As Thick as Thieves: Exploring Thomas Hobbes’ Critique of Ancient Friendship and its Contemporary Relevance
| Author | Gabriella Slomp |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718761243 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(1) 191 –206
As Thick as Thieves: Exploring
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Ancient Friendship and its
Contemporary Relevance
Gabriella Slomp
Abstract
Recent decades have witnessed a revival of interest in ancient friendship both as a normative
and as an explanatory concept. The literature concurs in holding Hobbes responsible for the
marginalisation of friendship in political science and suggests that Hobbes devalued friendship
because of his understanding of man. This article argues that although Hobbes’ appraisal of
friendship hinges on his assumption that man is self-interested, his critique of normative friendship
does not rest on that notion. Hobbes’ challenge to us is this: without foundation in the ‘truth’ (i.e.
the ‘Good Life’) that underpinned ancient friendship, modern friendship, whether self-interested or
selfless, cannot be assumed to be a civic virtue, nor an index of the health of a political association,
nor a facilitator of domestic or global peace. Hobbes’ critique is especially relevant for writers
who maintain that a resurgence of friendship can nurture concord and foster reconciliation within
contemporary liberal democracies.
Keywords
Hobbes, friendship, peace, self-interest, selflessness
Accepted: 1 February 2018
Friendship is making a comeback (Digeser, 2016: xi).
Until not long ago, the mention of civic or global friendship to a political scientist would
raise a smile at best and an eyebrow at worst. Recent decades, however, have witnessed a
revival of interest in the ancient concept of friendship (philia, amicitia) among a growing
number of philosophers, political theorists, theorists of international relations, historians,
sociologists and journalists.1 Supporters of this trend have highlighted the normative
quality of friendship (Dallmayr, 2000; King and Devere, 2000; MacIntyre, 1981) and the
explanatory merits of the concept (Foucault, 1997; Gadamer, 1999; Hayden, 2015).
School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
Corresponding author:
Gabriella Slomp, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, Arts Faculty Building, The
Scores, St Andrews, Scotland KY16 9AX, UK.
Email: gs21@st-andrews.ac.uk
192
Political Studies 67(1)
While, traditionally, liberals have attributed a marginal role to ‘friendship’, an increasing
number of writers are bringing the concept to the foreground of liberal theory (Digeser,
2016; Georgieva, 2013; Martel, 2001; Schwarzenbach, 2009; Scorza, 2004).
The literature on friendship broadly agrees that in the ancient world, friendship was
‘the major principle in terms of which political theory and practice [were] described,
explained and analysed’(Hutter, 1978: 2; see also Gadamer, 1999; Von Heyking and
Avramenko, 2008: 1), and finds Thomas Hobbes – the seventeenth-century theorist of
discord and disagreement (Abizadeh, 2011) – largely responsible for the modern margin-
alisation of friendship in political science and political philosophy (Dallmayr, 2000: 105;
King, 2000: 13; Pangle, 2003: 3; Schwarzenbach, 2009: 4; Yack, 1993: 110). Lorraine
Pangle captures the dominant view when she writes that:
the devaluation of friendship is the result of a decisive new turn in philosophy […] Ever since
Hobbes, modern moral philosophy, even when it has not followed his teaching about the state of
nature, has conceived of men’s most important claims upon one another to lie outside the realm
of friendship (Pangle, 2003: 3).
Surprisingly, the literature has shown little interest in exploring Hobbes’ reasons for
side-lining friendship2 – a concept that had endured from antiquity through the Middle
Ages (Haseldine, 2000), notably in the work of Aquinas (Grayling, 2013; Schwartz,
2007), and received a breath of new life from the English Renaissance (Lochman et al.,
2011). The tendency among interpreters has been to suggest, often in passing, that Hobbes
devalued friendship because of his views on the self-interestedness of man (Schwarzenbach,
2009: 4; Yack, 1993: 110).
This article agrees that the paucity of references to friends and friendship in Hobbes’
political works was the outcome of a deliberate and influential move3 but seeks to dem-
onstrate that although Hobbes’ account and appraisal of friendship hinge on his assump-
tion that man is self-interested, his critique of normative friendship does not rest on that
notion. To the ancients who had claimed that ‘friendship can exist only between good
men’ (Cicero, 1991b: 86), Hobbes retorted, ‘And depraved though they are, do not con-
spirators aid and comfort one another, and share common desires?’ (Hobbes, 1976: Anti-
White, 479). The article interprets Hobbes’ challenge to be that, without foundation in the
‘truth’ (‘the Good Life’ or God) that underpinned ancient and medieval friendship (Fortin,
1993; Schall, 1996), modern friendship, whether self-interested or selfless, cannot be
assumed to be a civic virtue, nor an index of the health of a political association, nor a
facilitator of domestic or global peace. Hobbes’ critique is especially relevant for writers
who maintain that a resurgence of friendship can nurture concord and foster reconcilia-
tion within liberal democracies.
