Do political theorists have friends? Towards a redefinition of political friendship

Abstract

This article suggests a sensitising definition of political friendship with the view of using the concept in empirical research. I begin by identifying three tendencies in the recent literature on political friendship: (1) the tendency to ignore historical developments that rendered modern friendship an intimate relationship; (2) the construction of modern friendship as hermetically sealed in the private sphere; and (3) the conceptual conflation of relationship types. Consequently, friendship is emptied of substantive relational content, while political ‘friendship’ is promoted from metaphor to denotative concept. I critique that approach by drawing on Maria Márkus’s account of friendship, which emphasises its historically contingent, ambiguous position between the private and the public spheres whence friendship offers vital utopian potentials in respect of public life: friendship instantiates mutual self-determination and gives experiential substance to ‘decency’. Combining Márkus’s with a differentiating approach to friendship that takes its lead from Siegfried Kracauer, I go on to propose a preliminary redefinition of political friendship as a personal relationship, as well as the substitution of political friendship by democratic solidarity with ‘decency’ its guiding orientation.

Keywords

decency intimacy Maria Márkus political friendship solidarity

Introduction

When turning to friendship, we are immediately confronted with the word’s semantic promiscuity. That promiscuity results from usage of its cognate ‘friend’ as an umbrella term for a whole range of relationships, be they between intimates or strangers. In English language use, the widening semantic scope of friend follows a long historical trajectory, while – significantly – friendship still retains its meaning as a form of intimacy, as a non-instrumental relationship of trust based on mutual respect, care and affection, something that ‘friend’ can ever more easily do without (Wierzbicka, 1997). Here lies also a central tension concerning the concept political friendship. Its semantics conjure the reconciliation of irreconcilables: the public with the private; formality with informality; strategy with spontaneity; self-interest with mutuality; indifference with affection; distrust with trust; absolute with minimal discretion. Civic friendship, mostly used synonymously with political friendship, appears to avoid some of those issues because it steers interpretation away from self-interest and the pursuit of power to the pursuit of civic virtues (Schwarzenbach, 2005: 234). But the question of how to reconcile the private and personal with the public and political is something that all attempts at conceptualising political friendship need to deal with. How that is done and to what extent these attempts are successful is the main question driving this article.

I begin with a contextual statement on intimate and political friendship, and then turn to some examples in the more recent literature that seek to conceptualise the latter. The examples were chosen because they are explicit attempts to conceptualise political friendship by way of comparison with intimate friendship, but also because they illustrate some problems encountered in what has been termed ‘the contemporary revival of interest in political friendship’ (Mallory and Carlson, 2014: 334). I identify three main issues: (1) the tendency to ignore historical developments that rendered modern friendship an intimate relationship; (2) the theoretical construction of modern friendship as hermetically sealed in the private sphere sequestered from public life; and (3) the tendency to semantically conflate relationship types. As a consequence, friendship is emptied of the very affective-relational content that characterises it as a modern relationship, at the same time as political friendship is promoted from metaphor to denotative concept. The attempt to present political friendship as an actual type of relationship, rather than acknowledging that it can only function as a metaphor for a range of relations, is pursued at the cost of intimate friendship, which remains little more than a shell of abstract ideals. Essentially a zero-sum approach, the conceptual yield is slim at best. Proposing a redefinition of political friendship towards use in empirical research, I draw on Maria Márkus’s work on friendship (2010a). Like others, Márkus too sees a problem with friendship’s potential enclosure in the intimate sphere. But she also recognises the ‘utopian’ potential of friendship anchored in its relative openness to the world. Friendship instantiates mutual support of self-determination and gives experiential substance to ‘decency’, which in turn figures as the normative underpinnings of Márkus’s (2001) conception of civil society. Having thus situated friendship in an ambiguous position, neither fully public, nor locked in an intimate sphere of its own, I go on to take my lead from Siegfried Kracauer and propose a differentiating approach to political friendship. The task is to untangle the work of semantic conflation and sketch the outlines of political friendship as a personal relationship. I conclude by suggesting that democratic solidarity may offer itself as the better concept for the purposes of reflecting on civic and political bonds.

Intimate friendship, political friendship

Although friendship is frequently used as a metaphor describing the sentiments that may suffuse a range of ties (Spencer and Pahl, 2006), I use the term to denote a concrete relationship. Following Simmel (1906), Kracauer (2011), Alberoni (2016) and others, I am interested in friendship as an intimate dyad. Friendship is ‘intimate’ insofar as it is a non-instrumental relationship of trust and respect, care and affection. It is ‘modern’ in the sense that it is voluntary, personal and private. Rather than institutionalised in the sense of playing an explicit public role, friendship can be thought of as an ‘institutionalized non-institution’ (Paine, 1974): it is clearly distinguishable as a relationship, yet untethered from formalised regimes of public recognition (Blatterer, 2018a). But neither is it entirely private. Its structural position is ambiguous: it can subvert public convention (Suttles, 1970) and challenge a given social and political order; it is a thorn in the sides of despots; it can equally undermine the necessary impersonal strictures of modern bureaucracy (Alberoni, 2016); and it can also play a role as a window into, and out from, the shelter of the intimate sphere (Márkus, 2010a).

