Friendship and the new politics: beyond community

ABSTRACT

What role can friendship play in contemporary politics? This article answers this question by showing how friendship supplements one of the central tropes of modern European thought: community. It argues that both the recent phenomenon of populism and more traditional political practice rely on this trope. This results in a politics which focuses on identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately this form of politics seeks an immanence which is impossible to achieve. In contrast, friendship offers a new way of thinking about politics as it focuses on open-ended relations between persons based not on sameness, but otherness and difference. The article articulates five key features of this understanding of friendship: (1) that it is a relationship, (2) between self and other, (3) which exists between the friends, which is (4) extendable into a network but not a unity and (5) it eschews all programmes or projects. In this way, friendship suggests not a project or a programme but an ethos. This article concludes by claiming that friendship is the open-ended and ongoing encounter with the other, and its politics holds a shared space open for the potential that this encounter brings.

KEYWORDS:

• Friendship
• community
• populism
• self
• other

View responses to this article:

Friendship in politics, community, populism and liberalism: a response to Nordin and Smith

Acknowledgements

This article was funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (CS001-U-17). This article was first presented at the workshop ‘Friendship and Politics: Cross-Cultural Perspectives’ staged in Leeds in June 2018 where we were grateful for engaged comments. We are also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for their comments, and to Adam Roberts of The Economist for his thoughtful response.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange CS001-U-17.