Pahl, R. E. (c2000). On Friendship. Malden, Mass.: Polity Press.
The development of friendship:
18 century:
hostile, [reason:] insecure civil society
Mid-18 century:
warm and tolerant, [reason:] commercial society is based on hand in hand cooperation (p55) -- >
1) material success -- > geographical mobility -- > indifferent co-citizens (p56-57) -- > new insecurity (p51)
2) free markets -- > liberal and fraternal relationships (p55-57)
3) social forces (agricultural society -- > industrial society, urban life: the competition within human beings) -- > distrust, reserve, touch-and-go relations (p57)
* Aristotle’s view of friendships of virtue suggest that this is one of the essential ingredients of the good life: ‘To perceive a friend, therefore, is necessarily in a manner to perceive oneself, and to know a friend is in a manner to know oneself. The excellent person is related to his friend in the same way as he is related to himself, since a friend is another himself.’ (p21)
*… deference to age or patriarchy inhibited the emergence of what Anthony Giddens has termed ‘confluent’, that is non-dependant, relationships. (p36)
* An interesting question to explore would be whether our modern chosen friends siphon off, as it were, sentiments which were previously attached mainly to kin. (p36)
* [Georg Simmel]…that modernity is inevitably destructive of friendship – in the sense used in classical debates. He argued that all the differentiating forces of modern life split us up into specialized roles so that our distinctive cluster of roles is too uniquely individualized to be able to relate in a holistic way to another single person. The modern way of feelings, he suggested, produces differentiated friendships, implying that we would have separate friends for particular interests and activities. (p36)
* For Simmel, the modern style of friendship would be based on reserve and discretion. Modern people have too much to hide. (p37)
* The modern idea of friendship lies in its very freedom from public roles and obligations. (p37)
* Friendship, as a continuous creation of personal will and choice, is ungoverned by the structural definitions that bear on family and kinship. … , most people’s friendships do have clear boundaries of obligations. (p38)
* The shared conception of a common ideal of modern friendship makes the empirical reality difficult to discover without careful and quite subtle methods of observation and analysis. (p38) Thus, for example, a woman might feel obliged to claim that her partner is also her best friend. Her response to an interviewer would be genuine, with no intention to mislead. However, as inevitably occurs from time to time in most close relationship, tensions or quarrels will lead what woman to see out her best friend – probably another woman – in order to gain sympathy and support. (p38)
* Is contemporary friendship a shallow and fragmented way of shoring up our uncertain identities? … Perhaps a new intimacy is available to use as we enter the third millennium: men and women are learning to communicate together more deeply and in a more widespread manner than at any time in the past. … Now such close and enlarged forms of intimacy [close and revealing friendships] are available to a wider cross-section of the population. (p43)
* Part of the problem, perhaps, is that those talking and writing about friendship are referring to very different social forms. (p43) …. Friendship has to be seen in historical and cultural contexts. (p44)
* … as it emerged from the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and has focused on the ensuing themes of industrialization, modernization, bureaucratization and secularization and similar clichés of student textbooks. … There appeared little likelihood that friendship would survive such momentous upheavals and intellectual onslaughts. (p45)
* [Exchange theory] Social and geographical mobility driven by the overwhelming desire for material success was seen to be undermining the American character: the loss of friends and friendship was simply part of a larger and socially damaging process. Philip Slater’s book The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) was subtitled ‘American Culture at the Breaking Point’. While these different in certain significant ways, they both argue that individuals associate with one another fundamentally because they all gain profit from their associations. (p49)
* For human beings to establish social associations on their own initiative (i.e. make friends) they have to be induced by the force of social attraction: ‘An individual is attracted to another if he expects associating with him to be in some way rewarding for himself, and his interest in the expected social rewards draws him to the other.’ Both parties have to anticipate that the association will be rewarding, and this is the basis of the attraction underlying the association. (p49)
* The calculative attitudes of mid-century American people were bought about by new insecurities based on a fluctuating social scene. Upwardly mobile people were reluctant to put down strong roots since that would be likely to make the regular transplanting to new locales more difficult. (p51) [1. new insecurity; 2 the need of movement]
* Whereas in traditional society friends and neighbors provided secure support, in ‘the modern world’ there is a ‘breakdown of community’ in the interests of the ‘free mobility of labor’. (p51) These and similar arguments rest on two main assumptions: first, that warm affective relationship with non-kin were characteristic of ‘traditional’ society and, second, that the writings of Adam Smith [emphasizing that to reward is to return good for good and to punish is to return evil for evil (p50)] and others in the period of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ushered in a new, modern approach to social relationships, based on market rationality [not exchange theory because exchange theory applies impersonal market to personal relation. This is what Adam Smith disagrees.]. (p51)
* [Lawrence Stone claims interpersonal relationships in 18 century] The emotional ties between family members appeared to be weaker than the strong feelings that led to intra-familiar murder. (p52)
* [continuing the above, offering evidence which is from ‘Letter of Advice to a Son’ by Sir William Wentworth] Sir William suggests: ‘He that will be honored and feared in his country must bear countenance and authority, for people are servile, not generous, and do reverence men for fear, not for love of their virtues.’ This highly cynical view of the nature of social relationships, which included wives and kin as well as friends, is likely to be general where there is not a well-established and secure civil society. (p52)
* … according to Stone, there was little warmth and tolerance in interpersonal relations. They were places filled with malice and hatred: ‘What is being postulated for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a society in which a majority of the individuals that composed it found it very difficult to establish close emotional ties to any other person … adults treated each other with suspicion and hostility; …’ (p53)
