Modernity, Intimacy, and Friendship

Abstract

Intimacy is a fundamental human need. But the modalities of its enactment and experience, its possibilities and constraints, depend on context and on place, as well as time. In this chapter I will address intimacy as part of Western developments without which the contemporary meanings attributed to friendship are unthinkable. I have chosen to sketch some key structural and cultural transformations in private life. The autonomy promised by intimate relationships takes on particular significance with the rise of industrial capitalism. But already in the commercial society described by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment these personal bonds are discussed. In the literature on the history of friendship, works by Adam Ferguson and David Hume, but above all by Adam Smith, are almost always held up as the first modern documents lauding the intimacy of friendship. That thesis bears rethinking. Scholars have argued that this commonly reiterated interpretation misses the highly instrumental approach to intimacy taken by the Scots, and especially by Smith. I argue instead that early Romanticism is key to the meaning of intimacy in the modern sense; that the Romantics’ often exaggerated outpourings of sentiment prefigure a cultural valorization of intimacy in terms of mutual disclosure, something that gains particular traction with the diffusion of therapy culture in the 20th century.

They who would confine friendship to two persons, seem to confound the wise security of friendship with the jealousy and folly of love.

Adam Smith