In a progressively globalizing world, one of the paradoxes of individualization is that the growing demand for global mobility and flexibility poses serious challenges for the fostering of solidarity while our personal freedoms increase. As Bruce Robbins has argued: “Common humanity is too weak a force to generate sufficient solidarity. It is not helpful to simply assert the contrary, as cosmopolitans of the older school do.” (Robbins 1998: 4) But how can solidarity then be conceptualized within the framework of a new cosmopolitanism viz. educational cosmopolitics? The paper takes its point of departure in critical theorist Axel Honneth’s claim that practices of solidarity, which he conceptualizes as a third form of recognition beyond love and moral respect, play a vital role for the future of democratic life insofar as they help actualize a more fully-fledged social freedom beyond liberal theory's thin notion of negative freedom (cf. Honneth 1994). Honneth’s conception of solidarity and social freedom will first be explored in light of Wittgensteinian ideas in order to make sense of the intricate interplay of exemplarity, intersecting differences, power and embodiment. Following Alessandra Tanesini’s (2004) and Aletta Norval’s (2007) feminist readings of Wittgenstein, a third path for a politics of solidarity will be outlined beyond Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democracy (2005) as well as the Habermasian consensus-oriented model of deliberative democracy. Honneth’s conception of solidarity will be revealed as dependent on a notion of community which remains tied to the boundaries of the democratic nation state. In contrast, Tanesini’s Wittgensteinian investigation of different variation of language games in which the speech act of ‘saying we’ is being used can be shown to offer vital tools for re-thinking the challenges of forming relations of solidarity in contemporary societies in which navigating global tensions and conflicts becomes increasingly urgent. In a second step, I will turn to the notion of “affective solidarity” as developed by Clare Hemmings (2012). Her conceptualization of a notion of solidarity which moves beyond empathy and places the experience of affective dissonance at the heart of the development of feminist relations of solidarity allows to further deepen Tanesini’s analysis of a ‘saying we’ as something other than an assertion of commonalities between members of a community. In the final part of the paper, some practical educational implications will be explored. Chandra T. Mohanty’s (2008) discussion of different ways of meeting the challenge of globalizing the curriculum without falling into ever new colonial traps will be taken as an example for how the proposed notion of solidarity could inform curricular development in a critical educational cosmopolitics.

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