Abstract
Graham Smith has written a valuable book exploring the place of friendship in the work of thinkers ranging from Plato to Carl Schmitt. The tasks the book sets for itself are, first, to review ancient and modern accounts of friendship as part of a discussion of political life and second, to open space for thinking about the connection between friendship and the political. With this agenda, the book belongs to an emerging literature in social and political theory that re-engages the phenomenon of friendship to correct the view that it is a purely private and personal matter, at best irrelevant to the social order, and at worst, a danger to it. Instead, the tenor of this literature is that friendship matters greatly for understanding social life and for thinking about political community (see King and Devere 2000; Von Heyking and Avramenko 2008. Hutter 1978 drew attention to this link decades earlier).
This is an important agenda because, as Smith points out, friendship has been neglected, if not ignored, by Western thinkers of modernity. Given this, the book’s aim to discern ‘modern transformations’ of friendship seems counterintuitive, and certainly makes the reader curious. This curiosity is also fostered by Smith’s ambition to trace the link between friendship and the political across the works of thinkers as profound and diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Schmitt. My expertise on these theorists is not sufficient to evaluate the accuracy of Smith’s reading of them; but in any case, the interesting question is what we can take from the book’s presentation of their engagement with friendship. The short answer is: a lot. While I am not sure the book fully meets its stated objectives, it offers a rich array of thoughtful insights about friendship, emerging from very different bodies of work in a clear and concise (although sometimes a bit too definite) writing style.
The two opening chapters offer a discussion of Plato and Aristotle, respectively. This is a sensible choice given the central role friendship plays in the writing of ancient Greek thinkers. These chapters review how Plato and Aristotle grappled with fundamental questions of what friendship is, why it exists, and in what sense humans find it useful; that is, what ‘need’ it satisfies, and how it supports political life. This discussion not only serves as a reminder of the importance and complexity of pre-modern thinking on the topic, but also allows Smith to introduce and evaluate some basic approaches to conceptions of friendship and the political. In brief, the Plato chapter puts forward the notion of friends being attracted to a shared sense of the good, allowing for a harmonious life in the polis by those able to see this good. This conception informs many accounts of friendship, yet as Smith reminds us here, it also risks creating a closed sense of unity among friends, with the potential to underwrite elitist and totalitarian views of order. Aristotle’s account is more nuanced. Indeed, his careful engagement with multiple forms of friendship and the ways friends can be useful to each other arguably makes him still the most profound thinker on the topic. For Smith, the most promising Aristotelian account is not the ‘true’ and intimate friendship amongst the virtuous, but the ‘political’ friendship amongst citizens of the polis, marked by equality and revolving around the concord of a shared constitution. He also usefully points out two (related) weaknesses of Aristotle’s otherwise rich discussion, namely its over-emphasis on shared activity and the neglect of emotional bonds underpinning friendship.
Against this backdrop, the book embarks on its main task of discussing ‘modern transformations’ of theorising friendship. Smith first turns to Kierkegaard, and uses the chapter to juxtapose (1) friendship as a particular and personal, or ‘purely human’ relationship, with (2) bonds created through spiritual commitment to a broader, metaphysical order – specifically the belief in a Christian God. As Smith points out, Kierkegaard champions the latter; that is, he considers the indirect connection through Christianity a superior way of creating lasting friendly relations with others, because they are less reliant on personal qualities but based on and mediated through the belief in something higher, universal and eternal, which even allows for the possibility of loving the dead. In Smith’s account of Kierkegaard’s critique of friendship as a direct and personal relationship, three aspects stand out. First, the notion of friendship as an eternal bond between humans is an ideal that cannot be reached, because it involves a relationship between complex, imperfect and incomplete beings that are subject to change. He seems especially skeptical about friendship as an emotional bond, since feelings cannot be chosen or controlled. Second, for Kierkegaard, attachment to a friend is not based on an evaluation of the other person as a whole but is selective, limited to particular qualities we like and which we might even project onto the friend. Finally, the chapter throws a skeptical light on the role of reciprocity in friendship, and argues that ‘the desire to claim or possess the other and the expectation of a return of feelings of friendship is a selfish move (p. 110). These criticisms are insightful, yet as Smith notes, they also are informed by Kierkegaard’s view that a relationship that fails to place God at the centre is unable to bring spiritual fulfillment and is, thus, incomplete.
