How best to apply the ancient theory of civic friendship to politics today? Modern liberal thought privatized the passions, relegating them to the private sphere.
Friendship, too, is now supposed to be private: whom we choose to associate with is our own business and properly off-limits to state control or even recognition. This privatization has been the source of inestimable benefits.
Yet modern liberalism has been overly ambitious about the extent to which passions can be kept private. Marriage is a good example: people continue to desire that the state recognize their ostensibly private love relationships. The state, in its turn, has an interest in stable marriages because they help to socialize the next generation of citizens at low cost. Furthermore, the passions which liberal marriage keeps in the private sphere have increasingly been subject to criticism: everyone is now familiar with arguments that power politics informs private associations and relationships, particularly those with a history of inequality. The politics of sex, the politics of the family, now even the politics of friendship (e. g. Derrida 1997): ‘‘the personal is political’’ has become a truism and an implicit challenge to liberalism’s distinction between public and private. Both the desire for marriage and the critique of marriage show how the passions have a way of breaking out of their private sphere, a way of seeking to make public issues of themselves.
The most useful application of ancient theory is not to bandwagon with recent critiques of liberalism but to supplement and bolster liberalism’s attempts to negotiate these difficulties, in part by providing richer descriptions of what the passions are. The passions figure prominently in two schools of thought that have challenged liberalism in recent years: postmodernism and communitarianism. Among their other criticisms, these schools of thought have argued that liberal epistemology has scanted the passions. According to postmodernists, the dispassionate, objective reason on which liberalism is founded is rare or impossible; instead, preconditions of our living together (such as power and language) constitute us as thinking subjects and decisively shape our thoughts. Similarly for communitarians, the loves which liberalism leaves to personal choice in fact constitute us as who we are. Liberal selves which freely choose where to live, whom to associate with, do not really exist. Instead, people are always already passionately embedded in communities and families.
Ancient theory about civic friendship can help to inoculate liberalism against these challenges. Ancient theory shows us a political science that acknowledges these passions and their distorting influence on reason without giving up on rationality. Liberalism need only concede to postmodern and communitarian critiques that liberal rationality is fallible, not that it is bankrupt. It is the forever unfinished character of the epistemological foundations of liberalism that most invites attack. The modern expectation that political theory should establish firm foundations and then build upon them creates a scandal when the foundations turn out to be just as much subject to inquiry as the superstructures built on them. But it is a scandal of our own creating. In ancient philosophy, by contrast, foundational questions are the least solvable of problems, those most open to further inquiry. Ancient rationalism provides a model in which inquiry into the foundations continues simultaneously with inquiry into the political superstructures. A fallibilist liberalism informed by ancient theory can point out the excessive normative aspirations cherished by communitarian and postmodern critics, who would replace sober liberal practices with attempts, respectively, to create tighter communities and to widen civic friendship to include all humanity. Friendship’s rootedness in the self places grave limitations on these hopes; it is unlikely that a community can ever approach the love that private families enjoy. Much less is it likely that all humankind can enjoy anything like the civic friendship that parochial communities sometimes achieve. Extending the bonds of friendship to include more and more ‘‘Others’’ cannot go on indefinitely.
Ancient theory of the passions can also help to deter liberalism from some of its own excesses. Many liberals have been at the forefront of attempts to extend democratic fairness into the new areas known as identity and recognition. On the one hand, classical scholars must welcome the richer description of politics inherent in these attempts. Pride in identity and the desire for recognition are clearly manifestations of spiritedness. For example, Gutmann (2003: 14-15) cites the example of black Americans who could pass for white and receive all the social perquisites of whiteness but choose instead to remain true to a group identity. Such cases show clearly that politics is about more than self-interest; liberal theory has too often reduced politics to the pursuit of private interests such as security and comfort. Yet Plato and Aristotle could add context to a second example of Gutmann’s: a deaf-mute student who would refuse an ear implant on the grounds that it would change his deaf identity (Gutmann 2003: 117). Here we see how individuals identify with their own (the oikeion) regardless of the goodness of their own (see above). No necessary connection exists between spiritedness and the group it has trained itself to love. The value that spiritedness confers sometimes contains all the perversity of anger. Such arbitrariness poses problems for liberal theories of recognition. In a recent formulation, recognition politics consists of creating the ‘‘hospitable conditions of identity formation’’ and fighting against factors that lock an individual into his or her current identity or current idea about what the said identity is (Patten 2004). Such a fostering of identities would have to rely on a fostering of angers, according to ancient theory. Therefore liberalism’s earlier resolve to ignore group identities and let individuals assert their identities under their own power seems more prudent than liberal recognition politics, at least from the standpoint of ancient theory about the passions.
World History