Originating in Aristotle’s philia politike, political or civic friendship seeks to describe a kind of friendship based on a political community’s general agreement and concord which, in turn, shores up a common investment in social institutions (Schwarzenbach, 2010). Sometimes it is made to describe friendly relations between collective political entities including states (Oelsner and Voin, 2011; Smith, 2011), and it is in this sense that political friendship is prevalently used in the vernacular. Those who share democratic values of governance can, based on such accord, ‘call each other political friends’, and it is here in particular that the concept is used as a ‘metaphor to express a positive, mutually oriented, cooperative relationship’ (Leuschner, 2016: 162). At times the concept is used to describe interactions in political and civic associations (Mallory, 2012), even as bonds that give affective purchase to nationalism (Kaplan, 2007), or as friendly relations between ‘peoples’ (Lu, 2009). Thus, political friendship refers to integrative bonds endogenous to political communities and associations, and friendly relations between states and the range of political and civil society associations.

Usually, and to varying degrees of critical reflection, Aristotle’s philia politike is made to resonate with modern political arrangements (King, 2007; Lu, 2009; Mallory, 2012; Singer, 2017; Smith, 2011). That is not unproblematic. For one, philia is non-specific to an extraordinary degree. It refers to relationships between equals as much as to those between ruler and ruled, patriarch and family, old and young, humans and gods, buyers and sellers, as well as to relationships between families, tribes, cities, even species. Erotic love, while belonging to it, describes philia only inadequately, while the common translation ‘friendship’ only seems to fit a special type, namely Aristotle’s friendship of virtue (Nehamas, 2016: 15). Virtue-friendship was thought to be possible only among the non-labouring, propertied, male elites, but it was also an elementary political form rather than a private and personal relationship in the modern sense: ‘the excellence of the friend…[is] no different than the good and useful as such – what one calls in English the common good’ (Brunkhorst, 2005: 15, original emphases). Thus, political friendship offered itself as a ‘solution to the Platonic problem of social integration’ (Brunkhorst, 2005: 13) in a premodern context. And here lies a second problem: because Aristotelian political philosophy came to treat the polis as a descriptor for society as a whole (Luhmann, 1998a: 932), the transposition of philia politike to contemporary societies (as political friendship) encounters the problem of integration. If polis does not suffice as a term describing the social system of the ancient city-state, and if therefore philia politike cannot describe its integrative, normative substratum, then the concept of political friendship encounters a similar problem, but this time at the much higher order of modern social differentiation. As we shall see, the problems that come with the Aristotelian legacy are always, in some ways, present in various attempts to clarify political friendship in the context of contemporary modernity: it is both questioned for its modern appropriateness and simultaneously – whether implicitly or explicitly – marshalled in defence of the concept to which it is supposed to lend credence.

Intimate versus political friendship?

Rather than taking his lead from the premodern notion of philia politike, Peter Mallory turns to Democracy in America to ‘examine the contribution Tocqueville’s work can make to recent scholarly debates on political friendship in modernity’ (2012: 22). He argues that Tocqueville does not make the common mistake of treating friendship as a purely private and personal bond ‘separated from politics and the public’ (2012: 25). At the same time, Tocqueville is said to be unsettled by a new kind of ‘democratic despotism’ that sees atomised individuals turn away from public life: ‘His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race’ (Tocqueville cited in Mallory, 2012: 33, Mallory’s emphases). This indicates that Tocqueville is ‘deeply concerned about an overly privatized practice of friendship for democratic public life’; it augurs friendship as ‘thoroughly depoliticized’ (2012: 33, original emphasis). Hence, ‘Tocqueville…is troubled by modern practices of ‘depoliticized friendship’ (2012: 33), because ‘in a successful democracy people’s horizons do not shrink to a small circle of friends and family but expand to include a concern for others in society. In this way, democracy avoids the dangers of the privatized, narcissistic friendship of democratic despotism’ (2012: 33).

Political and civil society associations are said to mitigate the risks of public disengagement, ‘because they facilitate personal bonds between citizens who would otherwise remain indifferent to each other’ (Mallory, 2012: 34). It is these personal bonds that qualify as political friendships. For, according to the author, like intimate friendships, they are freely chosen, are equal insofar as each is oriented to another as equal, and they transcend mere utility. While Tocqueville emphasises the goal orientation of associations, for Mallory ‘the bonds that develop between citizens over time…are also sincere bonds of affection which are valued for their own sake’ (2012: 35). On this interpretation, associational life furnishes the normative, integrative condition for the democratic polity, that is, political friendship. There are some issues, however, that need addressing.

First, rather than take up a position vis-à-vis friendship, Tocqueville casts a critical eye over what he diagnoses as one of democracy’s downsides – individualism. It is in this context that he twice refers to personal and private friendship: once in the quote excerpted above, and also in his chapter ‘Of Individualism in Democratic Countries’:

Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. (1994: 98)

This is not a critique of intimate friendship as a depoliticised version of a political ideal, but a critique of a turn towards the private sphere away from politics and public life. A direct criticism of (intimate) friendship as ‘depoliticised’ is nowhere to be found in Tocqueville, and neither does he equate individualism with friendship as such.

