Applies Aristotle's argument - that citizenship is like friendship - to the liberal and democratic societies of the present day.

Aristotle argued that citizenship is like friendship, and this book applies his argument to modern society. Modern citizens may lack the concept of civic friendship, but they persist in many practices and passions that were once considered essential to it. Citizens share many similarities with friends: prejudices held in common, favoritism towards each other, and - despite disagreement on specifics - underlying agreement about what is important, such as freedom and equality. Aristotle's theory reminds us that civic friendship is a factual condition of healthy societies, not a pie-in-the-sky ideal. By recognizing when it occurs and understanding it, we can build on it to counteract societal polarization. Civic friendship offers an alternative to populism and nationalism by engaging some of the same passions. In an era increasingly marked by tribalism and identity politics, this timely study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political science, classics, and philosophy.

Between periods of revolution, state repression, and war across Central and Western Europe from the 1840s through the 1860s, German liberals practiced politics beyond the more well-defined realms of voluntary associations, state legislatures, and burgeoning political parties. Political Friendship approaches 19th century German history’s trajectory to unification through the lens of academics, journalists, and artists who formed close personal relationships with one another and with powerful state leaders. Michael Weaver argues that German liberals thought with their friends by demonstrating the previously neglected aspects of political friendship were central to German political culture.

Developing a contemporary account of political friendship and synthesizing it with the radical movement of degrowth, this book provides the ethical grounding and the rationale of an alternative economy which serves human flourishing. The Aristotelian political friendship embodies active concern for the others’ well-being that contemporary societies lack; the crucial problems of ecological destruction and global poverty illustrate this friendship deficit. Arguing for the need for re-embracing a friendly civic ethos and re-aligning the economy with moral objectives, the author updates the Aristotelian idea and identifies it with democratic-autonomous political-economic praxis that ensures citizens’ self-actualization. Degrowth movement questioning economic growth and productivism, and privileging a simpler life with less material goods, favours political friendship precisely because it nourishes its unconscious substratum namely human instinctual sociality. The call for genuine democratic political praxis that political friendship implies could enable the degrowth movement to retain its radical character and accomplish the shift to an economy which serves life. The book is worthwhile studying by students and researchers across social sciences and especially by scholars in the fields of sociology, philosophy, and politics, but also a broader readership sensitive to the issues of social and environmental sustainability will find this work extremely interesting.

In this book, Wynne Walker Moskop addresses the practical and theoretical problem of how unequal political friendships evolve toward arrangements the parties consider reciprocal and just, a problem neglected by scholars of democracy who associate reciprocity and justice only with equal parties. Jane Addams insisted that Hull House was not a charity with philanthropic aspirations; rather it had to bring “two classes” to a shared purpose and more egalitarian relation. The problem was, and still is, how? Drawing on several bodies of scholarship—including Addams’s writings, secondary works about her collaborations, literature on Aristotelian political friendship, and feminist scholarship on the global migration of care workers—Moskop shows the importance of Addams’s practices to the continuing relevance of unequal economic relations for shaping political friendship. Contributing to a lively conversation about Addams’s work as a pragmatist thinker and social reformer that began three decades ago, Jane Addams on Inequality and Political Friendship is an invaluable resource to students of democratic theory, feminist political theory and philosophy, and American pragmatism. It illuminates the importance of overlooked conditions for friendship and justice in unequal relations, given people’s ongoing subordination because of race, class, gender, and citizenship status in the U.S. and transnationally.

The main subject of this book is the rather fascinating link between an acceptable concept of political whole and its legal and moral implications. When we face this problem, we find that widespread categories like `happiness' and "friendship" are at the same time necessary and dangerous, crucial and elusive. In order to make the case against the so-called Legal Enforcement of Morals, and to grasp the complex relationship between law and morality from a liberal point of view, it is not enough to reject a pattern of happiness, or of human flourishing, from which to draw normative instructions for men and women - it must be recognized that integration of individuals in the comprehensive groups, as well as in the political whole itself, is not the only valuable option. The fragile value of a relative lack of integration, a "right to unhappiness", turns out to be, eventually, what makes the weak, but decisive, moral primacy of liberal societies.

In this book, Wynne Walker Moskop addresses the practical and theoretical problem of how unequal political friendships evolve toward arrangements the parties consider reciprocal and just, a problem neglected by scholars of democracy that associate reciprocity and justice only with equal parties. Jane Addams may have insisted that Hull House was not a charity with philanthropic aspirations, but it still had to bring "two classes" to a shared purpose and more egalitarian relation. Drawing on several bodies of scholarship--including Addams's writings, secondary works about her collaborations, literature on Aristotelian political friendship, and feminist scholarship on the global migration of care workers--Moskop shows the importance of Addams's practices to the continuing relevance of unequal economic relations for shaping possibilities for political friendship. Contributing to a lively conversation about Addams's work as a pragmatist thinker and social reformer that began three decades ago, Jane Addams on Inequality and Political Friendship is an invaluable resource to students of democratic theory, feminist political theory and philosophy, and American pragmatism who have overlooked conditions for friendship and justice in unequal relations, but need to, given the subordination of peoples because of race, class, gender, religion, and citizenship status in the U.S. and transnationally. ades ago, Jane Addams on Inequality and Political Friendship is an invaluable resource to students of democratic theory, feminist political theory and philosophy, and American pragmatism who have overlooked conditions for friendship and justice in unequal relations, but need to, given the subordination of peoples because of race, class, gender, religion, and citizenship status in the U.S. and transnationally.