Friendship: A History (review)

In the age of Facebook, where individuals can have friends that number in the thousands, some may wonder what friendship really entails. Does it depend on obligations or intimacy, familiarity or service? Friendship: A History, an edited collection of essays, gives readers a long view, tracing the relationship over two millennia of Western history.

Early essays—"The Classical Ideals of Friendship," by Dirk Baltzy and Nick Eliopoulos and "Cicero on Friendship" by Constant J. Mews—set out the enduring Greek and Roman conceptions of friendship that held sway up through the Renaissance. Baltzy and Eliopoulos discuss philia, the Greek word that roughly translates to friendship but which involved a wider range of relationships, including those with kin, guests, and political allies. While there were competing visions of how such bonds should be regarded and sustained, the two most persistent classical conceptions were those of Aristotle and Cicero. Both stressed the importance of friends sharing ethical commitments, and being, at least in some senses, equals.

Cicero's De amicitia became the basis of discussions of friendship for centuries to come. In chapters on "The Latin West," by Constant Mews and Neville Chiavaroli, and "Renaissance Friendships" by Carolyn James and Bill Kent, Cicero's continuing significance is evident. These essays do more than trace classical ideals into later eras, however, for they show how those ideals were transformed. Older visions of friendships evolved in response to Christianity, which preached universal love and charity rather than exclusive friendship, and which also suggested that human relationships should serve not the people in them so much as God. Medieval society altered ideas about friendship as well, regarding the relationship as a way to cement ties and delineate obligations between unequal parties—friendship as the glue of feudalism. There were also, however, "pacts of friendship" between men who were equals—ties so close that the friends sometimes chose to be buried together. During the Renaissance, men and women elaborated on classical and medieval traditions, creating a new culture of friendship, evident in double portraits, stylized letters, and ritual gift-giving.

In his chapter on the Enlightenment, David Garrioch suggests that equality in relationships became more important during that period, and friendships were viewed in a more secular light. Novels offered new models of how friends should treat each other, and the relationships were increasingly sentimentalized. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women's friendship gained greater notice, particularly in literature, as Barbara Caine observes in her essay on women and fiction. A far-ranging chapter on the nineteenth century by Caine and Marc Brodie examines how different classes, races, and sexes envisioned friendship and its political implications. Working-class movements couched their revolutionary goals in terms of friendship and fraternity; middle-class reformers hoped to bridge class differences with the poor through practices of "friendly visiting" and "befriending."

The last chapters by Mark Peel, Liz Reed, and James Walter review an array of social changes that affected friendship in the twentieth century. A few developments are particularly worthy of notice. Whereas in earlier centuries, friendship often entailed public obligations and services, today friends may render service to each other but it is of a more private and emotional nature, and friendship is envisioned less instrumentally than formerly. Another interesting change is the effect of Freud on heterosexual male friendships. Once idealized as the quintessential form of friendship, men's relationships changed dramatically as fears about homosexuality developed. Simultaneously, women's bonds, which had seemed of secondary importance to philosophers in earlier periods, came to define friendship in the modern era. Yet another intriguing development was the way that those eager for political change conceived of friendship. Philosophers once questioned whether true amity was possible across racial, class, or ethnic divides, but by the twentieth century such doubts were disappearing, and many came to see friendship as possessing a power to unite the divided and transform politics. Finally, the authors suggest that in contemporary society, friendship has become a relationship of unprecedented importance.

Friendship is rich and there is much...