Friendship among nations: History of a concept (original) (raw)

Contemporary Political Theory

As a leading friendship scholar, Evgeny Roshchin's latest work, Friendship Among Nations: History of a Concept has been long awaited. Roshchin takes a unique position in the current debates in friendship studies, his conceptual approach being in stark contrast to the more dominant structural, individual, and state-centred approaches. While offering one of the more theoretical approaches to the study of friendship in politics, Roshchin's work also succeeds in revealing the deeper meaning behind the praxis of friendship in politics. Friendship Among Nations builds on Roshchin's previous works where he draws upon conceptual history to illustrate the development of the concept of friendship in international diplomacy, from the ancient era up to modern history, highlighting that modern conceptualisations are deeply indebted to both ancient and mediaeval ones. That means Roshchin's findings are highly relevant to both for our own theoretical understanding of friendship, and for what friendship practically means when it is invoked in the context of international treaties. In a field overwhelmingly concerned with the positive side of friendship, Roshchin's conceptual approach stands out both in its realistic outlook, and in what it has to teach us about the negative side of the utilitarian aspect of friendship. Chapter 1 critically discusses the history of political thought since Aristotle's seminal demarcation between pleasure, utility, and virtue-friendship. Chapter 2 details the conceptual development of friendship agreements in the 16th and 17th century. Chapter 3 illustrates the development of a normative approach of friendship, and Chapter 4 analyses the slow disappearance of utility friendship in the 17th and 18th century. This all builds towards Chapter 5, which showcases the implications of ancient assumptions underlying modern understandings of friendship. These are brilliantly illustrated by Roshchin in his analysis of both bilateral friendship treaties and the friendship treaties signed between the native populations and colonialising powers. Starting with Aristotle, friendship scholars have differentiated between one higher form of friendship, commonly denoted as virtue-friendship, and one or more