No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Aristotelian Realism: Political Friendship and the Problem of Stability
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2019
Abstract
This paper argues that the pursuit of stability is the primary concern of Aristotle's understanding of political friendship. Specifically, I argue that Aristotle chooses to understand political friendship to be a “special sort” of utility/advantage friendship, applicable to multiple regime types of varying degrees of (in)equality, because he fears what might happen when citizens in any polity develop mutual animosity. Turning to the contemporary liberal democratic context, I note that Aristotle provides us with a strong positive argument for why we ought to take political friendship seriously. However, I stipulate that contemporary liberal democracies present obstacles to the realization of classical political friendship. I thereby conclude by suggesting that citizens can potentially be political friends when they understand politics and their social relations through the “metaphor” of political friendship.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019
Footnotes
I would like to thank Ruth Abbey, Samuel Bagg, Mario Feit, Michael Gillespie, Ruth Grant, Jack Knight, Antong Liu, Abdeslam Maghraoui, Elliot Mamet, Alexandra Oprea, Thomas Spagens, Brian Spisiak, Isak Tranvik, Baldwin Wong, and my anonymous reviewers. I would especially like to thank Gerald Mara for commenting on several drafts.
References
1 References to works of Aristotle will be given parenthetically and are to the following editions: Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Bartlett, Robert C. and Collins, Susan D. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aristotle, , Politics, trans. Lord, Carnes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eudemian Ethics and Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
2 Similarly, Sherman, Nancy, “Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47, no. 4 (1987): 589–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Nehamas, Alexander, On Friendship (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 41Google Scholar.
4 Ward, Ann, Contemplating Friendship in Aristotle's Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 111–13Google Scholar.
5 Ward, Contemplating Friendship, 115–23. Nehamas's and Ward's discussions are reviewed in Abbey, Ruth, “Review Essay: On Friendship,” Review of Politics 79, no. 4 (2017): 695–707CrossRefGoogle Scholar, alongside Digeser, P. E., Friendship Reconsidered: What It Means and How It Matters to Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
6 von Heyking, John, The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016), 11Google Scholar. Von Heyking is here drawing on Aristotle's characterization of virtue friendship as “complete” or “perfect” (teleia) friendship and utility and pleasure friendships as incomplete or imperfect (NE 1156a6–1156b33).
7 Von Heyking, Form of Politics, 10–11.
8 Schwarzenbach, Sibyl A., On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Cooper, John, “Political Animals and Civic Friendship,” in Aristotle's Politics: Critical Essays, ed. Kraut, Richard and Skultely, Steven (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 71–76Google Scholar.
10 Frank, Jill, A Democracy of Distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Inamura, Kazutara, Justice and Reciprocity in Aristotle's Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Den Uyl, Douglas J., “Aristotelianism, Commerce, and the Liberal Order,” in Aristotle and Modern Politics: The Persistence of Political Philosophy, ed. Tessitore, Aristide (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 278–306Google Scholar; Yack, Bernard, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
11 Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 161–62.
12 Çidam, Çigdem, “Unruly Practices: Gezi Protests and the Politics of Friendship,” New Political Science 39, no. 3 (July 2017): 379CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 140–48.
14 I thank one of my anonymous reviewers for coining this phrase.
15 Yack advances a slightly different interpretation of this passage. On Yack's account, conflating political friendship with anything more than legal utility friendship—with moral utility friendship, let alone virtue friendship—is dangerous because it raises the expectations political friends have for one another, thereby making it more likely that they will disappoint one another: “they will complain not only about the failure to return advantage for advantage, but about betrayal and treason” (Yack, Problems of a Political Animal, 121).
16 Cooper, “Political Animals,” 71–75.
17 Johnstone, Steven, A History of Trust in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Allen, Danielle S., Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Çidam, “Unruly Practices,” 379; Jill Frank, Democracy of Distinction.
19 Ober, Josiah, “Classical Athenian Democracy and Democracy Today,” in Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going Together (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 This characterization of political friendship is supported by recent research that suggests that marketplace cooperation is more likely when there is a preexisting culture of trust. See Guiso, Luigi, Sapienza, Paola, and Zingales, Luigi, “Does Culture Affect Economic Outcomes?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 23–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 This explains why Aristotle remarks that a regime is just to the extent that friendship—equal or unequal—appears in that regime (NE 1161a10).
22 Accordingly, Aristotle also argues that “the virtue of the citizen must necessarily be with a view to the regime. If, then, there are indeed several forms of regime, it is clear that it is not possible for the virtue of the excellent citizen to be single, or complete virtue…. That it is possible for a citizen to be excellent yet not possess the virtue in accordance with which he is an excellent man, therefore, is evident” (Pol. 1276b31–6). I thank Ruth Abbey for reminding me of this passage.
23 I paraphrase the formulation offered in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 636.
24 Similarly, Lorraine Pangle notes that even though timocracies and democracies may find it difficult to realize political friendship because their members tend to have lax morals, it is far more difficult to realize political friendship in monarchies, let alone tyrannies; given that they presume their citizens to be unequal, monarchies impose additional structural barriers to friendship (Pangle, Lorraine Smith, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003]Google Scholar).
25 It is important to stress that the full case for why we must appeal to the resources of political friendship in order to adequately address the problem of stability requires both positive and negative arguments: a positive argument that demonstrates political friendship's importance; and a negative argument that demonstrates why alternative paths to stability, such as John Rawls's shared commitment to justice, Friedrich von Hayek's spontaneous order, or Chantal Mouffe's pluralist agonism, are either insufficient or wrongheaded. That is, even though Aristotle provides a strong positive argument for the importance of political friendship, a strong negative argument still needs to be made.
26 Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 22–23Google Scholar.
27 Cognitive science suggests that around 98 percent of thought is unconscious.
28 For more, see Lakoff, George, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008)Google Scholar; Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Boroditsky, Lera and Thibodeau, Paul H., “Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 2 (2001): e16782, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016782Google Scholar.
29 “Economist Debates: Language: Statements,” The Economist, Dec. 22, 2014, accessed Dec. 23, 2010, http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/628.
30 Allen, Talking to Strangers, 156.
31 Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship, 53–54. One immediate objection, which I do not have the space to rebut here, is that my proposed metaphoric notion of political friendship cannot succeed because it cannot overcome the need for political friends to recognize in one another political virtue and a commitment to the common advantage. For example, Digeser argues that even though the metaphor of political friendship may be able to overcome the problem of mutual recognition of motives, it still cannot generate trust, for trust demands that people recognize the correct sort of motivation or disposition in one another and can count on one another to act in a particular way. See Digeser, Friendship Reconsidered, 110ff.
32 Ignatieff, Michael, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 150–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.