Sharing some of Kierkegaard’s insights, yet taking them in a different direction, the chapter on Nietzsche provides the richest discussion. To begin with, it shows that thinking about friendship is tied up with the personal experience of the theorist. Smith notes how Nietzsche’s initial consideration of friendship was followed by disillusionment and an intellectual shift into an existential landscape dominated by solitude. In analytical terms, Smith shows that Nietzsche’s views of friendship are complex and ambivalent. His rejection of absolute truth and embrace of a ‘perspectivist’ stance produces a reading of the self and the world as multiple and without a central core. Hence, for Nietzsche, friendship is not about sharing some core qualities, but about the mutual discovery of different aspects of (self) knowledge. In this current, and complementing an analysis of friendship in the narrative of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the chapter highlights two useful images of friendship deployed by Nietzsche: friendship as a circle; and friendship as a ladder (pp. 147-56). The notion of the circle, only briefly sketched out by Smith, describes a constellation in which multiple friends or friendships revolve around a centre, complementing each other. Smith spends more time on the notion of the ladder, which depicts friendship as a relationship of (mutual) learning, as well as of transformation and departure. That is, it suggests that a stage may be reached at which the friendship has lost its value and is overcome. One reason may be that the friend cannot contribute any further to the growth of (self) knowledge. Another, as Smith points out, is that the friend who gains a deeper understanding of the Self may come to expose ‘tawdry or repulsive’ knowledge, which generates disillusionment and leads to the dissolution of friendship (p. 140). This logic of friendship having a destabilising effect seems almost tragic, and is certainly counterintuitive. Yet in Smith’s account, it logically follows from Nietzsche’s view that friends’ initial attraction to each other is based on deception, and that ‘in an aversion to the Ancient ideal, the best friendship is inherently unstable’ (p. 154).
The chapter on Schmitt is the shortest, and this is no coincidence. While Schmitt famously claims that the friend/enemy distinction lies at the heart of political decision-making, Smith acknowledges that ‘he says little of substance on the friend’ (p. 190). Given this use of the friend as an ‘empty category’ (p. 192), one may wonder why Smith bothers to engage with Schmitt. To his credit, he justifies this not by trying to reconstruct a meaning of friendship that Schmitt did not provide. Instead, he points to the relevance of Schmitt’s use of ‘the friend’ as a polemical structuring device for his broader argument about the nature of the political, and, ultimately, his agenda of creating political unity by dividing social relations into ‘Us’ (friends) and ‘Them’ (enemies). The distinction was, of course, Schmitt’s solution to the ‘problem’ of the perceived cacophony and internal division of the Weimar Republic. As Smith highlights, ‘the friend’ is an important category for Schmitt, since it has the functional purpose of transporting the image of the nation and the state as constellations based on decisions of intense association and disassociation. In this image, friendship is reduced to the act of identifying with a particular community and the acceptance of being in conflict with ‘Others’. Because the identification of the friend (alongside the enemy) is the ultimate political act, friends are implicitly rendered a homogenous, friction-less community devoid of pluralism and genuine political activity. Hence, while Smith credits Schmitt with bringing the relevance of ‘the friend’ into the public domain and, thus, to the attention of political theorists, the analytical value of this reductionist account is dubious at best. And he rightly warns that the notion of friendship as a relationship of intense unity, tied to acts of opposition and violence, is ethically dangerous. Indeed, Schmitt’s use of ‘the friend’ as a polarising category has identity politics written all over it, yet it is not clear how such a move can generate friendship at all. Thus, Smith concludes, ‘Schmitt’s voice lures us to an island where friendship meets its undoing, and Schmitt himself must be considered no friend of friendship’ (p. 223).
As this truncated summary indicates, the book offers competent and insightful discussions of different facets of friendship. What is more, I am not aware of another work that does so by engaging this particular group of thinkers, which makes it rather original and a fine achievement. That said, one wishes Smith had carried some of the insights beyond the context of the respective thinkers and their work. Perhaps this is too much to ask, but it points to a shortcoming of the book. Any project of this nature faces the challenge of not merely discussing thinkers side by side, but also of finding points of connection. This requires a compromise between, on the one hand, paying attention to the intellectual and socio-political context within which each writer approaches the topic (of friendship), while on the other, carving out general lines of thought, similarities and areas of comparison. While the book does the former quite well, it is less successful in linking the chapters and offering an overall analytical narrative to tie the book together.
This is visible in three ways. First, as interesting as the selection may be, the rationale for engaging the three theorists composing the main part of the book is not entirely clear. And it would have been useful if Smith had explained more carefully in what sense Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Schmitt offer ‘modern transformations’; what this means for the place of friendship in the project of modernity; and whether there are points of connection with ‘postmodern’ thought.
