Friendship and Love, Ethics and Politics: Studies in Mediaeval and Early Modern History

Chapter 2 - Challenging the Private–-Public Dichotomy: Friendship in mediaeval and early modern society

Challenging the Private– Public Dichotomy Friendship in mediaeval and early modern society Res privata and res publica Acknowledgement of the historical relevance of the private–public dichotomy is often associated with Jürgen Habermas’s influential theory, focusing as it does on the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his view, this public sphere was characterized by open communication , rational argument, and reason. He also views it as something new, in stark contrast to the representative public sphere of premodern society, in which hierarchical power presented itself to the people in what was to all intents and purposes one-way communication .1 In recent decades, however, Habermas’s ideas have been challenged, not least by historians studying popular culture, gender, or the early modern period. The British-Israeli historian Naomi Tadmor perceptively summarizes the debate as follows: 23 Chapter 2 If Habermas presented the public sphere as bourgeois, modern, male, secular, rational, and structured essentially around the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, current scholars portray it as popular, early modern, wrought with religious debate, … crossing gender boundaries, and active since the early seventeenth century or even since post-Reformation debates.2 In his theory, Habermas deals primarily with the communicative, debating aspect of the public sphere, stressing the importance of men’s political clubs, liberal debates in daily newspapers, political speeches, and the like. His critics have added to the variety of debates in public spheres with an understanding of the semi-political culture of the ladies’ salons of eighteenth -century France, for instance. Others have contributed with examples of possible popular forms of public sphere in much earlier periods. Taking into account the relative independence of the majority of Swedes in the early modern period—the peasantry owned their land, and even had a voice in the parliament —Swedish historians have seen parish assemblies and district courts as serving as a kind of popular public sphere.3 The private sphere, in contrast, has been con24 nected with family life in a narrower sense, embracing family, kin, and sometimes servants. This is true of both Habermas himself and those who have revised his thesis. Indeed, they differ little in their definition of the private sphere. However, the private–public dichotomy per se long predates the Habermas debate. The two concepts are derived from the Latin res privata—that which takes place in family life—and res publica—that which concerns public life, the state, and official tasks and responsibilities. In that sense the divergence between private and public life, as Georges Duby rightly points out, is one of place and power. Private refers to those places where no one may intrude unless they are invited, where family business is handled without the interference of authorities outside the household, where life is intimate and informal. Public , meanwhile, refers to places where people meet, be it in the streets or in official buildings, to debate and decide common civil matters; that is, to execute social power. Regardless of period, therefore, a distinction is always drawn between private and public. Such distinctions are present in every society, although not necessarily in the same manner. As Duby himself notes, the exact course of the dividing line may be fluid.4 25 Furthermore, there may have been social relationships , either real or notional, that tended to blur the dichotomy, to cross the dividing line. One in particular that did much to obscure the distinction between public and private in premodern times was friendship . The classical philosophy of friendship The classical philosophy of friendship, represented by Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, in fact included the possibility of a link between the private sphere and the public sphere where the business of the city-state was to be handled skillfully by good men. The starting point for Aristotle (384–322 BC) in his Nichomachean Ethics is the idea that man is an active social being who looks not only to his own happiness but equally to the common weal. The relationship between friends is defined—much as it has been ever since in the European tradition—as a personal and informal relationship based on reciprocity and trust. It is also voluntary, since it depends on our choice. We are not born into friendship in the same way as we are born into family or kinship. Lastly, ideal friendship presupposes equality, or at the very least either the illusion of equality or a...