The topic of friendship is enjoying a renewed interest among political theorists and philosophers. The three books reviewed here join several other recent works on friendshipFootnote ¹ and the creation of a journal of friendship studies, Amity. Despite their shared focus on friendship, the three works under review complement rather than duplicate one another. Alexander Nehamas's work is designed for a general readership, with scholarly nuance being largely relegated to the notes. The books by P. E. Digeser and Ann Ward are more typical academic publications. While Ward focuses almost exclusively on Aristotle, Nehamas and Digeser treat him as the touchstone for all later discussions of friendship in the Western tradition.

Chapter 1 of Nehamas's book, “A Friend Is Another Self,” distills two key features of Aristotle's views on friendship. The first is that friendship “is an unalloyed good, a flawless sort of love and one of life's greatest pleasures, making every life… a better life than one without it” (12). The second is Aristotle's tripartite typology, which distinguishes friendships of utility or advantage from those of pleasure and from those of virtue or character. But Nehamas also identifies ways in which he believes the Aristotelian paradigm has misled us. Nehamas contends that friendship is not as rare or as rarefied as Aristotle makes out, that even good friendships can have a more instrumental component than he allows (112), and that friendship is not necessarily a force for good in the way that Aristotle takes it, or at least its highest form, to be. This last critique explains Nehamas's insistence that friendship has a double face (6): it can foster the friends’ mutual moral improvement or their moral degeneration (61, 95). To illustrate this, Nehamas's final chapter contains a lengthy analysis of the movie Thelma and Louise in which the eponymous characters’ friendship incites them to violence, theft, murder, lawlessness, and ultimately suicide.

That Thelma and Louise's relationship provokes these outcomes illuminates a central aspect of Nehamas's own approach to friendship, which is a view about the self. Nehamasian selves are made, not given, and the freedom and fluidity that accompany this view of the self allow friendships to be very influential in shaping that self. Rejecting an essentialist view in favor of an aesthetic and plural one, Nehamas holds that we become different in different friendships. Friendships are a force in our self-fashioning (6–7, 138–39, 206, 211, 215). He cites Nietzsche on the importance of giving style to oneself (222), but corrects what he takes to be Nietzsche's assumption that the individual does this alone. Applying this aesthetic lens to Thelma and Louise, Nehamas concludes that “it was their friendship and the situations they confronted that led them to develop the features that allowed them to declare their independence. They did not discover their ‘real’ self—they created it” (212).

Nehamas accuses Aristotle of holding a substantive view of human nature that not all can accept, and this view informs and infects his conception of friendship, limiting its value (29). Aristotle fails to realize that we are all mixtures of virtue and vice and that we therefore accept as much in our friends (25). But Nehamas occupies a similar position, advocating a conception of friendship that rests upon a contestable view of the self. Anyone rejecting or even doubting his aesthetic, plural, protean picture of the self could remain skeptical about much of what Nehamas claims about friendship. Yet Nehamas never presents his view of the self, and its implications for friendship, as one possible position. It is, instead, repeatedly presented as the way things are.

Friendship is necessarily oriented toward the future, insists Nehamas, entitling his fourth chapter “And So On” to capture this momentum. Calling someone a friend makes a commitment to tomorrow, but it is a commitment to something I cannot yet know about the friend, given that she can change and that our friendship can be a force in her alterations. I might also change, and in part because of the friendship, so it is simultaneously a commitment to openness and a willingness to be surprised by how things turn out, both within and between us (134–39). Conversely, a friendship is effectively over when we feel we know all there is to know about a friend (213). This aspect of Nehamas's account of friendship is also vulnerable to doubts. What of friendships that thrive on nostalgia rather than openness to a mysterious future? Nehamas opens his book with an anecdote about a set of friends he has retained since his high-school days. They meet regularly in their erstwhile hometown and welcome former classmates like Nehamas who now live overseas and can join the gatherings only occasionally. What cements this group seems to be a shared past, not an open future (1–4). In the spirit of pluralism that permeates Nehamas's account of friendship, it would seem more appropriate to accept and even welcome the possibility that friendships can be of both varieties—future directed and backward looking. Some friendships might, correspondingly, flourish because both parties feel that they know, and are known by, one another thoroughly. The element of surprise and openness to an uncertain future might not be the tie that binds all friendships in the way Nehamas declares it to be.

