Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought

Introduction: The Persistence of Friendship in Political Life

Throughout the greater part of the history of political philosophy, friendship has occupied a central place in the conversation. If we draw on conventional historical distinctions, friendship perennially figured as the sine qua non of discussions among ancient and medieval political thinkers regarding good political order and the good human life. As Horst Hutter explains, up to the end of the Middle Ages the idea of friendship was at the core of political thinking: “Western political speculation finds its origin in a system of thought in which the idea of friendship is the major principle in terms of which political theory and practice are described, explained, and analyzed.”1 It is only in the modern era that friendship has lost its prominence and been relegated to the backbenches of political philosophy. It simply has not been a central concern for political thinkers within the liberal tradition, or any other, in the past five hundred years or so. 1 Introduction The Persistence of Friendship in Political Life John von Heyking and Richard Avramenko 000 FM-intro (i-viii, 1-18) 3/20/08 12:46 PM Page 1 This demotion has not gone unnoticed. Hans-Georg Gadamer, for instance , remarks that while justice needs only one book, friendship “fills two books in Aristotle’s Ethics [but] occupies no more than a page in Kant.”2 Where friendship is actually afforded some attention in the tradition , liberal thinkers are, at best, lukewarm toward it. John Rawls, for example —contemporary liberalism’s most famous expositor—regards it as a “nonmoral value,” but at the same time he nonetheless recognizes that it helps to sustain justice.3 There is, then, a shift in the history of political thought and in the practice of politics at the end of the Middle Ages. At the dawn of the modern state, the beginning of the scientific revolution, the outset of the spread of universal principles of rights and freedoms, and the advent of international truck and trade, friendship as a political concern nearly drops out of sight. However, as this book’s essays on modern and contemporary political thinkers show, friendship does not drop completely out of sight. One notable example of a liberal for whom friendship was important yet ambiguous was Thomas Jefferson, who indicated in his First Inaugural that friendship may even be more important than liberty: “Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things”4 Yet, nearly out of sight has friendship dropped today. So whither friendship? Commentators often observe that the modern era, and liberal democracies in particular, are so committed to liberty and autonomy—that the individual is emphasized to such a degree—that he perforce becomes isolated from other human beings. This is true as well for liberalism’s critics including nationalists, socialists, and romantics who prize “the nation,” “the people,” the universal proletariat, and “the state” as an abstract entity that subsumes individuals and his intermediate relations, which is the predominant scope of his actions. So whereas liberalism and its offspring liberal democracy promise the individual liberty , the cost of this liberty is often isolation. Loneliness, or as Joshua Mitchell refers to it, “brooding withdrawal,” therefore becomes one of the central experiences people have as liberal democratic citizens. This phenomenon is often recognized and painfully experienced by immigrants and visitors from outside North America and Europe, especially Muslims.5 Homegrown accounts of life in liberal democracies also bear this out; one need only think of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd as testaments. 2 T John von Heyking and Richard Avramenko 000 FM-intro (i-viii, 1-18) 3/20/08 12:46 PM Page 2 But not only have the bonds of friendship been eviscerated, the bonds between individuals generally have taken on a completely different hue. We commonly characterize the individual’s relationship with others in terms of the contract. In fact, the liberal principle that society is grounded in a contract reaches into other areas of life to the point that we regard all our relationships in similar terms. We come to our private relationships , our loves and friendships, with the same desire to get a good bargain as we do when we purchase a car or a computer. We network, we schmooze, and we realize the “autonomous self,” the ideal to which much of contemporary liberalism...