Rethinking personal and political friendship with Durkheim

Abstract

This article addresses the contribution that Durkheim's sociology can make to recent scholarship on the public and political significance of friendship. The concept of political friendship deals with the problem of how anonymous strangers can feel a principled solidarity, such that they recognize each other as moral equals and show a willingness to act in each other's interests. Because the new scholarship on political friendship aims to reveal the social bonds that underlie the political, we argue that this literature will benefit from a deeper engagement with social theory, particularly Durkheimian sociology. A Durkheimian approach reveals how friendship is not just a personal and private bond between individuals, but also a collective representation expressing some of the highest ideals of social relations, including justice, equality, and respect. Ultimately it is these idealized – or better, sacred – meanings of friendship that are driving the current interest in political friendship, hence the need to analyse them. The paper treats Durkheim as a conceptual resource for enriching current debates on political friendship, but it also offers an analysis of his own ambivalent approach to friendship as a way station on the road to broader forms of solidarity.

Keywords:

• collective representations
• Durkheim
• political friendship
• the sacred
• solidarity
• strangers
• symbols

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Patricia Cormack, Laura Eramian, Mervyn Horgan, Fuyuki Kurasawa, members of the Canadian Network for Critical Sociology, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and criticisms. We also thank our mutual doctoral supervisor, Brian Singer, for comments on the ideas in this paper when they first appeared in our graduate student work. The St. Francis Xavier University Council on Research provided research funding. Krisztina Riez provided superb research assistance. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the Canadian Sociological Association conference in 2012 and in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University in 2014. Our thanks to the audience members and organizers for their thoughtful comments.

Notes on contributors

Peter Mallory is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. His other publications include an article on friendship in Tocqueville in the Journal of Classical Sociology and an article on Adam Smith and friendship in the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Jesse Carlson is a doctoral student in sociology at York University and a lecturer at Brandon University, Canada. His dissertation develops an historical and typological account of the sociology of morality.

Notes

1. Important sources include Allen (2004), Arendt (1968), Derrida (1997), Devere and Smith (2010), Foucault (1997), Kaplan (2007), Kahane (1999), Ludwig (2010), Pakaluk (1994), Pahl (1998), Scorza (2004), Schwarzenbach (2009), Smith (2011), Wellman (2001).

2. One danger of not distinguishing between personal and political friendship is what Sennett (1976) calls an ‘ideology of intimacy’, that is, the critique of the presumed cold impersonality of the broader society from the ideal of intimate friendship.

3. It is worth noting Watts Miller's claim that Durkheim describes modernity as scaling down the sacred, generating ‘a world of the semi-sacred’ (2002, 28).

4. Massimo Rosati suggests that ‘When reading Durkheim, we must sometimes posit a third category, the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday, and it seems that the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane must be extended to a trichotomy. […] Unfortunately, nothing in Durkheim's thought suggests that we can see things this way. There is no such inner articulation of the concept of the profane’ (2005, 72–3).

5. Our use of ‘discourse of friendship’ is only partially analogous to what Alexander calls the ‘discourse of civil society’ (2008). Unlike Alexander we do not analyse a code of binary opposites, nor do we believe that the discourse of friendship generates a binary code of good and evil, as in Schmitt's ([1932] 1996) friend/enemy distinction. We prefer to speak of a continuum.

6. See, for example, Smart et al.'s analysis (2012) of the wounds of difficult friendships.

7. See, for example, Durkheim's discussions of the imbrication of the ideal with the real in The Elementary Forms ([1912] 1995, 229, 424–6).

8. In his recent biography of Durkheim, Marcel Fournier calls Hommay's death an accident, but suggests that it could have been suicide (2013, 117).

9. Rousseau ([1782/1789] 1953) is an obvious example, as is the place of friendship in Mary Wollstonecraft's ([1792] 2010) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

10. In several passages Durkheim connects friendships with exchange and reciprocity. As he argues, the economic emphasis on the egoistic individual leads many theorists to treat social bonds, including friendships, as contractual and self-interested. Such views, he argues, have ‘failed to recognize what exchange implies’, and he seeks to reveal the pre-contractual symbolic bonds that underlie reciprocity, whether between friends, associates, or strangers. Even more, because in each of us there is ‘something other than ourselves’, the contracting individual does not only make bonds and exchanges with others, but is constituted as a self through those exchanges. The basis of friendship for Durkheim is not need, utility, or advantage – which touch only the surface – but the deeper ‘feeling of solidarity’ and the symbolic and emotional connection to others. One's friend, he argues, is a constitutive, integral part of one's selfhood. For example, see Durkheim [1893] 1984, xliii–xliv, 17, 21–3 and [1925] 1961, 207–36.

11. Some notable projects in queer theory rewrite the boundaries of secondary groups and their relation to the political. See, for example, Halberstam's critique of familial normativity (2012) and the concept of ‘families of choice’ developed by Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan (2001). Regarding the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that Durkheim was interested in resolving, it is worth reflecting on the place of collective experiences connected to events like Nelson Mandela's funeral.

12. Durkheim writes in Moral Education that ‘To hold to society is to cling to the social ideal; and there is a little of this ideal in each of us. Each of us has a hand in this collective ideal, which [ … ] in turn is the sacred thing par excellence. Consequently, each of us shares the religious deference inspired by this ideal. The bond to the group thus implies, in an indirect but almost necessary way, the bond to other individuals. [ … ] This is what explains the moral character ascribed to sentiments of interpersonal sympathy’ ([1925] 1961, 82–3). See also the Elementary Forms where the collective energy of the group uplifts people in their everyday interactions with others ([1912] 1995, 213).

13. In claiming that there is a dialectic operating here, we differ, for instance, from Anne Warfield Rawls (2004), whose extensive reconstructive reading of Durkheim gives priority to practices over beliefs.

14. See, for example, the connection Tocqueville draws between the depoliticizing potential of private friendships and despotic, tyrannical forms of democracy. On Tocqueville and the social bond, see Singer (2013, 235–45).