Political Friendship

Abstract

I have argued that the bond of friendship provides the most promising source of the solidarity of a liberal political community in conditions of pronounced moral conflict. We share the ‘open road’ of a political life with our fellow citizens because we care about them at a basic level. In some sense, we regard them as our friends. But as I noted at the end of the last chapter, that seems a very strong claim indeed. On the face of it, the bond of friendship does not seem a particularly plausible candidate for the bond of a vast modern society whose members do not know each other, do not like each other and do not agree with each other about the substantive direction they would like their shared life to take. In this chapter, I will defend my appeal to friendship and argue that it can plausibly constitute the bond of a society with the characteristics I have mentioned. Indeed, I hope to show that friendship might in fact provide a more plausible interpretation of liberal solidarity than does the prevailing ‘citizenship’ approach, which conceives of community as grounded in commonality.