In the history of Western thought, friendship's relationship to politics is checkered. Friendship was seen as key to understanding political life in the ancient world, but it was then ignored for centuries. Today, friendship has again become a desirable framework for political interaction. In Friendship Reconsidered, P. E. Digeser contends that our rich and varied practices of friendship multiply and moderate connections to politics. Along the way, she sets forth a series of ideals that appreciates friendship's many forms and its dynamic relationship to individuality, citizenship, political and legal institutions, and international relations. Digeser argues that, as a set of practices bearing a family resemblance to one another, friendship calls our attention to the importance of norms of friendly action and the mutual recognition of motive. Focusing on these attributes clarifies the place of self-interest and duty in friendship and points to its compatibility with the pursuit of individuality. She shows how friendship can provide islands of stability in a sea of citizen-strangers and, in a delegitimized political environment, a bridge between differences. She also explores how political and legal institutions can both undermine and promote friendship. Digeser then looks to the positive potential of international friendships, in which states mutually strive to protect the just character of one another's institutions and policies. Friendship's repertoire of motives and manifestations complicates its relationship to politics, Digeser concludes, but it can help us realize the limits and possibilities for generating new opportunities for cooperation.

James Joyce spent the last decade of his life in Paris, struggling to finish his great final work Finnegans Wake amidst personal and financial hardship and just as Europe was being engulfed by the rising tide of fascism. Bringing together new archival discoveries and personal accounts, this book explores one of the central relationships of his final years: that with his friend, confidant and adviser Paul L. Léon. Providing first-hand accounts of Joyce's Paris circle – which included Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov – the book makes available again the text of Lucie (Léon) Noel's personal memoir of the relationship between her husband and the Irish writer (published as James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of Friendship in 1950), including his valiant rescue of Joyce's Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. The book also collects for the first time Leon's clandestine letters to his wife from August to December 1941, chronicling his desperate state of body and mind while interned in Drancy, France's main Nazi transit camp, and then in Compiègne, just before he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Joyce died suddenly on 13 January 1941 in Zurich and Léon was murdered by the Nazis on 4 April 1942 in Silesia. Annotated throughout with contextual commentary by Luca Crispi and Mary Gallagher, this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of Paris in the 1930s and first years of World War II in France.

An engaging new portrait of the seminal American composer

This book explores why and how Thomas Hobbes – the 17th century founder of political science -- contributed to the modern marginalisation of ‘friendship’, a concept that stood in the foreground of ancient moral and political thought and that is currently undergoing a revival. The study shows that Hobbes did not question the occurrence of friendship; rather, he rejected friendship as an explanatory and normative principle of peace and cooperation. Hobbes’s stance was influential because it captured the spirit of modernity- its individualism, nominalism, practical scepticism, and materialism. Hobbes’s legacy has a bearing on contemporary debates about civic, international and global friendship.

Finding himself without a kingdom, a king goes into the world to improve his fortunes and finds six friends whose special skills help him to get what he wants most.

Are you able to give your first impressions a second look? In this lighthearted and humorous take on life, Knox McCoy explores questioning and examining long-held ideas that no longer represent how we think. What would it mean to really examine what you think you know about yourself and your beliefs? To not just rely on the cliches you’ve always recited to yourself but to look deeply into why you think what you think? In All Things Reconsidered, popular podcaster Knox McCoy uses a unique blend of humor, pop culture references, and personal stories to show how a willingness to reconsider ideas can actually help us grow ourselves, our lives, and our beliefs. In this laugh-out-loud defense of changing your mind, Knox dives into a variety of topics including: Are participation trophies truly the worst? Is it really worth it to be a ride-or-die sports fan? Do we believe in God because of the promise of heaven—or the threat of hell? Does prayer work? Is anyone even there? In a world where we’re divided by political, social, and religious differences, All Things Reconsidered is a hilarious and insightful book of essays that reminds us of the value of reflection and open-mindedness.

Difference and disagreement can be valuable, yet they can also spiral out of control and damage liberal democracy. Advancing a metaphor of citizenship that the author terms 'role-based constitutional fellowship,' this book offers a solution to this challenge. Cheng argues that a series of 'divisions of labor' among citizens, differently situated, can help cultivate the foundational trust required to harness the benefits of disagreement and difference while preventing them from 'overheating' and, in turn, from leaving liberal democracy vulnerable to the growing influence of autocratic political forces. The book recognizes, however, that it is not always appropriate to attempt to cultivate trust, and acknowledges the important role that some forms of confrontation might play in identifying and rectifying undue social hierarchies, such as racial-ethnic hierarchies. Hanging Together thereby works to pave a middle way between deliberative and realist conceptions of democracy.