Second, while the analysis sets out to provide an account of political friendship that can adequately address the connections between the private and the public, it does so by paying more heed to the Aristotelian notion than is initially promised. From this perspective, ‘the decoupling of friendship and politics in modernity’ (Mallory, 2012: 24) needs to be remedied by a re-politicisation of friendship. However, if we agree that modernity is, amongst other things, synonymous with processes of differentiation that, amongst other developments, saw the formation of a distinct private sphere with an attendant privatisation of relationships (Ariès and Duby, 1987–91), then a re-politicised version of friendship would mean investing it with the kind of institutional purchase the very ‘liberation’ from which characterises modern friendship as modern (Blatterer, 2018a; Márkus, 2010a; Paine, 1974).

Mallory and Carlson (2014: 327) define their conception of political friendship as referring ‘to the problem of how anonymous strangers can feel connected to others they will never meet on the basis of principle rather than personal knowledge’. Durkheim’s thought on collective representations and the sacred/profane dichotomy serve as hermeneutic devices. At stake is an explanation concerning ‘how the symbolic meanings of friendship explain theorists’ affinity for friendship and its amenability for political inflection’ in order to redefine ‘our contemporary restricted and private understanding of friendship’ (2014: 2). Rather than a concrete, historically and culturally specific relationship, on this Durkheimian interpretation friendship is an ‘idealized’ bond that figures as a collective representation carrying ‘symbolic and sacred meanings as a relation to the other instantiating justice, equality and respect’ (2014: 5, 8). The authors do not attend to the specific interactional logics that distinguish private and personal friendship from other relationships – how these types of friendship are ‘done’ – but remain in a symbolic terrain that is disconnected from action. And it is the representational aspect of friendship that is then made to resonate with relationships between anonymous strangers: ‘friendship’ as a conceptual metaphor which is put to denotative use. For, if it would be filled with relational actualities, political ‘friendship’ thus conceived would be a misnomer.

The question whether political friendship is an adequate term to denote political/civic bonds between strangers is beginning to emerge here. According to the authors, Durkheim saw friendship as a personal bond with scant connection to society and thus turned to the concept of solidarity. And yet, rather than take Durkheim’s lead and pose the question whether solidarity – concerned as it is with ‘communities, associations, classes, societies and even humanity itself’ – may not be the better term, the authors assert that ‘Durkheim…allows us to pose the fundamental question of how friendship can be decoupled from intimacy’ (2014: 8, original emphases) so that the symbolic meanings of the friendship can be given purchase in relationships between strangers.

The attempt to nominate Adam Smith to help ‘address the problem of solidarity between strangers’ is explicitly aimed at reviving ‘the Aristotelian notion of civic or political friendship’, by way of showing that those who think friendship is ‘purely private and personal’ are mistaken (Mallory, 2017: 37, original emphases). The argument is advanced by casting intimate friendship as hermetically sealed in the intimate sphere and as essentially narcissistic with its alleged basis in similarity. Political friendship emerges as the ethically preferable option: open to the world and attuned to the other’s difference: ‘Indeed, such [political] friends need not be similar and may even be friends precisely through their differences’ (2017: 37).¹ But – and this is crucial – they need not be intimates, as is ostensibly shown in Adam Smith’s conception of friendship, for Smith ‘develops a public and social understanding of friendship in the context of a modern society of strangers’, and thus does not draw ‘an invidious distinction between friends and strangers’. Smith’s approach is commended for ‘linking friendship not with transparency but with impression management, because he can decouple it from intimacy’ (2017: 39, 42, 48). Although Adam Smith does not develop the notion of political friendship, he is said to assist in developing ‘a critical sociological account of’ it (2017: 50).

It is worth mentioning here that critical accounts of Smith on friendship – including critical appraisals of Silver’s (1996) well-known interpretation – have shown that Smith’s vision has little if anything to do with friendship; that it is a first articulation of the kind of instrumental networking mentality that was to become central to full-fledged market society; and that therefore relationships entered into on that basis cannot meaningfully be labelled ‘friendships’ (Blatterer, 2015: 16–25; Hill and McCarthy, 1999, 2004). It seems that here an uncritical approach to Smith is taken because instrumental relationships functional to market society break the connection of intimacy with friendship. Once conflated with relationships that could not be set further apart from any plausible notion of friendship, the contractual relationships of commercial society provide a blueprint for how to think about political friendship in the present. Thus drained of intimacy, friendship can be set on par with ‘strangership’.