This depiction of friendship's forward orientation seems, moreover, to relapse into an Aristotelianism that Nehamas otherwise rejects, for part of its forward momentum is that friendship promises a better future. Nehamasian friends “come to each other with a sense that our friendship will allow us to function at our best, improving what we already know of ourselves, engaging parts of which we have been unaware, and leading us to new features that, we hope, will be all to the good” (139). Some anticipation of goodness is therefore built into the way Nehamas characterizes this prospective aspect of friendship. But could this be said of friendships that deteriorate the friends’ moral characters, as Nehamas insists some do? Shouldn't recognition of friendship's double face be factored into and qualify his depiction of the improvement it is said to promise?

Nehamas also insists that friendship is an embodied relationship, “intimately expressed in… looks, gestures, postures, and tones of voice” (142; cf. 179). This too might represent an unacknowledged Aristotelian residue, for Aristotle feared that friendship would fade if the friends were not in regular physical proximity (Nicomachean Ethics VIII.5). This nexus between friendship and embodiment is one of the reasons Nehamas dismisses Facebook friendships, for this social medium “can make friends of people who will never in their life meet each other in person” (196). His other reasons for disparaging Facebook friendships are that they are indiscriminate and easily forged (4), and share only life's good moments (196, 275). The latter charge at least is untrue, but even without defending Facebook, one can wonder what the insistence upon embodiment and shared space means for epistolatory friendships. Involving no bodily proximity, they can be real and robust nonetheless. It is also at odds with Ralph Waldo Emerson's emphasis upon friendship's intensely spiritual, rather than material, nature. Yet Emerson, a rare modern theorist of friendship, receives scant attention in Nehamas's book.

Nehamas's emphasis on the link between friendship and embodiment is part of a meditation about friendship's relationship to art. He begins by asking whether painting can portray friendship well. Part of the problem here is that so much about friendship depends upon motivation rather than action or behavior (70, 79–81, 103, 198), and it can be hard for painting to communicate motivations. This prompts Nehamas to wonder whether literature is better suited to conveying friendship, as the novel can easily inhabit the interior of its characters and scrutinize motivations. He concludes, however, that no first-rate work of fiction takes friendship as its central subject (83) (but later qualifies this with reference to a Flaubert novel, which, however, is not one that celebrates friendship [90]). Chapter 5 largely comprises a lengthy discussion of Yasmina Reza's play Art, which, “like all drama, can offer us a nuanced picture of friendship” (142; cf. 179). This play enacts a friendship's deterioration, which is prompted in part by the friends’ divergent reactions to an expensive artwork. Drama, including presumably cinema given Nehamas's attention to Thelma and Louise, turns out to be the best medium for portraying friendship. Conspicuous by their absence in this catalogue and evaluation of artistic representations of friendship are music and television. Yet friendship is a significant topic for popular music while television has generated a number of notable depictions of friendship—Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex in the City, to name but three. Unlike plays and movies, TV serials can capture how friendships unfold and endure or dissolve over time. The three series listed here are also comedies rather than dramas, yet Nehamas pays no attention to this distinction when discussing artistic genres.

Preferring Michel de Montaigne to Aristotle as a guide to friendship, Nehamas admires in particular the early modern essayist's awareness of the irreducible individuality of friendship. Reflecting on why he and La Boétie became such great friends, Montaigne can only offer the nonexplanation, “Because it was he, because it was I” (quoted in Nehamas, 119). Nehamas's gloss on this is that “every friendship is a unique combination of two souls, impossible to duplicate” (121) and his book's closing lines reiterate this (225). If every friendship boils down to the mutual recognition of individual specificity, this offers another reason why the arts are better vehicles than philosophy for exploring friendship because philosophy has to stop, or at least slow down, when such particularity takes over. But in advancing this Montaignean view, Nehamas fails to mention Montaigne's insistence on how unusual his friendship with La Boétie was. In so insisting, Montaigne of course echoes the classical view about the rarity and preciousness of such higher friendships. Indeed, Montaigne's essay is studded with quotations from and references to ancient authors, including Aristotle, indicating that he is at the very least in conversation with classical views. On several occasions, it seems reasonable to infer that he is affirming the ancient view he cites. If this is so, then Montaigne's ability to represent a common experience of friendship is thrown into question, and the issue of whether he has inherited any of the supposedly troublesome features of the Aristotelian (and Ciceronian) view about friendship demands consideration.