It has been argued that in order to understand why Hobbes and ‘the thinkers who pre-
pared the way for liberalism … chartered the course forward as they did, we must consider
the problems they saw when they looked backward’ (Stauffer, 2016: 481), and that the best
way to gain such understanding is by ‘immersion in Hobbes’s own arguments’ (482).
In this spirit, this article examines Hobbes’ texts and seeks to establish his main con-
cerns with the rich friendship tradition he inherited. First, it shows that Hobbes was well-
acquainted with Aristotelian philia, and his own notion of friendship retains some of the
original characteristics of the concept; next, it examines Hobbes’ appraisal of the explana-
tory value of friendship; next, it discusses Hobbes’ critique of ancient philia as a political
and ethical norm; finally, it highlights the relevance of Hobbes’ argument to contempo-
rary debates.
Slomp
193
Hobbesian Friendship and its Marks
By all accounts, the meaning of friendship is highly contextual (Silver, 1989); it can vary
across cultures at one time and across times in one culture (Derrida, 1997: 366–367;
Konstan, 1997: 8–11). Here, I will not attempt a comparison of Aristotelian and Hobbesian
friendship; rather, I shall review Hobbes’ understanding of Aristotelian philia and com-
pare it with his own notion of friendship in order to highlight certain shared qualities.
Hobbes was well-acquainted with the works of Aristotle and ‘among the Hobbes
papers at Chatsworth there is a free digest from the Nicomachean Ethics’ (Strauss, 1963:
42); he elucidates the meaning of Aristotelian friendship in his abridgement of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric.4 Here, Hobbes highlights the reciprocity of love and trust required in Aristotelian
friendship, the selflessness and altruism entailed in the relationship, as well as the
exchange of benefits that may take place between friends (Hobbes, 1840: Art of Rhetoric,
454–456). Hobbes appears to have had a good ear for Aristotelian philia (Aristotle,
1984b: EN 8.2 1155b34; EN 8.3 1156a-1158a; EN 9.4 1166a31-2) as his account of
friendship agrees with the interpretations of modern-day commentators: they, too, high-
light ‘reciprocity’ (Konstan, 1997: 69; Pangle, 2003: 38; Schollmeier, 1994: 38) and
‘goodwill’ (Konstan, 1997: 74; Pangle, 2003: 39; Price, 1989: 138–139, 197; Schollmeier,
1994: 35–39) as central ingredients of the relationship; they stress the importance of the
Aristotelian typology of friendship, based, respectively, on utility, pleasure and virtue
(Nussbaum, 1986: 354–372); they emphasise the ‘altruism’ and selflessness of perfect or
true or virtue friendship (Konstan, 1997, 76, 101; Schollmeier, 1994: 7–15, 51), and the
self-interest inherent to imperfect friendships (Price, 1989: 131–161).
Hobbes left us no detailed definition of his own conception of friendship, however,
and so the key elements or (to use Hobbes’ terminology) the ‘marks’ of Hobbesian friend-
ship must be reconstructed from scattered remarks.
Hobbes was a nominalist (Pettit, 2008; Zarka, 1995, 2016) and held that there is ‘noth-
ing in the world universal but names’ (Leviathan, 17; Elements, 20; Anti-White, 34, 52).
He maintained that particular men differ from one another, that the same man is different
at different times (Leviathan, 21) and that what is constant in the same man, and common
to all men, is the functioning of the body (‘vital motion’) and of the mind (‘voluntary
motion’). Hobbes identified man with ‘motion’ (Hobbes, 1839: De Corpore, 137), which
he defined as ‘actual power’, and attributed to him the endless search for ‘power’, which
he defined as ‘potential motion’, in order to prolong his existence as motion. This brief
reminder helps us to appreciate the first characteristic that Hobbes attributes to friendship,
namely empowerment: ‘to have friends is power’ (Leviathan, 50). Hobbes’ claim that
friends are ‘power’, therefore, equates to the statement that friends contribute to the...
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