Two recent biographies, of Robert Lowell and of Elizabeth Bishop, record the poets’ friendship—a friendship (notably, between a man and a woman) seared in the fire of artistic creation, tested by ambition and mental illness, avowed by both to be life- and work-enhancing, and lasting until Lowell’s death. There is nothing in Friendship Reconsidered that invites reflection on the particulars of any friendship—its circumstances and place, its idiosyncracies, other people who support or envy or disrupt it, or its vulnerability to the vicissitudes of time. That distance from experience, the way in which the author does not ask us to fully inhabit her subject, tells us that she has assigned herself a conceptual task.
This task P. E. Digeser performs well and in a lively, sometimes colloquial, always astute way. She points out that some of our usual assumptions about friendship do not hold across cultures: Altruism, or intimacy, or even friendship as a relation between individuals may not be defining. In the course of her argument, we are reminded of the myriad conceptions of friendship’s relation to political life—as secession from political turmoil or as rebellion against politics, as a source of political alliances, as a conjectural basis for solidarity and community—the elusive civic friendship. Aristotle, Cicero, and a raft of canonical touchstones are present not as points in a historical survey but because they make an appearance in contemporary political thought. We read Hannah Arendt, Richard Flathman, Jacques Derrida, Carl Schmitt, work by Simon Keller, Danielle Allen, and many others on the subject. The author’s critical assessments of contemporaries give the book its shape and order.
All this dissection and appraisal is to a purpose: Digeser is thinking her own way to “what friendship means” and “how it matters to politics,” and the value of the book lies here. Friendship is a set of social practices, she argues. These practices structure our expectations about the repertoire of motives ordinarily appropriate to friendship. The defining characteristic of friendship as a relation is recognition of mutual motivation—believing that the other’s actions are motivated by these mutually recognized sentiments. Utility and obligation do not suffice. But are there motives and actions essential to friendship? Digeser says no. Any mutually recognized motive can meet the requirements of friendship, from genuine affection and care to sharing fun. Any motive works so long as friends offer one another “belief-sustaining actions.” Practices also entail subscribing to certain adverbial conditions of mutual disclosure (we act toward one another playfully, caringly, intimately, etc.). On this basis, we can distinguish mere friendly actions from friendship, and we can identify false friends. We can also say that friendship entails reasons to give preference to friends and duties toward them, but because the practices of friendship are variable, so is the character and weight of these reasons and obligations. Every element of the author’s concept of friendship is carefully wrought, and earned by dueling with alternative accounts.
Digeser’s deep intellectual and political pluralism emerges from her practices approach, and the pluralist thread runs right through the book. Her answer to the question “What does it mean?” is tied to this conceptual apparatus. Friendship is an expression of individuality: “Friends work upon themselves to best assist the self-enacted individuality of each other” (p. XVII). She calls this ideal bridging/bonding friendship. Mutual recognition requires us to attend closely to our own motivations. Friends are willing to work on their motives, and so controlling, moderating, and transforming sentiments is one aspect of self-enactment. This is not to say that friendship is instrumental to individuality; the relation is dynamic and reciprocal. The author’s concept of friendship is consonant with liberalism, and she means it to absolve liberalism of the charge of atomistic individualism.
With this apparatus in hand, Digeser considers three themes integral to “how it matters to politics.” One is whether friendship can serve, as so many have argued, as a model for citizenship, above all as a source of political unity. The instrumental purposes assigned friendship, even community or solidarity, are not central, the author argues; cooperation does not require it. And civic friendship would require not only stripping it of intimacy and emotion, as some proponents admit; on Digeser’s account, friendship, civic or not, requires mutual recognition of motives—an impossibility outside of some strictly bounded ideal community. What friendship can do is offer an ideal of citizenship “that bonds partisans and can bridge political differences” (p. 142). This conclusion seems to go beyond Digeser’s sensible notion that, of course, friends do civic stuff. It seems as much a friendly concession to the many theorists who want, somehow, to bring unity and reciprocity to public life by way of friendship, as is borne out by her own critical arguments.
The author’s second charge is to consider the political conditions that derange friendship. The emphasis is on friendship as a sanctuary from and protection against the state, and as a potential resource for political opposition. Another argument that complements the author’s overall position is Arendt’s notion of friendship as a preserve of pluralism in the face of totalism. The discussion of “friendship during dark times” ends with the thought that the author’s ideal of self-enactment operates beyond the reach of the political. In this chapter especially, something beyond careful parsing seemed necessary—some narrative of the wrenching torque between friendship and politics in regimes that see private relations as subversive and where friends can turn treacherous.
What about friendship and political institutions in stable states? Fairness and impartiality argue against room for friendship in the operation of liberal institutions, though the author allows for it in the appointment process for some offices where, in addition to qualification, trust and loyalty are crucial (the book antedates the Trump administration.) Domination and gendered hierarchies chill friendship, she shows. Should the state encourage a “law of friendship” by extending to it the privilege of privacy, duty of confidentiality, and more? A rich legal literature debates whether friends should have the privileges of kin, and Digeser is ambivalent about a “law of friendship,” for reasons she lays out. Would the legally recognized commitment to take medical leave to care for friends, for example, lead to a change in the usual expectations and practices of friendship? Should it?
Finally, international friendship, meaning friendship between nations, takes up a third of the book, and the author’s liberalism emerges plainly here. Friendship among nations is not reducible to partnership or alliance, which are motivated by self-interest or security concerns. Interstate friendship, rightly understood, is motivated by a mutual desire to promote and protect one another’s just institutions and policies. Grounded in John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples (1999), Digeser speaks of “international friendships of character”: cooperation that goes beyond mutual utility and that incorporates mutual recognition of motives and the adverbial condition of acting justly toward one another (she adds other adverbs: interacting confidently, trustingly, presumptuously, boldly). She suggests that aspirationally, international friendship would generate a different quality of international politics.
Throughout, the author fashions a middle ground: “The goal of this work is to carve out a position between whole-hearted endorsement and complete rejection of friendship as a political concern” (p. XIII). After all the parsing and analysis, the sober but generous interpretation of a host of writers and arguments, Digeser has earned her skepticism: skepticism when it comes to the sentimental and often diffuse aspiration to find in friendship something modern life has lost; skepticism when it comes to modeling citizenship and civic action; skepticism when it comes to government relying on or fostering friendship. The part left for friendship in politics is modest and mainly precautionary, and the part for politics in friendship is slim—which is not to say that personally and individually, friendship is not shaped by politics in practice.
The author comes to comparatively modest positions by making her way, step by step, through a literature that is philosophically complex and at the same time immune to our strong feelings about friends and politics. The final line of the book is true to her pluralist sensibility: “There is no one true friendship. There are, however, true friendships” (p. 281).
