Friendship

In 'Friendship', Francesco Alberoni offers a wide-ranging analysis of intimacy. Traversing disciplines, he untangles the meanings of friendship from family and friendly relations, from love and passion and the everyday experiences of coupledom. Friendship is the just relationship. Rather than based on exchange, it is an encounter between two intimates that repudiates the logics of the market, the depersonalizing norms of modern bureaucracy and the objectives of collectivities whether they be couples or social movements. Intimate and just, friendship partakes of the world while resisting its dehumanizing drift. Marrying philosophical poetics with social science sensibility, Alberoni shows that the extent to which we live up to the ideals of friendship marks our capacities to realize the republican virtues in concrete everyday life.