Although Nehamas invokes Jacques Derrida's famous essay on friendship (52), he pays scant attention to the powerful theme of death and mourning threaded through it. And this despite the fact that La Boétie was, as Nehamas notes, dead when Montaigne penned his paean to their friendship. Yet the friend's death is salient for two of the key features Nehamas imputes to friendship, for death presumably ends the open-endedness of the relationship, meaning that the friendship can now be captured and examined in a way that it could not while both friends were alive. The friend's death also renders the fact of embodiment irrelevant. But as Montaigne's essay testifies, the death of the friend need not spell the death of the friendship. His essay breathes life back into La Boétie. And in writing the essay, Montaigne is also engaging in an act of friendship by protecting his friend's reputation when he can no longer do so for himself. Montaigne's essay is thus an act of friendship at the same time that it is a eulogy.

Nehamas observes that during Montaigne's era, friendship was losing its public place in “the arena of war and politics” (47) to become the privatized relationship it is today. Yet Montaigne's essay republicizes their friendship in the hope of protecting La Boétie's reputation from its detractors who claimed that his essay “Of Voluntary Servitude” justified treason. Montaigne was also, no doubt, partly concerned about his own reputation and safety, not wanting to be too closely aligned with the author of a tract that so worried the Catholic establishment (116). His way of doing this was not to disalign himself from La Boétie but to proclaim his friend's loyal political credentials. This would have been less convincing had he published La Boétie's incendiary essay together with his collection, which is, I think, the real reason why he changed his mind about doing this. Nehamas, by contrast, discerns as his motive conveying their personal bond to his readership. This may be partly correct—indeed, with Montaigne multiple motives are not just likely but plausible. But reading Montagine's essay as purely personal, and not as a political expression in defense of his dead friend, misses an important part of its mission.

And just as friends can die while friendships survive, so friends can live while friendship dies. The end of a friendship is especially painful on Nehamas's account because the friend is rejecting not just me but all that he has become through our relationship (203). Nehamas suggests that Aristotle, owing to his general neglect of the saturnine aspects of friendship, offers us no resources for the grief that comes with friendship's passing (5, 200–201). But Aristotle reflects throughout NE IX.3 on some of the ways in which friendships can, and should, be terminated. In so doing, the distress this can cause is palpable, to this reader at least. He says, for example, that if a friendship ended because the friend deceived me about the sort of friendship we were having, I can complain with more fervor than complaints against counterfeit money, because the deception is about something so much more valuable.

As his depiction of the decline in modernity of friendship as a public relationship indicates, Nehamas weaves a loose historical narrative about friendship through his book, charting the diminution of philosophical attention to friendship in the journey from ancient to modern thought. The celebration of friendship in ancient writers like Aristotle and Cicero (who, although cited several times, plays very little role in Nehamas's account) draws to a halt with Christianity. With some notable exceptions, such as Aelred de Rievaulx, the Christian accent on universal love arouses discomfort with friendship's particular and preferential nature (30–31). As Nehamas notes, “Friendship is inconceivable without thinking that it is perfectly all right to treat some people differently from… everyone else, to give them preference and pride of place, simply because they are our friends” (59). Such discomfort resonates through Enlightenment thought; its emphasis on reason, impartiality, and universality could find little room for friendship (57–58).

As we have seen, Nehamas's approach to friendship is powerfully inflected by aesthetics. His conception of the self is aesthetic, and he devotes much attention to aesthetic representations of friendship. Indeed, he sometimes assimilates an appreciation of friendship to that of works of art (214–16). Perhaps because of this focus, Nehamas does not address many of the key questions that arise in the literature on friendship in the Western tradition. One is homophilia: most theorists of friendship assume or state that friends must be alike in age, gender, moral character, socioeconomic status, and so on. This was, of course, partly to do with the link between friendship and equality; in a world with many formal hierarchies, friendship was one of the few domains in which individuals could breathe the air of equality. But what does this homophilic legacy mean today? Does it limit the ability of friendships to embrace or even tolerate diversity? Is friendship effectively a form of narcissism? In this context, it is a truism to observe that much of the classical tradition celebrated friendships between men. But what about women's friendships? Are they different in kind from men's? And what are the options for friendships across the genders? Although Nehamas barely addresses traditional friendship's homosociality, his examples are of same-sex friendships; Montaigne and La Boétie, his own boarding school friends, his adult friend Tom, who is also the book's dedicatee (125–31), the three male protagonists in Art, and, of course, Thelma and Louise.

