Friendship and Strangership: Rethinking Political Friendship through the Work of Adam Smith

Abstract

This article considers the contribution that Adam Smith's work can make to current scholarship on the political significance of friendship. Smith's approach to friendship is important because he decouples it from intimacy and uses friendship to theorise solidarity and mutual identification between strangers. He theorises not only the friend, but also the stranger, and furthermore, their interrelationship. So closely are the friend and the stranger intertwined in his work that scholars have recently coined the term ‘strangership’ to describe his characterisation of amicable stranger relations. Smith does develop a rich concept of sympathy as the animating principle of stranger relations. I argue, however, that Smith's approach remains limited by his weak and depoliticised conception of strangership, which is premised on the similarity of strangers and obscures difference, exclusion and inequality. Addressing these limitations is important for developing understandings of political friendship and strangership appropriate to diverse societies of unequal strangers.

Keywords:

• Adam Smith
• Political Friendship
• Strangers
• Sympathy

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Jesse Carlson, Laura Eramian, Mervyn Horgan, Vince Marotta and the members of the Canadian Network for Critical Sociology for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Valuable funding was provided through a grant from the St Francis Xavier University Council on Research.

Notes

1. Aristotle's and other important philosophical accounts of friendship can be found in Pakaluk (1991).

2. There is now a substantial literature on political friendship. For an excellent overview and a substantial bibliography, see Devere and Smith (2010).

3. One of the subtlest accounts of these constitutive tensions of friendship is still Pitt-Rivers’ description (1961: 138–40).

4. In addition to Arendt (1968: 24) see also Allan's (1989) description of the modern ideology of friendship as well as Silver's discussion of private friendship (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Mallory

Peter Mallory is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at St Francis Xavier University, Canada. His interest in friendship and strangership is part of a larger research project on the meaning and significance of personal relationships in early social thought. Other essays from this research project include a study of political friendship in Tocqueville in the Journal of Classical Sociology