Second, the concern with the political and its link to theorising friendship is not pursued throughout, or at least it is done very unevenly. The opening pages offer sufficiently vague yet plausible definitions of the two key terms: ‘friendship’ is defined as a (multifaceted) bond between person and person, which falls into the domain of ‘the political’, understood as dealing with the question of order and value in a world of self and others. The first chapters on the Greeks engage this link through, for instance, the issue of justice; yet the link then moves out of sight in the discussion of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. One reason may be the presentation, at least in parts, of bonds of friendship as emotional bonds, as bonds of love. While this is a common view, the book gives little guidance on whether and how to place love into a political theory of friendship. The concern with the political takes centre stage in the Schmitt chapter, but for reasons noted it does not (cannot) provide a link to a substantial theorisation of friendship. Thus, by the time we arrive at the final chapter, the reader is not quite sure what to make of the claim that ‘friendship is coterminous with the political. The one inhabits the space of the other: they are aspects of the same concern … all forms of politics are dependent on friendship’ (p. 226). Because these claims do not really come alive in much of the analyses, the connecting thread goes missing. This is unfortunate, as it also diminishes the book’s force in persuading political theorists to take friendship seriously.
One also gets the impression, paradoxically, given the aim of the book, that the three main chapters give only a lukewarm endorsement to the analytical and ethical value of friendship. To be sure, each of the three thinkers recognises the relevance of friendship as a means for self-discovery or self–fulfillment, and thus as tied up with questions of ontology and identity. And yet the overall tone emerging from the discussion is skeptical. Kierkegaard rejects the notion of direct and personal friendship; Nietzsche comes across as ambivalent and disillusioned; and Schmitt uses it as an empty category for forging sovereignty through antagonism. For theorists of friendship, little that is positive seems to come out of these modern transformations.
To clarify whether and why this might be the case, third, one wishes for a final chapter pulling the main insights together under the common theme of friendship and the political, tackling the difficulties and paradoxes head on. Smith presents a final chapter, which does raise interesting issues of how friendship fares with tyranny, its relevance for identity, and the structure of the bonds holding friends together. However as useful as these pointers are for expanding thought on friendship and political community, it is not apparent how they flow out of the preceding discussion. To be sure, these shortcomings do not diminish the value of presenting a rich discussion of friendship in different bodies of thought, and perhaps it should be left to the reader to draw the links. Similarly, some of the insights the book does not exploit, such as Nietzsche’s view of friendship as a relationship of power, are still very useful as invitations for further exploration.
Most importantly, perhaps, the book encourages a revisiting of the view that the theoretical exploration of friendship died with Hobbes. Rather than assuming that theories of modernity are intellectual deserts when it comes to friendship, the book should motivate us to probe how the theme is present in the work of other political theorists: we might be surprised by what we find. One candidate would be Marx. Given his lifelong friendship with Engels, Marx was obviously well aware of the experience and its productive power. And it is not difficult to envision the notion of friendship as intrinsic to the notion of class solidarity and comradeship, where bonds are formed by the shared commitment to, and striving towards, a communist order. At the same time, Marx might have held that the (socialist) ideal of treating all persons as equals holds little space for particular bonds of friendship. Furthermore, we should be probing the treatment of friendship in non-Western thought. For instance, suspicion of intimate personal ties as subverting and corrupting the order of things is also found in neo-Confucianism, where friendship is considered harmonious only if it is supportive of hierarchical structures of the family and the state (see Kutcher 2000). The Confucian view of emotional ties as dangerous to hierarchy fits, in turn, Aristotle’s insight that friendship is the one relationship capable of overcoming formal inequalities, hinting at interesting parallels in Eastern and Western thought.
Many insights presented in this book can also be fruitfully applied to our understanding of transnational ties. While scholars of International Relations have analysed transnational ties for a while, only recently have they begun to look at them as possible phenomena of friendship (see Berenskoetter 2007; Oelsner and Vion 2011). Smith does not address this here (though he does elsewhere: see Smith 2011), yet once we view friendship as a force capable of constituting or contesting ideas of order within a political community, there is no reason to stop looking for it at the national level. Kierkegaard’s notion of universal neighbourly bonds finds its echoes in liberal cosmopolitanism and ideas of global citizenship. Nietzsche’s notion of the circle and the ladder might also be applied to configurations and developments in inter-state relations; and the friend/enemy distinction as a tool for unifying a particular community is, unfortunately, a familiar sight in foreign policies around the world. So there is much to explore. And, who knows, theorists of world politics might even come up with their own (post)modern transformations of the theme.