Paul Ludwig frames Rediscovering Political Friendship as a double plea: “a plea to empirical social scientists to study civic friendship” as “a descriptive feature of liberalism” (pp. 5–7, 15, 221, 298) and a plea to liberal theorists to avow the friendships that liberal democracies host in fact, but that their theories fail to account for or put at risk (pp. 7–8, 10, 15). Exploring extant liberal democratic practices as correctives to theory, Ludwig also emphasizes theory’s “trickledown” effects on real-life politics (pp. 18, 160, 273), arguing that a better theory of civic friendship can produce a “public-spiritedness” (p. 8) capable of challenging modern individualism (pp. 7, 21) and serving as an antidote to polarization (p. xv).

Rediscovering Political Friendship finds that theory in Aristotle who, Ludwig argues, corrects recent liberal and communitarian thought (p. 20) while also helping “rescue the full complexity of classical liberalism” (p. 160), as represented in the writings of Locke, Smith, Tocqueville, and Madison, among others. To Ludwig, Aristotle’s “realist” theory of political friendship (pp. 120–22), grounded in a rational self-interest informed by “pessimistic and self-centered” passions (p. 26), orients us to a utility obscured by modern economic rationality, a sociality not governed by overly demanding virtue ethics, and practices of limited government underwritten by “truly free markets and more local, grass-roots giving” (p. 16). Devoted to the “Foundations of Friendship,” Part I of Rediscovering Political Friendship elaborates the utility, activity, and self-interest of ancient political friendship through especially rich and contributive readings of Aristotle and Plato that explore the centrality to friendship of anger, disappointment, indignation, defensiveness, and envy. Persuasively demonstrating that these “irascible passions are … often what actually get people to cooperate” (p. 150), Part II, “Where Is Civic Friendship Today?” draws on Tocqueville’s “self-interest rightly understood” to argue that “the rationality of cooperation” is exemplified in “associations” (pp. 154–60). Part III, “A Different Way to View Liberalism,” explores the different sites of civic friendship in contemporary “commercial society” and in “mass society,” and Part IV presents a set of policy recommendations relating to a just wage, immigration, and national service that might better reflect and also enhance existing friendship practices and capacities.

Ludwig’s case for recovering Aristotelian political friendship is compelling. As “a peculiar form of self-seeking [which] expands the self to include others” (p. 9), in which altruism has “egoistic roots” (p. 147), and “[u]sing and needing to use others is not inimical to friendship but one of its grounds” (p. 21), Aristotle’s political friendship refuses many problematic binaries that organize familiar versions of liberal and communitarian thought: irascibility versus solidarity (Chapter 1), self-love versus love of others (Chapter 2), egoism versus altruism (Chapter 3), utility versus sociality. Especially insightful about the risks to both domestic and political life when friendship is confined to intimate relations (p. 122), Ludwig tacks between ethics and politics—soul and city (chapter 7)—to elaborate the ways in which political friendship produces “a political system” that, in turn, (re)produces it.

This circularity is especially virtuous, Ludwig maintains, in “liberal democracies [that] tend to produce the type of person who values freedom and equality” (p. xi). Insofar as the “stamp” (pp. 2, 268, 275, 284, 299) of “we liberal citizens” (pp. 14, 13, 18, 180) is freedom-and-equality and insofar as liberal citizens “tend to like this type of person—the type they themselves belong to … this liking or love is widely shared, cutting across racial and class differences— although it is experienced differently by people on different sides of those divides” (pp. xi–xii, 2). The “like-mindedness” of the liberal democratic stamp of freedom-and-equality takes different forms in Rediscovering Political Friendship, sometimes appearing as the “shared idea” that “all men are created equal” (p. xiii), sometimes as a “bedrock love of” (pp. 1, 275) or shared commitment to freedom and equality, and sometimes as a shared belief about the regime’s commitment to these values (p. 292). Whatever form the stamp takes, Ludwig argues that, with help from Aristotle, classical liberalism does a better job than modern liberalism of theorizing the friendship conducive to its reproduction.

I am less optimistic than Ludwig about the capacities of classical liberalism and less persuaded that Aristotle can be pressed into service as its savior. Regarding the first, Ludwig notes, “Classical liberalism failed to prevent and never fully healed America’s original sins of slavery and segregation—failures with such distorting influences on subsequent politics” (p. 68). This is something of an understatement. When, after penning the 1669 Constitution of the Carolinas, Locke maintains in the Second Treatise, in a pre-echo of the US Declaration of Independence, that men are created equal and free, he effectively erases the present and pervasive inequalities and unfreedoms of American enslavement. When Tocqueville describes America’s equality of conditions as requiring the assimilation of African Americans and elimination of Native Americans in Democracy in America, he indicates that a liberal democratic preference for one’s fellow citizens grounded in classical liberalism will depend on and reproduce a like-mindedness that constitutively excludes those who are, in Ibram X. Kendi’s book title, “Stamped from the Beginning” as unequal and/or unfree, an exclusion that continues today in the operations of, for example, the prison-industrial complex and voter suppression.

In this regard, classical liberalism may have more to learn from some modern liberalisms than Ludwig tends to allow, more to learn from “postmodern” thinkers to whom Ludwig gestures without citation or engagement (pp. 31, 200), and more to learn from other theorists who do not appear at all in the pages of Rediscovering Political Friendship. For example, when Ludwig criticizes the failure of “much recent identity theory … to understand that it is dealing with anger” (p. 60 fn omitted), he takes up only “the rather empty concept of identity within liberalism” (p. 52). By leaving out the sophisticated, complex, and competing accounts of identity by queer, feminist, Black, and lesbian theorists and in the twentieth-century Black freedom struggle and twenty-first-century Movement for Black Lives, Ludwig leaves unaddressed anger that is expressed by people whose concerns about long-standing and ongoing asymmetries of structural and institutional power lead them to question whether the political system is credibly committed to the freedom and equality it invokes. Does classical liberalism countenance such anger?

My concern about turning to Aristotle to rescue classical liberalism is that, as Ludwig brings out, Aristotle rejects abstract equality both in friendship and as the ground of distributive justice in favor of “proportionate equality” (pp. 93, 171–72, 228); in place of a freedom premised on private property, he advocates that property be held as one’s own for common use (pp. 172, 211, but see pp. 94–98, 231). These “illiberalisms” in relation to equality and freedom rest on Aristotle’s understanding of the self as not individuated and autonomous but constituted in and through friendship, most specifically, as Ludwig shows, through activities of use, and his understanding of human nature itself as inherently political (p. 13, but see chapter 5). In another notable difference from liberalisms, classical and modern, Aristotelian political friendship, in Ludwig’s words, “makes equality into … an achievement” (p. 297). Equality is an achievement that, as Rediscovering Political Friendship shows, emerges not from an extant “strong sociality” (p. 13) but from passional and rational activities that seek to forge a shareable “ownness” out of self-interest through use. To me, this is less the “favoritism based on something shared” (p. 2) that Ludwig places at the heart of Aristotelian political friendship than a striving to create what is to be favored and shared. This is like-mindedness as a coming to terms that seeks to bring equality and freedom into being.

Seen in this way, liberal democratic equality and freedom are fabrications in a double sense: they are false presuppositions of liberal democracies that must, if they are to exist, be continually created and re-created through political friendships. If such friendships exist to be studied today, they may be discovered less perhaps in what Ludwig calls “patriotic sacrifice” (p. 262) than in the protests in the time of COVID-19 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. Embodying expansive self-love powered by utility, these protests, seeking to achieve equality and freedom, may best exemplify why Aristotle takes friendship to be the bond of a polity.