* [18 century] However, by the mid-eighteenth century a highly significant change seems to have taken place. The word ‘friend’ comes to have its modern (and original) meaning. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary defined it as ‘one who supports you and comforts you while others do not’ and as someone ‘with whom to compare minds and cherish private virtues’. (p53)
* [how did this change take place] Counter to what the classical sociological tradition appears to suggest, Aristotelian styles [another self/alter self/friendship of virtue, utility …] of re-emerged with the coming of commercial-industrial society in the eighteenth century. (pp53-54)
* [Allan Sliver] Silver stoutly claims that ‘The father of market theory was precisely not an “exchange theorist” in the domain of personal relationships.’ (p54)
* … counter to what is assumed in much modern social theory, it was precisely the spread of market exchange in the eighteenth century that led to the development of new benevolent bonds. (p54)
* Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, recognized the distinctiveness and formlessness of personal relations in commercial society. (p54) ... ‘The actions required by friendship, humanity, hospitality, generosity are’, Smith insisted, ‘vague and indeterminate.’(p55)
* Quite clearly, Adam Smith rejected any economistic model or an analogy between market exchange and the personal relations of friendship. Sometimes in the eighteenth century, it seems friendship appeared as one of a new set of benevolent social bonds. This was not as some kind of sharp reaction to the dehumanizing aspects of commercial society but rather as an essential moral and psychological ingredient of new liberal and fraternal values. (p55)
* The crucial point is that David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and other were rejoicing in the liberation of friendship from the narrow instrumental concerns of pre-commercial society as described by Lawrence Stone. The replacement of much previous instrumental friendship by the rules of commercial society allowed the free ex
[indifferent, but not what exchange theory’s way of applying impersonal market to personal relation. indifferent -- > the concept of ‘freedom’ in friendship (?)]
* Nevertheless, for the newly urbanized workers in a rapidly expanding capitalism there appeared to be many social forces preventing the spread of these new forms of friendly relations. (p57) [social forces, such as transience and impermanence of urban life]
* The American social theorist of the Chicago School writing in the 1920s emphasized the transience and impermanence of urban life, following the suggestions of George Simmel, who in his essay The Metropolis and Mental Life first published in Die Grosstadt in 1902-3, wrote of the reserve and distrust which men have in ‘the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan life’. (p57)
* … Simmel claimed that ‘the quantitative aspect of life is transformed directly into qualitative traits of character’. Urban life transformed the traditional struggle with nature into an inter-human struggle for gain. The division of labor leads to narrow one-sidedness and ‘death to the personality of the individual’. (p57)
[agricultural society -- > industrial society: the competition within human beings (?)]
* [cited from Simmel The philosophy of Money (1900)]… that the number of relationship based on money is constantly increasing, that the significance of one person for another can increasingly be raced back, even though often in a concealed form, to monetary interests. In this way, an inner barrier develops between people, a barrier, however, that is indispensable for the modern form of life. (p58)
* Before commercial society a main purpose of friendship was to help friends by deflecting enemies, whereas in the eighteenth century personal relations benefited those involved at no cost to others. As Allan Silver remarks, this implied that ‘friendship becomes simultaneously a private virtue and a public good.’ (p58)
* So Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others recognized that the great virtue of commercial society was to allow a clear distinction to be made between those relationships based on interest and those relationships based on sympathy and affection. Before this clear distinction emerged, people were advised to treat friends as if they might become enemies. Hence, in commercial society the family may be weakened and friendship strengthened… (pp58-59)
* In the words of Allan Silver, ‘Only with impersonal markets in products and services does a parallel system of personal relations emerge whose ethic excludes exchange and utility.’ Friendship and other sympathetic bonds serve to integrate individuals into the larger society. (pp59-60)
* Any suggestion that there have been qualitative or quantitative changes in the texture and style of relationships must assume that it is possible to compare like with like. (p61)
* This is not based on rules, regulations or any part of the institutionalized order. Individuals, out of their own volition, work out how they should behave with their friends. At the heart of this ideal is the notion of trust. (p61)
* If we feel obliged to be a friend, then it is no true friendship. In the modern ideal of friendship, the relationship is one of our own free choosing, it is a product of our own personal agency and no other. … This vision of the modern ideal of friendship is related to the late modern concern – if not obsession – with individual freedom and ex
* The inevitable uncertainties of interpersonal interactions have to be overcome through trust. This implies that trust must lie at the heart of true communicative friendship in the contemporary world. … The closer we are to our friends, the more able they are to betray us. Without trust, friendships will fail. (p63)
* We have to behave as if our friend will not betray us, even though we recognize that she has the capacity to do so. Our personal trust has to transcend this possibility: unlike formal contracts or activities enforceable by third parties, this trust is based on a moral quality. (p63)
* Anthony Giddens recognizes that trust must imply non-rational and incalculable elements, implying that it is a form of faith in which ‘confidence vested in probably outcomes expresses a commitment to something rather than just a cognitive understanding.’ (p65)
* [distinction between trust and confidence] ‘What makes trust so puzzling’, remarks Barbara Misztal, ‘is that to trust involves more than believing; in fact trust is to believe despite uncertainty. Trust always involves an element of risk resulting from our inability to monitor others’ behavior, from our inability to have a complete knowledge about other people’s motivations and, generally, from the contingency of social reality.’ (p66)
* … social relations and the obligations inherent in them [social relations] are mainly responsible for the production of trust. Intimacy is a strategy of establishing trust.(p66)
* …true friendship as an essential ingredient of the art of life needs to be respected and nourished. (p91)
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