Reflections on Friendship in Political Theory
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Reflections on Friendship in Political Theory Derek Edyvane • Kerri Woods
Published online: 20 December 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Introduction Interpersonal political conflicts stemming from moral disagreements and clashing particularistic loyalties form the necessary background of contemporary political theorising. These circumstances lend considerable urgency to the task of articulating a basis for social unity and yet also contribute to scepticism about the prospects of success in that enterprise. However, theorists of friendship, from Aristotle to Montaigne to Arendt and beyond, have not necessarily seen moral and political conflict as inimical to friendship. Indeed, civic republicans and communitarians see in the relations of friends something akin to ideal relations of fellow-citizens. This collection explores the possibilities of (political) friendship across different and conflicting particularistic commitments. The papers address a range of overlapping and interconnected concerns, including the significance and potential of friendship in managing conditions of diversity and pluralism, the relationship between friendship and civic respect, friendship and resistance, and the possibilities of global friendship. By addressing these questions, we hope to illuminate a broader range of issues in contemporary political theory, including the management of tensions arising from pluralism, the limits and possibilities of affective concern and the demands of justice, and the nature and function of moral education. The idea of friendship as a specifically political concept has been largely neglected in the field of contemporary political theory. However, recent years have seen the gradual growth of a literature on the topic. Whilst the essays presented here complement recent interventions, they also address the idea of friendship in different and distinctive ways that help to push the debate in new directions. D. Edyvane (&) K. Woods School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Woods e-mail: [email protected]
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Existing treatments of the topic often engage with the idea of friendship either as a matter of largely historical interest or, in a broadly communitarian vein, as a feature of, or as a means to the realisation of, the good society. The papers collected here, by contrast, adopt a more realistic perspective, and seek to use the tradition of thought on the idea of friendship in order critically to examine the value of the concept as a political resource and, specifically, as a response to contemporary domestic and global problems including those of inequality, intolerance, oppression, insecurity and global injustice. Whilst existing contributions to the literature tend often to adopt a rather ‘rosy’ view of the idea of friendship as a political concept, this collection offers a more balanced and critical perspective and includes dissenting and sceptical treatments of the topic. In these
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