British historian Alan Bray’s 2006 book The Friend reminds us that friendship was not always as underappreciated as it seems to be today. He tells the story of a long-forgotten Christian ritual that established “spiritual kinship,” or what might be described as a marriage of friends. Dating back at least to the twelfth century, this rite was publicly performed and officially recorded by priests in churches. It bound two souls for eternity, while also imposing responsibilities and carrying material consequences regarding inheritances.
Today the idea of a government “friendship license,” or even formal recognition of friendship by religious authorities, seems risible. Indeed, Bray demonstrates how robust and traditional norms of friendship once taken for granted slowly decayed with the rise of liberalism. As the modern secular state became the primary if not the sole source of legitimate authority, it became the umpire of human relationships. But much like the political philosophy from which it arose, the liberal regime dismissed friendship as fundamental to a life well lived.
Meanwhile, 300-or-so years since the last spiritual kinship ritual was performed in the West, loneliness has been acknowledged as a society-wide crisis. It has become so widespread in liberal democracies as to earn the reviled status of an epidemic. As documented in a 2023 advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General, recent decades have seen a sharp increase in single-person households and a corresponding decrease in the number of close friendships and time spent with friends; millions of Americans now spend the majority of their waking hours alone. But one doesn’t need to be isolated to feel lonely—many Americans feel that way despite having scores of so-called friends.
What happened to friendship? A quick examination of major pop-culture offerings about friendship suggests that even as we suffer from the lack of good friends, we overlook friendship in our single-minded pursuit of romantic love. Take the iconic sitcom, Friends, launched in 1994, that follows the lives of six twenty-somethings friends living in Manhattan. Despite its title and purported theme, by the end of the show four out of the six “friends” are in committed romantic relationships with one another. Friendship is held to be merely a youthful placeholder for marriage or at least romantic love. In fact, it seems like the only popular modern stories that are structured around friendship are all set in fantastic, imaginary universes (Lord of the Rings; Harry Potter; Star Wars; Star Trek; The Avengers, and so on). It is almost as if friendship does not belong to our world.
But if romance appears to us as the sole remaining oasis in our contemporary emotional desert, it also seems increasingly like a mirage. On the one hand, commitment is hard to come by; marriage rates are shockingly low. On the other hand, we demand of our partners that they be our closest friends, our family, our primary emotional companions, and our ever-satisfying lovers. In pursuit of this ideal we neglect and disparage other bonds. Perhaps our romantic relationships would be better served if we had more friends. By elevating romance so far above friendship we do both a disservice.
Of course, modern technology from the Internet to Doordash all draw people away from in-person interaction, worsening our crisis of friendship. In part we do not take friendship seriously because we no longer know how to define it. The turn away from friendship can be traced to the philosophical giants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who ushered in classical liberalism. Friendship was ranked as one of life’s greatest goods by classical and medieval philosophy—Aristotle devoted more space to friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics than any other moral virtue. But it is scarcely mentioned by such thinkers as Locke, Spinoza, or Hobbes, whose scattered remarks on friendship include the claim that “to have friends is power,” and for whom friendship is good mostly insofar as it is a useful means to further ends. To the extent that these thinkers laid the foundations of our present political regime, their understanding of human nature and especially their dismissal of friendship continues to shape our sociality, our moral opinions, our longings, and our aspirations.
There is no better illustration of how seriously friendship was taken in pre-modern times than the opening lines of Book VIII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: “for friendship is a certain virtue or is accompanied by virtue; and, further, it is most necessary with a view to life: without friends, no one would choose to live, even if he possessed all other goods.” In addition to Aristotle both Plato and Cicero wrote dialogues on friendship. Broadly speaking, premodern thought held that friendship between mature and virtuous individuals was the richest, fullest, and most worthwhile of human bonds. But the last great philosophic essays to espouse such a view of friendship were written over 400 years ago, by Montaigne in the late 1500s and by Francis Bacon in the early 1600s. From Thomas Hobbes onward, friendship was largely dismissed as a meaningful human bond. To Montaigne’s claim that, in the best friendships, “souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them,” or Bacon’s judgement that “it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness,” Hobbes responded in 1642, in De Cive, that by nature “we are not looking for friends but for honor or advantage from them.”
Aristotle exalted friendship within a broader view of human nature according to which men are political animals and the political community itself “exists by nature.” By contrast, early modern thought’s disregard for friendship is grounded in a basic denial that human beings are political or deeply social by nature. Indeed, Hobbes, Locke and those who followed in their tradition championed the individual. In their various state-of-nature doctrines they argued, more or less explicitly, that human beings do not have a natural concern for the common good nor any generous or cooperative other-directedness by nature. Indeed, for all their disagreements, early modern political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau argued that the natural condition of man either begins with conflict and violence or consistently leads to it.
