Project Report. Aristotle and Political Friendship

What holds a political community together? Aristotle gives a striking answer: political friendship. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he claims that friendship seems to hold cities together and that legislators care for it even more than for justice. Yet the friendship he has in mind is not simply ordinary friendship between close acquaintances. He is referring to a political relationship among citizens, including those who may not know one another personally. What exactly this relationship consists in, however, and how it can hold a city together, is much less clear. Aristotle says relatively little about political friendship directly, and his remarks are scattered and compressed.

My project asks how we should understand this idea of political friendship and why Aristotle gives it such political importance. During my time as a CHS fellow, I developed a new way of approaching that question. Rather than trying only to reconstruct Aristotle’s view from his elusive remarks, I began to place political friendship within a wider ancient debate about what holds a city together.

Greek authors before and around Aristotle repeatedly returned to this problem: what prevents a polis from collapsing into faction, civil conflict, or political breakdown? They offered a range of answers. Some emphasised justice or lawfulness; others equality. Plato’s Republic proposed a more radical form of unity by weakening the distinction between “my family” and “your family”, so that members of the ruling class would come to regard one another as belonging to a single family. The Statesman, by contrast, connected civic unity with friendship and unanimity. Other authors such as Aeneas the Tactician also reveal a more coercive possibility: maintaining order by removing or suppressing those who threaten it.

Seeing these positions together changed the way I understood Aristotle. Political friendship began to look less like an underdeveloped concept and more like his intervention in an existing debate about civic cohesion. My current argument is that Aristotle does not simply select friendship as one answer among several. Rather, he reorganises the debate.

He rejects two prominent strategies. One is the attempt, associated with Plato’s Republic, to make the city maximally unified by dissolving the distinction between “my family” and “your family”. Aristotle objects that what is shared by everyone may, in fact, be cared for by no one: the attachments we have to those who are specifically our own cannot simply be extended across an entire political community. The other strategy is political domination. Aristotle is deeply critical of tyrannical methods based on fear, manipulation, and the removal of potential opponents. Such methods may preserve a regime for a time, but they cannot generate the willing acceptance on which lasting stability depends.

At the same time, Aristotle brings several other strands of the ancient debate together within his account of political friendship. I argue that political friendship is a form of utility friendship: citizens can regard one another as useful insofar as they contribute to the shared conditions that make the good life possible. Equality enters this account as reciprocity, since friendship survives only when both sides regard the relationship as involving an appropriate return. Justice, in turn, describes that reciprocity in terms of what citizens owe one another. Finally, unanimity or concord can be understood as an outcome of the goodwill that political friends have towards one another: agreement about common action becomes easier when citizens care not only about their own advantage, but also about the good of their fellow citizens.

The fellowship therefore led me from a relatively narrow interpretative problem—what Aristotle means by political friendship—to a broader historical and philosophical one. Placing Aristotle within the ancient debate about what holds a city together helps explain why his discussion moves so quickly between friendship, justice, equality, and unanimity. Rather than treating these as separate answers, Aristotle shows how they can be brought together within a single account of civic cohesion. This also brings out what is distinctive about his concept of political friendship: it does not simply add another answer to the question of what holds a community together, but provides a framework for understanding how several different answers—friendship, justice, equality, and unanimity—fit together.