On the Friendship Metaphor in Democratic Theory

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

Since Plato and Aristotle, political philosophers have analogized the condition of political citizenship to that of friendship. On some views, political citizenship is itself a kind of friendship. On other views, friendship helps us to pick out distinctive characteristics and structural features of citizenship. This paper examines the way the friendship metaphor is deployed in contemporary democratic theory. In particular, it focuses on the work of a group of political philosophers who have come to be known as “relational democrats.” On their view, part of what makes democracy distinctive and valuable is its ability to instantiate a unique relationship of equal standing across the citizenry. Such relational democrats often turn to friendship as a means of reflecting on what it means and why it is valuable to stand in a relationship of democratic equality with one’s fellow citizens.

In this paper, I reconstruct these relational arguments, while noting ambiguities, strengths, and weaknesses with the friendship metaphor. As an alternative, I argue that democracy and democratic citizenship can be fruitfully analogized to marital divorce and joint custody. In democracy, deeply estranged partners remain engaged in the project of building a common life. As with divorced parents, these estranged partners retain partial claims over the control of their shared project, even as they wildly disagree with one another on how to best direct that project. Though there is a place for compromise in such relationships, the key method of adjudicating disputes in both divorce and democracy is alternation: ruling and being ruled in turn.

In that sense, thinking about divorce and joint custody as a metaphor for democratic life can help us to develop a group-centric approach to democratic theory. This model of democracy offers distinctive advantages over the individualistic premises of social contract theory or an overly pluralistic picture of society as a collection of innumerable associations. American political life today, for better or worse, is divided into the duopolistic control of two rival parties. Faced with that institutional reality, democratic theory needs to make sense of how these two parties can legitimately take turns in steering our collective political destiny, while deferring at times to the demands and interests of the minority party. The model developed here will show how a turn-taking theory akin to Aristotle’s picture of ruling and being ruled in turn does more justice to the normative and sociological realities of modern politics than does a consensus or compromise-based theory. This paper attempts to provide a more realistic understanding of how democratic citizens can be thought of as friends—of a sort—even as they radically disagree with one another.

Author

• Dimitrios Ioannis Halikias, Harvard University