Similar issues can be noted in attempts to marshal friendship in international relations. Graham Smith (2011) puts the conceptual conundrum upfront:

[Friendship] does not seem to be a good candidate for the relationship between…states. In any case, it is difficult to determine how one state could have emotional ties with another. It might be conceded that individuals within states can have friendly relations; but this is different to claiming that states per se can have friendships, or even that there are forms of friendship that underpin the state. Moreover,…[the] intimate and affective demands of friendship would seem to provide a fertile breeding ground for exclusion and the abuse of state power. In this view, politics is about the general, the public and procedural justice; friendship is about the particular, the private and special acts of virtue. The two do not meet. (Smith, 2011: 11, original emphases)

How does Smith propose to overcome what seem by his own account to be irreconcilable differences? It is instructive that here too the demise of ‘friendship as an institution’ is seen as a ‘fall from the attention of the moderns’ (Smith, 2011: 13), a problem of theorising gone astray rather than a historical process.² Hence, what is needed is, like for others, a reestablishment of friendship to its rightful place: in public as the bond that holds together a fraying social fabric, for ‘[p]ersons now experience friendship not as citizens, or political subjects, or members of the community, but in their personal and private roles’ (2011: 14, original emphasis). With Bacon and Montaigne, friendship is cast in opposition to the instrumental power-play of politics and, symptomatic of individualism, friendship becomes a ‘marginal and devalued concern’ (2011: 15). Now, Smith shapes friendship in two moves so that international relations can be made to resemble those between individuals. The first move is to jettison Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Smith takes umbrage at Schmitt’s assertion that the maintenance of state sovereignty always also requires a protective stance vis-à-vis other states as potential threats. That assertion is judged to be ‘both mistaken and regrettable’ (2011: 18) it seems not because Schmitt’s argument is shown to lack merit in the context of Realpolitik, but because it cannot be reconciled with Smith’s vision of ‘friendship’.

The second (and related) move is to broaden the definition of friendship. Smith asks whether reciprocity need be a characteristic of all friendships, whether it need be inclusive or not, ‘emotional or intellectual’, and whether there needs to be equality. At the same time, the concept ought not to be too diffuse lest it should become meaningless. What determines its delimitation, then, is the concept’s ‘usefulness’ in allowing ‘examination of what would otherwise be hidden’ (2011: 20, original emphasis). The result is the insight that the ‘contemporary-affective model of friendship’ signals an ‘impoverishment’ of language because it obscures the variety of friendships and their connections, ‘leaves the theorist bereft of a discourse to describe and explore the relationships it excludes or overshadows; and…fails to recognize and respond to the long tradition of theorizing about friendship’ (2011: 21, original emphases). It is imperative, according to Smith, that we must not assume contemporary-affective friendship to be the ‘paradigm case’ or ‘gold standard’ for a relationship that is ‘notoriously hard to define’ (2011: 24, 25).

What unites the approaches canvassed above is the confusion of a conceptual metaphor, which does its work of meaning-making in everyday language, with the denotation of an actual relational reality. Just as ‘the notion of the state as an individual with the attributes of a person, is, of course, only a metaphor’, surely so too is friendship in the context of relationships ‘within’, ‘between’ and ‘across’ states (Smith, 2011: 22, 23, original emphases). Friendship in the context of international relations is a metaphor that, on the level of common sense, connotes qualities that are personified in concrete relationships between intimate friends. In fact, as research has shown, friendship is prevalently used in international treaties as ‘a tool of public relations and spin, rather than diplomacy and peace-building’ (Devere et al., 2011: 65). Thus, the ‘contemporary-affective model’ of friendship functions as the ‘gold standard’ not because individualism has turned moderns away from politics, or because theorists follow a reductionist drift, but because friendship is experienced on the ground between concrete actors as a relationship; having emerged in its modern form from processes of social differentiation (rather than philosophical conjecture), its norms are part and parcel of a shared cultural understanding of modern intimacy that allows us ‘to be at home with self in other’ (Hegel cited in Williams, 1997: 83). Concerning states, those ideals are mostly invoked in the service of political strategising (see also Roshcin, 2001). It is one thing to invoke friendship for strategic ends, or to use friendship as a shorthand for friendly relations between states, even to raise the possibility of a more humane, ‘friendly’ society. But it is quite another matter to turn a metaphor into a concept that can be marshalled in research, one that is allegedly denotative of a supposed (and undefined) reality, especially when that is pursued by way of (a) ‘by-pass[ing] the modern conception of friendship based on interpersonal relations’ (Oelsner and Voin, 2011: 4), (b) devaluing intimate friendship as symptomatic of individualism; or (c) emptying friendship of interpersonal and supposedly undue affective content only to then (d) appeal to connotative ‘resemblances’ (Smith, 2011) so that its use for specified purposes may be picked from the conceptual remainder. Friendship, in other words, seems only to be capable of carrying the load of political integration when it is emptied of all that makes it a concrete relationship constituted in encounters between concrete actors. What we are left with is a shell of notional sentiments that are generalised towards a notional common accord by notional actors in a range of contexts. Having pitted intimate against political friendship in what amounts to a zero-sum game, each concept has lost rather than gained in explanatory yield.