The Western tradition of thinking about friendship has also typically been dyadic, but whether strong friendships can persist among more than two people is not explicitly discussed by Nehamas. Although his boarding-school friendship group has several members, and the friends in Art form a trio, his basic template seems to be dyadic. Consider the quotation above that describes every friendship as “a unique combination of two souls” (121). His book's magnificent cover reproduces the painting Two Pears by Graeme Harris. (How Harris resisted calling his painting The Pair escapes me.) Yet Nehamas is only explicit about his focus on dyadic friendships in a note (256), leaving little room to explore its ramifications and possible limitations.

Nehamas also has little to say about whether friendship is different from other salient personal relationships such as familial ties, romantic love, and sexual love. He describes friendships as “freer” than many other relationships (210), which is consistent with his emphasis on self-fashioning. He makes one passing comparison of friendship to eros saying that both types of love crave intimacy and self-revelation (215). But the differences between them receive no attention, which is unusual in an approach so enamored of Montaigne. Friendship is likewise praised to the detriment of “nuptial love” in a passage by Robert Burton that Nehamas cites but does not gloss early in the book (4). Are Montaigne and Burton, who are not unique among theorists of friendship, right to place these relationships in contrast? Or is Nehamas correct to assimilate them? Or, in keeping with Nehamas's accent on friendship's particularity and unpredictability, are we even permitted to pose such general questions?

Such canonical questions play more of a role in P. E. Digeser's Friendship Reconsidered. One of the key ambitions of this wide-ranging work is to replace an essentialist approach with a family-resemblance one. Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of the family resemblance, Digeser agrees with some other recent scholars that friendship takes many forms, not just in any individual's life but also across time, space, and cultures. In the face of this variety, trying to delineate necessary or sufficient properties is unhelpful. Digeser prefers to associate a number of features with friendship: respect, affection, loyalty, care, shared activity, nonviolent interaction, mutual self-disclosure, choice, equality, distinctive motivations, and so on. No single friendship need manifest all of these and some of these features may appear in other relationships too (xiii, 5, 9–11).

Borrowing from Michael Oakeshott, Digeser recommends that we view friendship as a social practice. Seen through this lens, the actions and motivations of friendship are governed by norms and expectations (6, 15). She also helpfully replies to a series of potential objections to this approach, such that friendship is too idiosyncratic to be norm governed and too individualistic to be a social practice (15–16). Digeser accentuates friendship's adverbial quality: what matters is not what friends do to, with, and for one another but how they do it—caringly, respectfully, honestly, and so forth (25, 34–36). She thus considers friendship to be “a family of practices… conditioned by the mutual recognition of ordinarily appropriate motives and adverbial conditions” (39). This more fluid approach enables her to move well beyond personal friendships.

Part 1, however, remains on that terrain. Despite her accent on friendship's variety, Digeser's working model also appears to be dyadic. In her quest to avoid essentialism, she repeatedly acknowledges that friendship practices can vary by gender, age, class, ethnicity, culture, and so on. Digeser declares friendship to be “the sort of relationship that can draw and bind individuals together regardless of their kinship, tribe, ethnicity, race, class or gender” (xii). But while there might be diversity among forms of friendship, personal friendships, in the West at least, overwhelmingly unite those of similar gender, age, culture, class, and race. This default assumption of homophilia manifests itself in small but illuminating ways in Digeser's book: its examples are typically same sex—Alan and Denny; Wilson and Greg; Darlene and Allison; John and Henry—and typically have Anglophone names.

Chapter 2 looks at friendship's motivations and actions; chapter 3 asks what, if any, role self-interest and duty play in such relationships. In response to Christopher Wellman's insistence that talk of rights and duties should find no place among friends (see his “Friends, Compatriots, and Special Political Obligations”), Digeser suggests, in characteristically nuanced fashion, that it all depends on what work an appeal to duty does. Duty can, for example, be invoked in an effort to restore or revive a friendship or to end it. It can thus be a pharmacon that kills or cures (69–70). An appeal to duty can also be appropriate when urged by someone outside the friendship. A third person exhorting me to do my duty by my friend is not necessarily corrosive of the friendship. It might, rather, signal that failure to support my friend is a moral weakness on my part, and another's language of duty can stiffen my resolve to be the friend I should be.

