With a population of less than 300, Beinwil has remained a typical farm village, whose inhabitants are spread across four hamlets and remote farms and mainly earn a living from dairy farming and cherry orchards. The pass road over the Passwang, which connects the Schwarzbubenland with the rest of canton Solothurn, has never attracted a great deal of traffic, so the area generally enjoys a tranquil pace of life.

Beinwil's history is closely linked to that of the Benedictine abbey, which was probably founded by the local nobility around 1085 and endowed with a dominion that roughly corresponded with today's municipal area. In the 12th century, the abbey flourished and levied church taxes from several villages in the Schwarzbubenland as well as land that stretched to the regions of Alsace and Breisgau. In the 13th century, however, economic decline set in as a result of territorial disputes by the cities of Solothurn and Basel with the counts of Thierstein, who acted as the abbey's lord protectors. Beinwil was taken over by Solothurn in 1519, and the city impounded much of the abbey's possessions. As a result of the «Kulturkampf» conflict between the state and the Roman Catholic church, the abbey was dissolved by popular vote in 1874 and fell into ruin. The former abbey was reopened in 1983 and is now run as an ecumenical conference and retreat centre.