What lies at the root of these (and other) attempts at describing political friendship is the problem of semantic conflation of different relationship types (Blatterer, 2015, 2018b). To be more precise, it is a problem from a perspective that pays heed to the lived experience of intimate friendship and its action norms. It is not a problem from a perspective that aims to make the case for political friendship versus (rather than alongside) intimate friendship, because here conflation is required to bolster an argument. Mallory and Carlson’s appeal to a broadening of usage of the terms friends and friendship is a case in point: ‘Friendship with its norms and ideals is suffusing not only the family, but also workplaces and politics. The term friend is also multiplying in uses, having recently become a verb’ (2014: 338). Taking everyday language use at face value allows conflation of friendship with sundry relations, including those between anonymous strangers and those that are purely instrumental and/or contractual. Now the relationship needs simply to be extended to generalised others in order to make its connotations chime with positive public, associational or inter-state relationships. A strong sense emerges here that, whatever the criticisms, Aristotle’s philia politike seems to have such strong background resonance that it is constantly pressed into service to provide the conceptual foundations for political integration in the present, and that intimate friendship – private, personal, and allegedly disconnected from culture and society at large – needs to make way for more ethical political bonds. That background resonance likely appeals to a simplistic private/public dichotomy that ascribes the vice of self-interest to the former, and the virtue of public utility to the latter.

To summarise, there are three tendencies that beset these ‘revivals’ of political friendship, of which the above are illustrative examples: (1) The tendency to ignore historical developments that have transformed friendship from a more or less institutionalised relationship to a personal and private relationship enables charging ‘theorists’ with the wrongfully reductionist description of friendship as personal and private. By extension, the question whether political friendship can adequately describe modern integration remains unasked. (2) Intimate friendship is sealed in the private sphere and thus in need of semantic broadening to include personal ties in associational contexts as well as international relations between states, ‘peoples’, humanity, no matter whether or not these ties are purely strategic. (3) These strategies go hand in hand with the semantic conflation of relationship types. This is partly achieved by turning the conceptual metaphor friendship into a denotative concept, which, in turn, is possible only when friendship is emptied of intimacy, or if the constitutive intimacy of intimate friendship is generalised to public contexts. Pitted against its ‘political’ variety, intimate friendship loses out; it has become meaningless to the same extent to which non-intimate relationships are exalted as ‘friendships’.

These criticisms are emphatically not meant to devalue a critique of current social and political arrangements that seeks to invest the public sphere with the equality and justice that obtain especially in friendship. Clearly, these are normative benchmarks worth pursuing in Karl Jaspers’ ‘age of anonymous responsibility’ (Gadamer, 2000: 56). Rather, the criticisms are meant to clarify that the parameters of equality and justice are necessarily of a different order – they are private, personal, and informal, rather than public, impersonal and formal – and therefore cannot be generalised in their concrete relational form. While there is common ground in experience, the social constitution of justice takes place in different spheres, to loosely gesture to Walzer (1983). And of course, there is a justified hope that everyday interactions between individuals and institutions err on the side of ‘friendliness’, although friendship cannot be legislated. What we do know, however, is that degrees of general trust correlate with personal trust; that authoritarianism eats away at the fabric of personal mutuality; and that therefore a vital and open public sphere is conducive to friendship because ‘political freedom and personal freedom mirror each other’ (Shklar, 1998: 16).

My criticism of a prevalent semantic conflation of relationship types refers to these issues. If the semantic promiscuity of ‘friend’ would actually signal the practical transposition of egalitarian and just social arrangements to public relationships, however slow and incremental, that would be a different matter. But we might doubt that ‘friending’, ‘unfriending’ and ‘friend farming’ retain even a modicum of hope for a more egalitarian modus vivendi. The terms are arguably more likely to signal what Maria Márkus (2010b) has called the emergence of ‘connectivity’, a hollowed-out form of personal connection. There is, then, some justification for conceptual nuance in order to render concepts useful in empirical research at the same time as doing justice to the different types of behaviours, practices and attitudes they describe. Any approach that seeks to convince us that friendship does neither need to be reciprocal, nor egalitarian, nor affectionate, rather than appealing to its democratic potentials, divests friendship of any substance and even ‘usefulness’.

But whatever its theoretical distortions, private and personal friendships continue to exist, and meaningfully so. Surely, then, the task must be to conceptualise both intimate and political friendship in such a way that one does not exclude the other.

Towards a redefinition of political friendship

Márkus’s utopian horizons: Friendship and decency

Maria Márkus (2010a) identifies the societal processes that underpin recent attempts to conceptualise political friendship: historical processes of differentiation have opened a gap between forms of trust that integrate ‘abstract systems’ and those that are instantiated by personal relationships. Márkus draws on the public-private distinction proposed by Heller: the private sphere of ‘“the whole human persons (we are living here)” is distinct from the systemic sphere where we participate as ‘“specialized human persons (we are only working there)”’ (Heller cited in Márkus, 2010a: 15, original emphases). Although the development of modern intimacy has seen a relative democratisation of relationships, these are private relationships whose dynamics cannot simply be translated into democratic public life. The gap remains. But friendship plays a unique role amid the tensions between the different forms of trust, and it has to do with its ambiguous location.