Chapter 4 opens with Montaigne's nonexplanation of his friendship with La Boétie that Nehamas cites: “Because it was he, because it was I” (quoted in Digeser, 74). Exploring the relationship between friendship and individuality, this chapter dovetails most closely with Nehamas's work. The ideal of friendship examined here—which Digeser reminds us is just an ideal and just one among others—“is one in which friendship supports the individuality of the friends and the individuality of the friends is a prime motivation of the friendship” (82). But rather than engage with Montaigne's essay directly, Digeser's encounter is mediated via Richard Flathman's concept of “self-enacted individuality” (87–89).

What Flathman's concept of self-enacted individuality, which emanates from Oakeshott's idea of self-enactment (78), brings is a more willed, sculpted, or voluntarist account of character and motivation within friendship. Instead of just accepting as given that we are motivated in some ways and not others to relate to our friends, Digeser explores how motivations can be consciously shaped. We can give ourselves a sense of how we should behave towards our friends and strive to act in accordance with that (76, 78, 85). This sounds like self-improvement or self-overcoming and left this reader wondering about the value added by Flathman's neologism “self-enactment” (86–87). I also wondered what work it did over and above better-known ideas such as Harry Frankfurt's notion of second-order desires or Charles Taylor's concept of strong evaluation or Nietzsche's concept of self-making or giving style to oneself.

This chapter also applies to dyadic friendships Robert Putnam's terms of bonding and bridging from his analysis of social capital. Friendship can bond those who are developing their individuality but whose individuality might lead them in different directions, which Digeser dubs “bridging” (300n1). This sort of friendship clearly includes Aristotelian elements, such as the friends’ mutual improvement and mutual recognition of virtue (83). The latter, in turn, requires some degree of mutual familiarity and witnessing of one another in a variety of contexts that reveal character (83). But Digeser also includes a helpful list of ways in which friendship can militate against the forging of individuality. Too many blurred boundaries between self and other can do this; the simple desire to please or conform to the friend can too. Or friends can cleave to outdated understandings of who we are and try to draw us back to those (91). Digeser also takes up Nehamas's admonition that friendship can foster vice in the friends, tracing this realization back to Cicero (93). Digeser returns to Aristotle's question about what I should do when my friend seems to be acting immorally (94), which further illustrates that Aristotle was not quite as rosy eyed about friendship as Nehamas deems him to be.

Whereas Nehamas summarily rejects any notion of civic friendship (52, 55–56), Digeser offers a more nuanced view, although ultimately she agrees with Nehamas about the problems of applying friendship to the political realm, for how can a relationship centered on mutual recognition of motivation be stretched to cover large swaths of the population? Most fellow citizens must remain strangers to one another and their motivations opaque. Digeser reflects, nonetheless, on how the ethical resources associated with friendship could fruitfully be applied to politics. Chapter 5 on civic friendship succeeds admirably in her goal to “carve out a position between the whole hearted endorsement and complete rejection of friendship as a political concern” (xiii). She provides a supple evaluation of the attractions of and obstacles to the ideal of civic friendship and engages productively with those, such as Danielle Allen and Sybil Schwarzenbach, who advocate some contemporary version of civic friendship.

