include moral positions, economic arguments, pragmatic approaches and the collective values considered in the previous chapter.

This chapter argues that bringing about egalitarian justice under neoliberal circumstances requires being disposed to solidarity with others who are also subject to unjust institutions. When unjust institutions cross state borders, people should regard others who are subject to those institutions as potential partners in efforts to resist them. Seeing these others as partners means that people should be alert to appeals to act from those they rely on, open to hearing out claims that they have misperceived their political status, and ready to understand the robustness of their freedom as partly dependent upon theirs. Such solidarity is mutually beneficial because people have a common interest in the removal of some shared obstacle to freedom. The advantages of the view are shown through comparison with rival accounts by Iris Marion Young, Sally Scholz, Avery Kolers, and others.

Chapter 5 restates Foucault’s critique of Hegel and Marx by summarizing the major influences on Foucault’s intellectual development of two of his central teachers, Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. The chapter charts how Foucault’s own position developed in relation to his studies of Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, a position that ultimately rejected all teleological conceptions of history. This included not only those positions associated with Hegel and Marx, but also with the later ‘ethics of recognition’ associated with Charles Taylor, and the ‘ethics of self-realization’ developed by T. H. Green, and influential among the British Hegelians. Foucault’s ethics are beyond Hegel and Marx, whether in their classical or more recent formulations.

With the attacks to the Portuguese barracks in 1963 that launched the PAIGC into the anticolonial war, the movement led by Cabral weighted the importance of extending the conflict to Cape Verde. A strategy was devised, and international supported from Cuba and Soviet Union was secured. The death of Che Guevara in the jungle of Bolivia, in 1967, the difficulty in recruiting the personnel for the operation, forced PAIGC into reconsidering the operation. In the end, Cabral’s movement settled to the notion that war did not have to be extended to Cape Verde, since a bullet shot in Guinea was a contribution to independence of Cape Verde. However, putting both Cape Verde and Guinea in the path of independence, but concentrating all the effort in one single territory, created resentment against the Cape Verdeans.