In nascent modernity, friendship, once ‘located on the fringe of the private sphere, on its open side, in the semi-public’, was gradually integrated into the inner sanctum of the private, the intimate sphere (Márkus, 2010a: 19, original emphases). But having thus lost its explicit (institutionalised) connection to the world at large it, ‘perhaps paradoxically’, also lost out to ‘erotic love and marriage’ (2010a: 12) in the order of intimate priorities, which ultimately was to give it purchase as a semi-public relationship. What bolstered that development was another: intimacy came crucially to be informed by the rise of therapy culture, the emergence of various forms of self-help and professional counselling (2010a: 14; Johnson, 2010), to which friendship is resistant, not least because of its disconnection from the more mundane aspects of coupledom, which unlike friendship, centres on common life projects (Blatterer, 2011, 2016). This is a crucial moment in love’s turn towards an institutionally shored-up self-referentiality (Luhmann, 1998b) that sees the emergence of ‘the relationship’ as the quasi third entity to be worked on by partners; it includes the unfinished project democratisation regarding gender relations and sexualities.

In its further development, the intimate sphere – and the public imagination regarding what counts for ‘intimacy’ – is occupied by love; in fact, it threatens to be overloaded by it. Situated between the uncertain demands of ‘until-further-noticeness’ and commitment, its self-referentiality may border on claustrophobia. It is now one of the

characteristics of friendship…that the intimate sphere alone is much too narrow for friendship. Friendship does not really thrive here, it wilts. It not only suffocates in the enclosed atmosphere of the intimate, but its exclusive restriction to the sphere of intimacy contributes to the further overloading of the intimate sphere itself. (Márkus, 2010a: 19)

Far from enclosed in the intimate sphere, then, friendship retains a connection to the world³ because the orientation to the other as other also includes common interests, common concerns, a ‘third party’ that – unlike the relationship in love – is never merely the friendship itself, but rather ‘an idea, a cause’ (Murphy cited in Márkus, 2010a: 19). Friendship thus has a double role: it can provide a window out from the intimate sphere and thus give ‘innovative impulses’ for public life (2010a: 19), as much as it can open the intimate sphere to the outside. What Márkus has in mind is not simply the generalisation of friendship in ‘a naïve hope for the creation of a “friendly society”‘, but friendship as an orientating ‘utopia as a yardstick’ grounded in the already actualised experience of what it means to live in a relationship whose purpose is ‘the self-determination of others’ (Heller cited in Márkus, 2010a: 20).

But while identifying an integrative gap between the public and the private sphere spells out contextual differences, this does not entail having to give up on the possibilities of normative social integration. As for the purveyors of political friendship, for Márkus too civic bonds remain central, with civil society furnishing the mechanisms with which they are tied. Integration here refers to an open process of will formation oriented to the realisation of a ‘decent society’ (Márkus, 2001). Decent Society is ‘a normative concept’, but Márkus does not propose to delimit ‘what such a society might concretely look like’; rather, she refers to the significance of an open debate concerning institutional processes that has ‘decency’ as its guiding norm (2001: 1023). The criteria for decency surpass the relative ‘coolness’ of civility, because it alone cannot ‘generate an interest in the interests of others’, let alone foster solidarity. Rather than ‘almost depersonalized’ civility,

[d]ecency…implies something more or at least something different: a respect for the ‘dignity’ of each person and some interest in, and commitment to, promoting the ability of all members of society to lead a dignified, humanly meaningful life. It involves not only the toleration of other views and convictions, but also an interest in an openness toward what they say, along with an attempt to understand the reason why it can be meaningful to hold such a view. (2001: 1021)

On that view, a decent society is not only one in which the institutional conditions for humiliation are absent, but one in which an engaged respect for the dignity of others, including outsiders, is realised in democratic institutions as well as everyday life; decency thus describes qualitative aspects of social integration (Ebert, 2010). Again, Márkus reiterates the significance of utopian potentials, this time those inherent in the vision of a decent society: ‘decent society’ functions ‘as a normative-regulative ideal’, and it is by way of civil society that ‘this “utopian horizon”’ is best striven towards (2001: 1028).

Taken together, Márkus’s writing on friendship and on decent society is instructive concerning current attempts at theorising political friendship. While Márkus, like theorists of political friendship, recognises the potential of friendship to provide a model for public/civic relationships, rather than posit friendship as closed off, she maintains that it is open to the world as well as to the inner sanctum of the private sphere, partly because of its social constitution as an inclusive relationship (Márkus, 2010a: 20). But it is not generalisable as an integrative mechanism. Paying heed to the differentiation of a sphere of privacy and a sphere of publicness which precipitates the differentiation of value-spheres, subjectivities and relationships, friendship is shown to be ambiguously situated in ‘semi-public’. That approach avoids emptying friendship of its intimate characteristics in order to make it fit political or civic purposes. Rather, personal and private friendship emerges with and becomes part and parcel of modern societies; but it is not loaded with a burden of integration it cannot carry. That role falls to civil society which, if oriented to the realisation of ‘decency’, can strengthen solidarity under conditions of advanced differentiation and pluralism. That decency, whatever its utopian qualities as generalised practice, is always already realised in friendship as an interpersonal bond of trust, respect, care and affection. The full weight of modern friendship, then, lies in its ability to give practical purchase to decency as a normative, utopian yardstick. This is arguably the most fitting role for friendship. For, not only can its dynamics not simply be generalised, this ought not to be contemplated if principles of impartiality are to remain guiding norms for democratic governance. There is, then, a necessary division between intimacy and politics that not only characterises differentiated societies, but surely needs to be retained.