Instead of asking how conceptions of friendship can inform politics, chapter 6 looks at how politics affects friendship. Do flourishing personal friendships presuppose a relatively benign political background? As Digeser puts it in another chapter, “To the extent that the law removes barriers to association, encourages forms of equality, and refrains from engaging in manipulative behavior, it may create opportunities for friendship” (180). Conversely, can oppressive regimes threaten friendship, making it difficult for people of divergent political opinions to be close? For one way of focusing this examination of “friendship during dark times,” Digeser turns to Hannah Arendt. Curiously though, she finds Arendt's account of friendship insensitive to political climate (152). I am unable to reconcile Digeser's claim that “Arendt presents a nuanced view of friendship during dark times” (146) with her conclusion that “nothing about her notion of friendship changes if the times change. … The circumstances themselves do not appear to dictate the expectations that we may have about the nature of friendship” (152). For another way of focusing this examination of friendship in dark times, Digeser returns to the Roman biography of Titus Pomponius Atticus. A lifelong friend of Cicero, Atticus simultaneously sustained friendships with some of Cicero's staunchest enemies. Digeser entertains the view according to which remaining loyal to a diversity of friends who are in conflict with one another and who at any time might fall out of political favor could be audacious. Yet this also struck me as a suboptimal guide to friendship in dark times. The twentieth century has its share of times dark enough to test friendships, and finding something more recent might have been more compelling and have supplied a more fitting foil to Arendt. Reaching back, moreover, to an age where friendship was more fully theorized and valorized than in modernity—Cicero authored, after all, one of the leading classical tracts on friendship—seems odd for a test case. The next chapter's example from Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help (set during the Jim Crow era) might have been a more fertile resource for the ways in which political structures test or foreclose friendships.

Chapter 7 continues this theme about how the wider political background influences and interacts with friendship. Digeser echoes Nehamas's question about whether friendship can be compatible with just and impartial treatment. She also ruminates on whether policies and laws should recognize and support friendship. Friends could, for example, be eligible for carer's leave or enjoy a tax break on inheritance or have hospital visitation rights. Digeser's talent for supple treatment of her material is again on display in her account of this latter issue as she combs through the pros and cons of affording friendship some legal status. Some of the problems she finds with this stem from her insistence on friendship's plurality. As there are many different types of friendship, which one(s) will be codified in, and which overlooked by, the law? Digeser counters that it may be better to have some form(s) of friendship recognized than none. Legislating friendship is likely to bring appeals to rights and duties between friends, which introduces the problem mentioned above by Wellman. There is also the question of how long a friendship must last to have legal status. How do we even date the beginnings and ends of friendships?

The third part of Friendship Reconsidered explores friendship's role in relations among states. This is more than just an enlargement of civic friendship, for by asking whether entities like states can participate in friendship (219), Digeser shifts its ontological grounds. Because she allows friendships among states to be forged by interests, we seem to be back in Aristotle's category of utility friendship (223, 245). But not any old interest will do: to count as a basis for interstate friendship, Digeser stipulates that it be an interest in justice. She lingers on Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction but finds it unhelpful as a friend seems to be little more than an ally in Schmitt's thinking (225–30) and cannot be clearly delineated from a neutral state (228). The Rawlsian approach to relations among peoples is potentially more fruitful because the idea of states committed to justice forming a self-conscious grouping is more plausible within his framework. Ultimately Digeser concludes that an international friendship can exist when “minimally just states” have “a mutually recognized motive to preserve and promote just institutions and act in accord with those motivations” (243).

Although she makes reference to the language of friendship being used among statespeople to describe their relationships with other states (xviii), part 3 turns out to be highly ideal and speculative, asking how friendships between states might be possible and what they might look like. One does not have to be a realist to find parts of this naive: Germany and the United States, for example, have been relatively friendly with Merkel and Obama as their respective heads of state, yet the United States spied on Germany. This could not be reconciled with Digeser's account of interstate friendship as I understand it. Minimally just domestic institutions do not, moreover, always translate into just foreign policy, unfortunately, so extrapolating from a commitment to justice on the inside to the outside can be problematic. I found this the hardest part of the book to follow: contradictory things seem to be said about what role motivations play in friendships between states, for example. Tapping the resources of the English School of international relations might have helped this section, for, inspired by Hedley Bull, its adherents have long argued that while the international system is anarchic, it still exhibits some of the features of a society. Ultimately though, the payoff from stretching friendship so far as to cover relationships among states remains unclear to me.

Digeser shares Nehamas's assessment of the ongoing influence of Aristotle on (Western) thinking about friendship, but rather than dedicate a single chapter to him, she manifests this by recurring references to his work. She gives more credit to Plato for initiating the West's philosophical conversation about friendship than does Nehamas who says both that the Lysis began philosophical conversation on friendship (256n79) but “is quite inconclusive” and of minor influence (233n11). Digeser puts a more positive spin on that aporetic dialogue as signaling that a full understanding of friendship is unattainable (8). She also offers a more complex assessment of the dialogue's importance (286nn6–7). But whatever one's interpretation of the Lysis, it sets the agenda for thinking about friendship, posing a series of questions about whether friends should be similar or dissimilar (back to homophilia); whether friendship is the prerogative of good people or can be experienced by evil ones; whether friendship must be mutual; whether good people need friends; and whether friendship is an end in itself. Aristotle engages these questions in NE VIII–IX, indicating that the Lysis has been very influential in shaping classical Western thought about friendship.

