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Civic Friendship and Thin Citizenship

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Abstract

Contemporary appeals for a deepening of civic friendship in liberal democracies often draw on Aristotle. This paper warns against a certain kind of attempt to use Aristotle in our own theorising, namely accounts of civic friendship that characterise it as similar in some way to Aristotelian virtue friendship. The most prominent of these attempts have focused on disinterested mutual regard as a basic ingredient in all Aristotelian forms of friendship. The argument against this is that it inadequately accounts for the idea of a virtue friend as another self, which we find in Aristotle’s thought. When we attend closely to that, we see that civic friendship is different in a fundamental way from virtue friendship because virtue friends are keenly committed to the moral improvement of one another. It is argued that Aristotle does not see civic friendship in the same way. However, if this argument about the differences between the forms of friendship cannot be accepted, the paper argues that we should not draw on Aristotle for an understanding of civic friendship because any similarity it might have to virtue friendship would license illiberal interventions in the lives of citizens in service of some idea of moral improvement. A seeming connection between Aristotelian civic friendship and thick conceptions of citizenship is replaced with a connection between it and thinner conceptions.

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Notes

  1. Quotations from the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) are from the Ostwald translation (1962). Quotations from the Politics (Pol) are from the Barker translation, revised by Stalley (1995).

  2. I will use ‘altruism’, ‘disinterested regard’, and ‘mutual well-wishing’ interchangeably. While it does not bear on my argument here, ‘altruism’ does raise some philosophical issues, since Aristotle says that friendship is part of what makes an individual life eudaimonic and, therefore, friendship and self-interest are connected (see e.g. Annas 1977).

  3. Part of the appeal of Aristotle is surely the sense of warm-blooded relations between citizens, which this common liberal view often seems to lack.

  4. I am writing this as many Americans are expressing grave worries about the ‘toxic rhetoric’ of the country’s political discourse. After the shootings in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011, many blamed the aggressiveness of contemporary political debate and the threat this poses to the possibility of reasoned deliberation about the issues that are dividing Americans.

  5. Alpern disagrees that the well-wishing found in the inferior forms of friendship is of the same kind as that found in virtue friendship (1983).

  6. An ‘incorrect’ regime is not necessarily a wicked regime. Aristotle is clear enough that there are numerous practical constitutional variations that are neither perfectly virtuous nor vicious.

  7. He specifically cites Barber’s Strong Democracy and MacIntyre’s After Virtue (cf. Bryan 2009).

  8. Yack also cites Alpern (1983) and Price (1990) as making a similar misinterpretation.

  9. At 1278a40, where Aristotle is drawing his discussion about the good man and the good citizen to a close, he says that even when the good man and the good citizen are identical, not all good citizens will be such. Only those who direct public affairs will be and, therefore, we can say that even in this idealised case, the terms of civic friendship will be different from anything found in virtue friendship. Some citizens will, even here, be of a different kind, which will necessarily qualify the kind of philia between the city’s members.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Manchester Workshops in Political Theory, September 2010. I am grateful to ‘Friendship’ panel participants for their suggestions and probing questions. I am also grateful to the anonymous referee for this journal for raising important concerns. Finally, thanks to Michelle Bentley for numerous discussions about the paper and for helping me clarify my thoughts.

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Correspondence to R. K. Bentley.

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Bentley, R.K. Civic Friendship and Thin Citizenship. Res Publica 19, 5–19 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9203-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9203-5

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