Kracauer’s differentiating approach

To recognise processes of differentiation is to also recognise what Hogen, in reference to Musil, Canetti and Kracauer, has called ‘the modernisation of the I’ (Hogen, 2000). Echoing Simmel’s reflections on the modern personality, and especially his thoughts on ‘differentiated friendship’ (1906), Siegfried Kracauer (2011) provides an example of a ‘differentiating approach to friendship’ (Blatterer, 2018b). From a broadly phenomenological perspective, Kracauer distinguishes friendship from erotic love, acquaintanceship, comradeship and collegial relationships according to the typical norms that underpin each and the fundamental logics that orient these types. For example, comrades are oriented not to each other but to a common goal, just as colleagues are oriented to a common task. ‘Comrades are equals before the goal – but nothing besides’, writes Kracauer, while collegial bonds end ‘where the world of my dreams, my memories, my yearning, my love begins’ (2011: 32, 35). If colleagues and comrades are in principle replaceable, (intimate) friends are not. What marks acquaintanceship off from friendship is that the relationship turns on discretion, while friendship turns on intimacy. Kracauer does not intend to draw unbridgeable boundaries around these relationships; he insists that one can transform into another, and into friendship on the basis of ‘deep human sympathy’ (2011: 34). He simply seeks to show that there are shared expectations of appropriate attitudes, behaviours and practices concerning relationship types whose meaning are therefore socially constituted.

From that perspective, it is not clear why personal interactions in political or civic associations are necessarily political friendships. Surely, ‘affection’ may or may not develop between members (‘citizens’) (Mallory, 2012), but that is not the collective imperative. What is operative in associations is an orientation to a common goal, or set of goals, irrespective of their voluntary constitution. That does not mean that interactions need be ‘utilitarian’. It simply means that in the first instance associational relationships are oriented to exogenous objectives, much like relationships between comrades and colleagues in interpersonal contexts. Friendship, rather than inscribed in associational norms, is a secondary outcome of human conviviality, just as much as personal animosity. Moreover, it stands to reason that political associations may emerge or receive decisive impulses from intimate, dyadic friendships so that a developmental logic that sees associational life as productive of friendships may just as well be turned on its head. The politically generative friendship between Marx and Engels serves as a salient case in point (Alberoni, 2016: 113–15). This is yet another indication that friendship is not sealed off in the private sphere, and that the distinction from political friendship does not hold (see also Singer, 2017). Personal friendship can clearly be orientated to a concrete other as well as to public affairs.

Political friendship as interpersonal relationship

Against the background of Márkus’s and Kracauer’s reflections on friendship, political friendship can be conceived of as a concept denotative of a specific type of personal relationship. Márkus reaffirms the world-openness of friendship, its orientation to another via common interests, including politics, as a consequence of developments in a differentiated private sphere. Kracauer’s was a first phenomenological approach to different types of personal bonds. Taking these approaches on board, we can modify Mallory’s (2012) original position that conceives of political friendship as ‘personal bonds between citizens’ forged in political and civic organisation, while leaving friendship’s affective charge in place. Required are specific actors, specific contexts and the typical range of interactions that characterises a given friendship as ‘political’.

I suggest that political friendship can describe interpersonal relationships that personify trust, respect, care and affection and are maintained for their own sake, but are cross-cut by common or opposing political concerns and convictions; relationships in which the strategic demands of politics need to be negotiated alongside the norms of intimacy. The specific contexts are private life as well as civic and/or political life whose boundaries are constantly crossed (see also Leuschner, 2016). ‘Civic or political life’ may refer to the ‘political system’, but also to civil society associations, the media and other organisational entities for which the political system, or politics more broadly, is an ‘environment’, in Luhmann’s’ sense (1995: 176–209), or a central point of reference.

Interactions between political friends are neither entirely balanced on the fulcrums of ‘discretion’ (acquaintances) or exogenous demands (comrades, colleagues). What is central is trust, respect, care and affection (intimacy) whose maintenance, especially in the case of opposing political allegiances, requires significant discretionary sensibilities. On that conception, political friendship is characterised by ‘sociological ambivalence’ insofar as political friends need to navigate ‘incompatible normative expectations’ (Merton and Barber, 1976: 6). Here ambivalence and ambiguity meet insofar as normative expectations cannot be divorced from their embeddedness in public and private contexts. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr calls on sociologists to ‘systematically take into view the thresholds by which the “private” is separated from the “non-private” while simultaneously remaining related in the sense of a unity of difference,’ including ‘the multifarious practical, communicative and personal designation of thresholds (2010: 37).⁴ Friendship in general and political friendship in particular may well be a cardinal case for what she calls ‘threshold analysis’.

Political friendship or democratic solidarity?

