Friendship and Citizenship (original) (raw)

Political Friendship , Democracy and Modernity

2017

In modern society, friendship seems to be relegated to the private realm. When friendship enters the public space, it is usually associated with corruption. This is particularly the case when speaking about friends in politics, where friendship is part of informal politics which is focused on accessing or keeping political power. This relational aspect of political friendship must be distinguished from a more structural and institutional aspect of political friendship, which political philosophy presents in terms of civic friendship. This is the very meaning of the political, where a public space exists with the conditions that must be guaranteed for conflictual political communication or collective political action. In this sense, the idea and the theory of civic friendship points to the relational and organizational aspects of collective action, as well as to those shared norms that are expressed and negotiated in the public sphere. No serious sociological theory can ignore the fa...

Friendship and the new politics: beyond community

Global Discourse, 2018

What role can friendship play in contemporary politics? This article answers this question by showing how friendship supplements one of the central tropes of modern European thought: community. It argues that both the recent phenomenon of populism and more traditional political practice rely on this trope. This results in a politics which focuses on identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately this form of politics seeks an immanence which is impossible to achieve. In contrast, friendship offers a new way of thinking about politics as it focuses on open-ended relations between persons based not on sameness, but otherness and difference. The article articulates five key features of this understanding of friendship: (1) that it is a relationship; (2) between self and other; (3) which exists between the friends; which is (4) extendable into a network but not a unity; and (5) it eschews all programmes or projects. In this way, friendship suggests not a project or a programme, but an ethos. This article concludes by claiming that friendship is the open-ended and ongoing encounter with the other, and its politics holds a shared space open for the potential that this encounter brings.

Friendship as a Political Concept: A Groundwork for Analysis

Political Studies Review

What kind of a concept is friendship, and what is its connection to politics? Critics sometimes claim that friendship does not have a role to play in the study of politics. Such objections misconstrue the nature of the concept of friendship and its relation to politics. In response, this article proposes three approaches to understanding the concept of friendship: (1) as a ‘family resemblance’ concept, (2) as an instance of an ‘essentially contested’ concept, and (3) as a concept indicating a problématique. The article thus responds to the dismissal of friendship by undertaking the groundwork for understanding what kind of a concept friendship might be, and how it might serve different purposes. In doing so, it opens the way for understanding friendship’s relation to politics.

Friends, Strangers or Countrymen? The Ties Between Citizens As Colleagues

Political Studies, 2001

Some analogies are better than others for understanding the ties and responsibilities between citizens of a state. Citizens are better understood as particular kinds of colleagues than as either strangers or members of close-knit communities such as family or friends. Colleagues are diverse, separate and relatively distant individuals whose involuntary interdependence as equals in a practice or institution creates common concerns; this entails special responsibilities of communication, consideration and trust, which are capable of extension beyond the immediate group. Citizens likewise are involuntarily interdependent in political practices, and have comparable concerns and obligations that are more substantial than liberal advocates of constitutional patriotism recommend. But these are distinct from and potentially more extensible than those between co-nationals sharing a common culture, which are proposed by nationalists and some communitarians. The relationship of citizens is a more valid ground for associative obligations than others apart from family and friends.

Civic and Cosmopolitan Friendship

Res Publica, 2013

This article draws out two implications for cosmopolitan or global friendship from an examination of a recent work on civic friendship in the domestic sphere: (1) Insofar as it is the case that civic friendship, as defined by Schwarzenbach (On civic friendship: Including women in the state. Columbia University Press, New York, 2009) is necessary for justice in the state, it is also the case that the absence of global justice can be partially explained by the absence of what might be called cosmopolitan friendship.

Civic Friendship in International Encyclopedia of Ethics

Civic or political friendship (politikē philia) is a bond of reciprocal good will between fellow citizens (see CITIZENSHIP) expressed through norms of civic behavior, such as mutual recognition of moral equality, mutual concern, and mutual defense and support. Theories of civic friendship are, at their heart, normative arguments about the proper nature of political unity – that is to say, arguments about how fellow citizens in general should regard and relate to one another in the public sphere. The original and foremost theorist of civic friendship is Aristotle (see ARISTOTLE), who, in Nichomachean Ethics, argues that politically equal citizens (see EQUALITY) should wish their fellow citizens well and seek to do well by them for their own sakes, rather than exclusively pursuing self-interest or focusing on commitments to members of a particular faction, party, clan, or other group within a political community. (Aristotle: 1984) Aristotle's conception is championed by numerous contemporary political thinkers, among them Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach, who argues that civic friendship is a necessary condition for true justice, and Hauke Brunkhorst, who leverages civic friendship on behalf of a cosmopolitan theory of solidarity. (Schwarzenbach 2009; Brunkhorst: 2005)