The fundamental moral fact in classical liberal political philosophy is the natural right to self-preservation. The desire for self-preservation and security is the foundation of political and social life. The liberal state exists to protect individuals and their rights. Suppressing and managing those aspects of human nature that naturally lead to war becomes a key task of government and civilized society. Conflict is to be avoided at all costs: politeness, complaisance, and agreeableness become virtues. Accordingly, the dominant moral posture of liberal society is that we each have the right to live as we please so long as we don’t interfere with the rights of others. In fact we’re free from any obligation to care for them.
In such a society friendship is threatened on two fronts. First, as physical security and comfort are ever more fully achieved, the passion for self-preservation expands toward securing our moral and emotional integrity, for instance, our safety from offense. Hobbes himself stressed the dangers of offensive speech and it is just a small extension of his argument to claim that speech can not only incite violence but be tantamount to violence. An expanded and excessive concern for self-preservation might well explain why the prevailing social disposition today is one of reserve and timidity and why “trigger warnings” have proliferated. People not only seem genuinely concerned that they will be harmed by difficult, upsetting or contrarian arguments, but they have in fact become excessively sensitive to these so-called offenses.
Second, when no one owes anyone anything beyond politeness and safety, friendship is felt to be groundless and lacking in substantive commitment. We are more concerned with keeping and respecting boundaries than we are with doing well by our friends. Violating a friend’s emotional boundary is an acknowledged offense; but to abandon a friendship wholesale is generally considered acceptable.
Taking pride in the equality that liberalism bestows on us, we rely most of all on our own judgement, believing ourselves to be morally and intellectually self-sufficient. Our belief in equality fosters a basic distrust of authority, including that of our friends. We are reluctant to admonish them and resentful of being judged ourselves. Worse, friendship is necessarily selective and exclusive. One can only ever have so many friends. Liberal, cosmopolitan sentiment chafes at this particularism. Most of us have a hard time acknowledging that we rank our friends. It feels wrong. Likewise, it is not surprising that we speak of “close friends” rather than “good friends.” The term “closeness” evokes something more circumstantial and neutral while calling someone “good” suggests a forbidden judgement of character. Yet worthwhile friendship calls for both ranking and judgement. There is only so much time in the day, and we should strive to cultivate those friends and friendships that are good.
But what about love? It doesn’t come out of the liberal tradition. To understand our disproportionate concern with romance, we must turn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the modern apostle of romantic love, and the father of the Romantic Movement. Although Rousseau criticized his liberal predecessors, he did so on the basis of a fundamental agreement with them: that man is not by nature political, that he has a natural right to self-preservation in the state of nature, and that civil and political society are established by a calculation made to escape the state of war.
According to Rousseau, man was originally solitary and individualistic: he was self-sufficient, free from anxiety and from any sense of neediness. He was dependent on others neither for his subsistence nor for his happiness. The only “social” need that belonged to man by nature was sexual desire. But by his account, there was no such thing as love, nor even the family. Instead, Rousseau argued in the Second Discourse that human society and sociality as we know and experience them emerged as the chance outcome of various contingent alterations to the original human condition. Over a long period of time, natural disasters and seasonal changes slowly brought people together. Humans changed: they learned to speak, they began to feel love, and the family emerged. Rousseau gives a beautiful description of this evolution in his Essay on the Origin of Languages:
[U]nder old oaks, conquerors of time, an ardent youth forgot its ferocity by degrees; little by little they were tamed by one another; striving to make themselves understood, they learned how to explain themselves … Here were made the first parties, the feet leaping with joy … gestures were no longer sufficient: voice took on passionate accents … here was at last the true cradle of peoples, and from the pure crystal of fountains arose the first fires of love.
Thus, civil and political society is decisively prepared by a prior socialization of man on the basis of sexual desire. Ultimately, Rousseau makes romantic love and the family central to human sociality and human happiness. At the same time, he argues for a new conception of marriage and the family as built on love and free choice rather than an obligation, duty, or tradition. But he does not bring back other forms of sociality, such as friendship. He directs all our social hopes and longings to love.
If liberal political philosophy generally dismisses friendship, if there is very little in its views of human nature that sustain such bonds, such that our regime and our culture do not inherently promote or encourage friendship, it is also true that liberal democracy allows us the freedom to choose to cherish it ourselves. Becoming aware of our moral opinions and social habits is the first step to changing them, should we find them lacking. As individuals, we can reconsider our attitudes towards friendship, reassess its value, and choose to act differently. Fortunately, we can turn to Aristotle and others for help. Friendship does not burn as brightly and strongly as love, but once one has experienced the steady warmth of a good friend, its value is unmistakable. There is hope for friendship still.
Image: Georges Seurat, A Man Leaning on a Parapet, oil on wood, 1881 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).