Hutter's study explores the origins of classical conceptions of politics in the theory and practice of friendship in ancient Greece. It analyzes ancient Greek society as one in which political space was organized in terms of the metaphor of friendship. Tracing the importance of male friendship groupings in Greek society, and comparing them to similar formations in primitive societies known to us through anthropological data, it shows how political processes were conceived as friendship processes, and demonstrates how important friendship groupings were for these processes. Greek political philosophies are seen as universalizations of the principles of friendship. Hutter shows to what extent Platonism and Aristotlelianism as well as Stoicism received their inspiration from the practice of friendship. In particular, the theory and practice of Greek democracy are seen to be derived from the principles of friendship. Finally, the book shows the application of Greek theories of friendship to Roman society by Cicero. Noting the differences and similarities between Greece and Rome, it explores the redefinition that the theory of friendship underwent when applied to the Roman context. The concluding chapter briefly discusses the role of friendship in mass society and its politics.

The most influential of contemporary philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores the idea of friendship—and its political consequences, past and future—through writings by Aristotle, Nietzsche, Cicero, and more. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida’s “political turn,” marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida’s thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “my friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future.

Guido de Graaff explores the political dimension and significance of friendship, arguing that its specific contribution lies not only in its theological approach, but also in its particular focus distinguishing the 'political' from the 'social' and/or 'civic'. The book's explorations are framed around a particular story of friendship: the story of Bishop George Bell and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Drawing on Hannah Arendt and Oliver O'Donovan, de Graaff argues that Bell and Bonhoeffer's story can be read as one of friends assuming the responsibility of political judgment in an emergency situation - their story casts doubts on secular politics as the primary context for interpreting the friends' judgments. Thus the book provides a more comprehensive account of the story, also interpreting it against the background of the life of the church (with special attention to John 15 and Romans 12). De Graaff concludes by showing how a theological account is vital for discerning the distinct politics of the church, including opportunities for Christian engagement in secular politics.

Between periods of revolution, state repression, and war across Central and Western Europe from the 1840s through the 1860s, German liberals practiced politics beyond the more well-defined realms of voluntary associations, state legislatures, and burgeoning political parties. Political Friendship approaches 19th century German history’s trajectory to unification through the lens of academics, journalists, and artists who formed close personal relationships with one another and with powerful state leaders. Michael Weaver argues that German liberals thought with their friends by demonstrating the previously neglected aspects of political friendship were central to German political culture.

Previously published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, this volume throws light on the place of friendship in politics by connecting theoretical questions to empirical answers. Today, friendship and politics are most commonly viewed as distinct and mutually opposed concerns. Politics tends to be seen as general and impersonal, to do with power and hierarchy. Friendship, by contrast, is conceived as particular and intimate, relating to equality and fraternity. Ancient Greek and Roman thought tended to bring the two together, locating friendship as the moral foundation of the political. But is this view sound? Ought not Friendship to be dismissed by moderns as primitive, inefficient, nepotistic (Freud)? Or ought it to be promoted as a vital moral constraint on power and the consuming egotism of rulers (Plutarch and others)? The contributors seek to answer these questions, directly and indirectly, by supplying: analyses of the concept critical reconstructions of some crucial modern accounts (Kierkegaard, Arendt and Schmitt) concrete accounts of the actual play of friendship both within and between states.

The main subject of this book is the rather fascinating link between an acceptable concept of political whole and its legal and moral implications. When we face this problem, we find that widespread categories like `happiness' and "friendship" are at the same time necessary and dangerous, crucial and elusive. In order to make the case against the so-called Legal Enforcement of Morals, and to grasp the complex relationship between law and morality from a liberal point of view, it is not enough to reject a pattern of happiness, or of human flourishing, from which to draw normative instructions for men and women - it must be recognized that integration of individuals in the comprehensive groups, as well as in the political whole itself, is not the only valuable option. The fragile value of a relative lack of integration, a "right to unhappiness", turns out to be, eventually, what makes the weak, but decisive, moral primacy of liberal societies.

Developing a contemporary account of political friendship and synthesizing it with the radical movement of degrowth, this book provides the ethical grounding and the rationale of an alternative economy which serves human flourishing. The Aristotelian political friendship embodies active concern for the others’ well-being that contemporary societies lack; the crucial problems of ecological destruction and global poverty illustrate this friendship deficit. Arguing for the need for re-embracing a friendly civic ethos and re-aligning the economy with moral objectives, the author updates the Aristotelian idea and identifies it with democratic-autonomous political-economic praxis that ensures citizens’ self-actualization. Degrowth movement questioning economic growth and productivism, and privileging a simpler life with less material goods, favours political friendship precisely because it nourishes its unconscious substratum namely human instinctual sociality. The call for genuine democratic political praxis that political friendship implies could enable the degrowth movement to retain its radical character and accomplish the shift to an economy which serves life. The book is worthwhile studying by students and researchers across social sciences and especially by scholars in the fields of sociology, philosophy, and politics, but also a broader readership sensitive to the issues of social and environmental sustainability will find this work extremely interesting.

Applies Aristotle's argument - that citizenship is like friendship - to the liberal and democratic societies of the present day.

In this book, Wynne Walker Moskop addresses the practical and theoretical problem of how unequal political friendships evolve toward arrangements the parties consider reciprocal and just, a problem neglected by scholars of democracy who associate reciprocity and justice only with equal parties. Jane Addams insisted that Hull House was not a charity with philanthropic aspirations; rather it had to bring “two classes” to a shared purpose and more egalitarian relation. The problem was, and still is, how? Drawing on several bodies of scholarship—including Addams’s writings, secondary works about her collaborations, literature on Aristotelian political friendship, and feminist scholarship on the global migration of care workers—Moskop shows the importance of Addams’s practices to the continuing relevance of unequal economic relations for shaping political friendship. Contributing to a lively conversation about Addams’s work as a pragmatist thinker and social reformer that began three decades ago, Jane Addams on Inequality and Political Friendship is an invaluable resource to students of democratic theory, feminist political theory and philosophy, and American pragmatism. It illuminates the importance of overlooked conditions for friendship and justice in unequal relations, given people’s ongoing subordination because of race, class, gender, and citizenship status in the U.S. and transnationally.