The above conception, however, does not sufficiently incorporate the concerns of theorists who envisage political friendship as a civic bond between strangers and advocate for its use as a social science research concept. But because in that context ‘friendship’ cannot exceed its metaphoric usefulness, consideration needs to be given to its adequacy. Solidarity, on the other hand, has considerable historical pedigree both in terms of its application to political bonds and as a descriptor of societal interdependencies. For these reasons alone, it is somewhat curious that the concept is granted scant if any attention in the literature on political friendship. Mallory and Carlson do not respond to Durkheim’s attempt to conceptualise a specifically modern form of social integration under its name.⁵ For Schwarzenbach, solidarity is ‘too general and vague’, while ‘in the original Marxist tradition (at least) it tends…to be conceived as primarily male’ (Schwarzenbach, 2010: 14), despite the history and meaning of solidarity preceding and exceeding usage in the ‘Marxist tradition’ (see Bayertz, 1999).

Others are more circumspect. Hauke Brunkhorst charts the emergence of democratic solidarity from the non-egalitarian notion of political or civic friendship in Greco-Roman philosophy, and from Judeo-Christian ‘brotherliness’. ‘In the standard liberal understanding’, he writes, ‘democracy is a procedure for majority rule. And solidarity is, according to political persuasion, either superfluous or a supplementary social or socialist achievement of the general welfare’. He goes on to ‘defend the thesis that, in modern societies, solidarity coincides with the concept of democracy’ (Brunkhorst, 2005: xxiii). At stake is a normative description and critical appraisal of democratic solidarity as the appropriate concept for societies marked by difference, diversity and pluralism. It is under these conditions that ‘the old ideas of civic solidarity and love of neighbor [are transformed] into the practical project of an egalitarian and self-determined solidarity among strangers’ (2005: 76). While a full summary of the argument is not possible here, the following statement should suffice to give pause concerning the adequacy of political friendship:

Legal subjects who organize their public affairs through the medium of positive law are required no longer to be attached to one another as friendly citizens of the polis, or to love one another as Christians. It is a profane legal community, not a sacred association of friends; constitutional patriotism, not service to God; obedience to the law, not service to the people and the state. In the institutionalized discourse of a democratic legal community, solidarity loses ‘that character of forced willingness to sacrifice oneself for a collective system of self-assertion that is always present in premodern forms of solidarity’⁶. (Brunkhorst, 2005: 76–7)

Under conditions of a ‘normative horizon’ that has exploded the confines of a parochial, communal sense of belonging, democratic solidarity offers a benchmark towards the integration of a ‘global legal community’ (2005: 76, esp. 103–76).

Taking Brunkhorst’s argument into account, I suggest the political friendship can be retained as a concept describing a particular type of personal relationship, while democratic solidarity offers itself as the more fitting descriptor of, and normative basis for, political and civic bonds. Thus, when Schwarzenbach asserts that ‘civic friendship emerges as the forgotten problem in modern democratic theory’ (2005: 239, original emphases) it could just as well be argued that the qualifying efforts required in shaping the concept to suit modern conditions suggest its unsuitability rather than a collective forgetting or wrongful theorising. What about the use of ‘friendship’ in international relations? After all, it is part of everyday usage and political speech. As such it cannot be dislodged; but we can stay awake to the obfuscating work it does as a metaphor and euphemism in the shoring up of alliances and their strategic ends.

Friendship, however, is worth retaining as a concept denoting a relationship of intimacy that is open to the world, not because of some inordinate obsession with ‘correct’ language use in the face of friend’s semantic promiscuity. Sociologists’ remit is to work up conceptions that can help us makes sense of modern intimacy’s varied forms in a way that is both adequate to and suspicious of common sense. When that remit is underpinned by a critical sociological approach, the call is also another: to clearly name a vital human relationship that can only be sustained to the extent that its ‘ideals’ are pursued in order to protect the autonomy its world-open intimacy can assure only as distinct from politics. In his interpretation of Heller on friendship, Sergio Mariscal reminds us that

[t]he link between modern friendship and modern politics is…an indirect one. The existence of a democratic form of politics hinges on the openness of a public realm in which a plurality of opinions can be expressed. In contrast, authoritarianisms of all kinds strive for unity and, in doing so, work towards the destruction of the open public sphere: they aim at eliminating the distinction between the political and intimacy…Friendship is a relationship that lives and thrives on these distinctions. (Mariscal, 2018: 279–80)

Surely, then, Maria Márkus is right when, drawing on the work of her friend and ally Agnes Heller, she points out the transformative potential of friendship as anchored in the support of the self-determination of others. In friendship, we can attain self-awareness not by way of withdrawn contemplation, but by way of intimacy as mutuality, ‘by regarding the other as other’ (Hegel, 1991: 42). As such, friendship is a conduit for ‘innovative impulses’ for public life, as Márkus puts it. But of the two utopian horizons it is decency that spells out the specific temper and ‘regulative ideal’ required for civil society institutions to do their work towards the realisation of democratic solidarity. At the same time, it describes a comprehensive, integrative modus vivendi. Unlike friendship, which instantiates decency in interpersonal relations, decency is generalisable. Unlike friendship, which is trust, is respect is justice and to that extent is non-negotiable, the substantive content of decency is subject to collective elaboration. Friendship can neither bear enclosure in the intimate sphere, nor wholesale re-location into the public sphere. It is from its semi-public location, after all, that friendship gives substance to autonomy, is able to be built and maintained time and again despite and in the face of modern life’s less salutary realities and can show us ‘other possibilities’ here in the real.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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