<p>My dissertation seeks to clarify the stakes of recent calls to increase civic friendship in our communities by initiating a conversation between contemporary and historical theoretical work about the requirements and consequences of using friendship as a model for social and political relationships between citizens. Friends’ lives are bound together by shared activity and by mutual concern and support; in what ways do relations between citizens, who often begin as strangers, take up these attitudes and behaviors? What kinds of civic friendship are possible in our contemporary democratic communities? How are they cultivated? And what are their political advantages and disadvantages? These questions guide the project as a whole. </p><p>I begin by canvassing some recent and popular work by Robert Bellah et al., Robert Putnam, and Danielle Allen in order to clarify the claims they make about different forms of civic friendship. The chapters that follow focus on the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith respectively in order to respond to various gaps I find in the contemporary accounts. I assess what each thinker, contemporary and canonical, can offer us today as we continue to think about the most sustainable and fair ways in which citizens can relate to one another in vast and diverse contemporary democracies. Along the way I address several important over-arching issues: the relationship between self-interest and care for others; the relationship between different sorts of equality and civic friendship; and the different roles that reason, emotions, habits, and institutions play in the cultivation of various kinds of civic friendship. I conclude that equality and justice ought to be both prerequisites and consequences of civic friendship, that self-interest is not a sufficient source for robust civic friendship and that instead some kind of imaginative and emotional motivation is needed, and that civic friendship must be understood as both a moral and a political phenomenon.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation argues that it is possible to retrieve Aristotle’s conception of political friendship in a manner that is relevant for contemporary democracies. First, I offer an account of Aristotelian political friendship that can respond to various conceptual worries within both Aristotle scholarship and contemporary political philosophy regarding the coherence of an account of "friendship between strangers," that is, friendship among people who do not know each other personally. The first two chapters closely examine Aristotle's conception of political friendship as depicted in various passages in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics and develop a clear and robust account of Aristotelian political friendship. Chapter 1 argues for an interpretation of Aristotelian political friendship in terms of what I call the mutual-care model of friendship, as opposed to what I call the modern-narrow model which takes friendship to be a personal and intimate relation. This interpretation of friendship as a relation of mutual care thus creates the conceptual space to respond to the worries regarding the incoherence of political friendship as a concept. Chapter 2 defends the view that Aristotelian political friendship is a form of utility friendship that requires its participants to jointly commit to collectively advantageous political goals. Second, I apply the account of Aristotelian political friendship that I introduced in the first two chapters to contemporary democracies. To this end, Chapter 3 investigates whether members of contemporary democracies have reasons to participate in a relationship of mutual care with their political fellows. I argue that the primitive value of political membership constitutes a reason for every member of a democratic polity to minimally care for their political fellows qua parts of their political community. Chapter 4 examines the relationship between affective polarization and political friendship. I maintain that affective polarization undermines political friendship by concealing the ground of friendship, i.e., the perception of a joint commitment to shared political goals. I argue that political friendship can be reestablished in affectively polarized societies through systematic efforts to raise political fellows' awareness of shared political goals. / 2026-10-04T00:00:00Z