Friendship and Politics
| Author | Heather Devere,Graham M. Smith |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-9302.2010.00214.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Friendship and Politicspsr_214341..356
Heather Devere Graham M. Smith
Auckland University of Technology Lancaster University
Over the past two decades interest in ‘friendship’ shown by scholars of politics has been intensifying. This review
highlights some of this literature and research.The first section sets the scene and discusses the foundations for the
engagement with friendship, outlining the analytical, descriptive and normative dimensions of the concept. The
second section examines both published work and conference papers on this topic.The flavour and scope of a
representative sample of this body of work is arranged into three categories: (a) political ideas; (b) national and
international politics; (c) feminism and gender.The concluding section offers a brief sketch of the contours of the
research trajectory of this idea in politics, suggesting that the study of friendship will help to illuminate reciprocal
horizontal relations that can transform our view of the political.
‘Friendship’: Descriptive, Analytic, Normative
For many researchers the association of the terms ‘friendship’ and ‘politics’ might seem
somewhat peculiar if not a plain mismatch.‘Fr iendship’ is presumed to be private,emotive
and inclining to partiality; ‘politics’ is presumed to be public, procedural and based on
impartiality. Given these assumptions, there are three possible conclusions that might be
drawn: that any talk about friendship and politics is simply a utopian project; that
friendship must be divorced from politics; or that friendship is actually destructive to
politics as it subverts justice through the arbitrary use of power. The body of research
under review not only challenges these conclusions, but actually seeks to make substantial
ties between politics and friendship.This research reveals that current assumptions about
the relationship between friendship and politics stand in need of revision, and that
friendship can play an important role in the study of politics as a descriptive, analytic and
normative construct.
The starting point for much of the recent scholarship on friendship and politics makes the
observation that ‘friendship’ has a somewhat narrow connotation in contemporary
Western thought and that this ignores a longer and much richer heritage. Two observa-
tions are central. First, whereas contemporary usage tends to understand the term to
denote an emotive,par ticular and personal relationship between two (or more) people,the
pre-modern (and especially the ancient) usage was more wide-ranging, encompassing
relations such as family, clients, comrades, fellow citizens and relations between men of
virtue. Friendship admitted degrees of ‘affection’, and (importantly) friendship had a
definite ethical and sometimes even political purpose. Fr iendship was central to the
flourishing and stability of the polity, and to pursuing justice and the limitation of
arbitrary power. Indeed, this assumption is partially recognised in a negative way in the
modern prejudice that friendship is antithetical to politics. Implicit here is the recognition
that friendship serves not only to provide political stability, but also alternative forms of
POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2010 VOL 8, 341–356
doi: 10.1111/j.1478-9302.2010.00214.x
© 2010 TheAuthors. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association
community to the dominant status quo. As will become clear from the review itself,
friendship has had an important theoretical and even practical role in the resistance of
power and the fight for justice.The second observation notes that contemporary under-
standings of the political tend to view it through a modern lens focusing on the individual,
liberty and power. The result is that politics becomes a mechanism for limiting the
infringement of the individual’s ability to act and to pursue goals. In contrast, the ancient
view saw politics as connected to an overall striving for the good life. As such, it was not
possible to conceive of a person as existing outside politics and remaining fully human.
Friendship, then, is a way of theorising this condition. Again, this is also partially
recognised by the general assumptions of the modern view. Without some basic and
irreducible connection between person and person there would be little to motivate
concerns with justice and wider political aims.
The pre-modern paradigms are useful in so far as they offer a contrast to those of the
modern. However it is almost universally recognised by contemporary scholars that the
pre-modern notions of ‘friendship’ and ‘the political’ cannot simply be imported (whole-
sale) into the contemporary setting. In the first instance these goods are relics from the
past: they can be instructive but not useful as they cannot survive in the atmosphere and
conditions of contemporary times, or meet their demands. Second, they are notions that
also come with many unfortunate and unacceptable assumptions, especially concerning
the exclusion of women and the institution of slavery.The central motivating question of
recent scholarship is not how to transpose the ancient paradigm, rewriting its framework
in a modern idiom. Instead, there has been a focus on how to learn from the pre-modern
accounts in order to generate a reinvigorated understanding of friendship and politics in
a contemporary setting. To this end the research agenda can be usefully summarised as
having been focused around three related aspects: descriptive, analytic and normative. In
focusing on these aspects of friendship it is easier to see both how friendship can be
considered to be a fully fledged political idea, ideal, phenomenon and practice; and also
how it fits together with other terms of the political lexicon.
Work that can be described as being descriptive takes friendship to have a broad meaning
to encompass relationships and groupings all the way from personal friendships between
individuals, to kith and kin, to tribe and nation, and ultimately between entities such as
states and nations. It ranges from the local to the cosmopolitan, and from the personal to
the political. Here researchers tend to identify and examine what might otherwise be
ignored by the standard political analysis: the impact and function of ‘friendship’ on and
in politics. Thus examinations focus on friendship relations between particular actors, or
states, highlighting how friendship shapes national relationships. The phenomenon can
also be traced through its historical manifestations identifying the impact of friendship on
the politics of a variety of historical periods. However, while friendship is often assumed
to have a connection to an ethical concern with the Other, pointing to solidarity, care and
reciprocity, some scholars have used its focus to show how ‘friendship’ has been used as
a tool of power, or to subdue and stifle resistance. Indeed, it should not be assumed that
friendship is simply ‘cosy and caring’; it is also sometimes found to be exclusionary,
confrontational and as having radical political consequences.What is also interesting about
342 HEATHER DEVERE AND GRAHAM M. SMITH
© 2010 TheAuthors. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association
Political Studies Review: 2010, 8(3)
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