Anne Ward dives deeply into Aristotle's theory of friendship, but not quite as deeply as her title suggests. Ward's book is not just about friendship: instead she ingeniously knits this topic into a discussion of wider Aristotelian themes such as happiness, moral and intellectual virtue, contemplation, metaphysics, wealth distribution, money, justice, and more. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to close readings of Aristotle on this array of subjects, but for present purposes, the focus is her interpretation of Aristotle on friendship.

To his theory, Ward poses two questions. The first treats the relationship between perfect friendship (which Nehamas calls virtue friendship) and political friendship. Although civic friendship begins in advantage, it can and must rise above that (111, 113). Aristotle repeatedly suggests that those who treat political life as a means merely to increased wealth are blinkered. Politics should aim at higher ends than material (or martial) goods. The polis enables not merely life but the good life, so by implication the sort of friendship that unites its members cannot remain one of utility. This move might have been valuable to Digeser's section on friendships among states, for it would have allowed her to move them beyond the register of utility friendships. Having argued that political friendship is based on more than advantage, Ward contends, in disagreement with Derrida, that the political friendships made possible by timocracies most resemble perfect friendship (14, 104, 122–23). Timocratic friendship “is a like-to-like relationship, it is based on a strict equality of sameness, and timocratic citizens can view each other as other selves” (117).

Ward's second question is whether women can participate in perfect and political friendships. When Aristotle situates women vis-à-vis men, he concludes that their capacities are more limited than men's. Spouses can enjoy friendship but not that based on equality or similarity of function (110, 125–26). But Ward contends that situating women as mothers rather than spouses sheds a different light. Inspired by Derrida, she takes seriously Aristotle's comparison of perfect friendship to maternal love (12–13). Indeed, maternal love surpasses even perfect friendship because the mother continues to want the best for her child even if the child does not recognize her and so cannot reciprocate her affection (17, 104). Because of the transcendence of the self that maternal love can manifest, women should be recognized as capable of perfect and political friendship because political friendship, as we have seen, requires surmounting a concern with one's own advantage (15, 129). Women who care about their children's welfare must also care about the health of the political community those children will join and which will shape their lives (18, 134). Piecing together some of Aristotle's claims to reach conclusions that he does not, Ward argues that women possess both the ability and the motivation to engage in civic friendship.

It is refreshing to see such attention to gender in studying friendship. Ward provides a close yet accessible reading of Aristotle, engaging many other scholars along the way. One curious omission, however, is Sybil Schwarzenbach's recent attempt to adduce an Aristotelian-inspired notion of civic friendship which accords full significance to the caring work so often performed by women. This seems directly relevant to Ward's enterprise, especially given that Ward spends some time with the ethic of care and its impact on feminist thinking (15–17). And Schwarzenbach attempts what Ward does not by spinning out some practical implications from her more female-friendly approach to Aristotle and politics. I get the sense that Ward wants her interpretation of Aristotle to have contemporary relevance but she nowhere draws that out. Some engagement with Schwarzenbach on this topic could have been very illuminating.

It is noteworthy that none of the books reviewed here contains a concluding or synthetic chapter. Perhaps this is because being so individual and particular, friendship is hard to pin down. Perhaps it is because friendship is open-ended and available to ongoing redefinition. Perhaps friendship is such an elastic concept that it can be applied in some ways to many other sorts of relationships. William Deresiewicz may be right in his 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education article that as the paradigmatic modern relationship, friendship has become “both all and nothing at all.” The possible reasons for the renewed scholarly interest in friendship are similarly myriad. It could be connected to the rise of social media and the increasing technological mediation of so many face-to-face relationships. It could be linked to the changing nature of marital and familial structures—many people in Western cultures now marry later, have fewer children, divorce more often, and so on. Interest in some ideal of civic friendship could, as Wellman has suggested, be due to the inability of social contract thought to explain special obligations among compatriots. Whatever the reasons for the recent revival of scholarly attention to friendship, the three books reviewed here make admirable contributions to that renaissance.