It may seem odd, given its title, but this is a book about friendship. The central problem of American democracy, according to Danielle Allen, is a lack of trust among citizens. For democracy to be stable, its citizens must feel confident that the obligations and opportunities of society are shared equitably. Yet majority rule is a breeding ground for distrust, particularly in a polity marked by race. Without trust, there is nothing to bind the minority and the majority together. The task of this book is to find ways for citizens to trust one another in these unsettled times. Doing so, Allen argues, requires developing habits of political friendship. The challenge of democratic politics, ironically, is to turn strangers into friends.

Allen's argument begins with a striking point: Sacrifice is an omnipresent part of democracy. This is because democracy promises all citizens independent political power, but few experience it. The result of this paradox of democratic sovereignty is a collective neurosis that must be constantly managed: “Democratic citizens are by definition empowered only to be disempowered. As a result, democratic citizenship requires rituals to manage the psychological tension that arises from being a nearly powerless sovereign” (p. 41). Prior to Brown v. Board of Education, this tension was resolved through Herrenvolk democracy, which provided whites with a sense of equality (among fellow white citizens) and power (over all those who were not white). After Brown, Allen argues, the challenge is to develop habits of citizenship that can empower citizens without resorting to exclusion and subordination.

Democracy, then, implies loss, given that one lacks the promised power. Loss, in turn, implies sacrifice. Those who lose a decision yet assent to it have in a way sacrificed, and “their sacrifice makes a collective democratic action possible” (p. 29). Through an excellent interpretation of the fiction and criticism of Ralph Ellison, Allen persuasively argues that sacrifice is a ubiquitous, inconspicuous, almost rudimentary part of democratic life.

The only way to deal with sacrifice effectively is to build relations of trust among citizens so that we can be confident that our sacrifices will be reciprocated. This requires that we find ways to talk to strangers. Developing habits of trust allows citizens to see strangers as friends. Following Aristotle, Ellison, and Hannah Arendt, Allen maintains that political friendship is the essence of democratic citizenship. Such friendship does not require citizens to come to know each other intimately or even that they know each other at all. All it demands is that citizens feel that they share an equitable amount of the benefits and burdens of citizenship. By asking ourselves “Would I treat a friend this way?” in encounters with fellow citizens, we convert “rivalrous self-interest” into “equitable self-interest” (pp. 140, 126). By making strangers into friends, we share sacrifice equitably, and in so doing generate the relations of trust upon which democracy depends.

Talking to Strangers is engaging, well written, and tightly argued. Its interpretations of texts are excellent. Part I of the book sets up the problem of sacrifice and citizenship by means of a fascinating interpretation of several of the most famous photographs of the struggle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. The photographs, Allen shows, reveal the “deep rules” of public interaction among American citizens at the time: white women cursing black women, white men kicking black men, black people stoically enduring abuse from white mobs. These rules are learned through intuition and habit rather than education in the explicit rights and duties of citizenship. The analysis is followed by a keen comparison of Ellison's and Arendt's interpretations of Little Rock. Through original critiques of Jürgen Habermas and Thomas Hobbes, Part II examines the “bad habits” of contemporary democratic practice. Part III begins with a careful reading of Invisible Man as a text on democratic sacrifice. It goes on to imagine what a trust-generating citizenship might look like and, using Aristotle, defends rhetoric as a crucial tool in developing trust.

One of the book's most essential points is made quietly. Allen suggests that the black experience of sacrifice during slavery and segregation makes it a deep spring from which to draw in developing a post-Brown, trust-generating democratic citizenship. “Something in the African American experience of sacrifice,” she writes, commenting on Ellison, “has brought extra knowledge about the nature of democracy…. This knowledge could be the basis of a new approach to citizenship” (p. 114). Black people's exquisite experience with the paradox of democratic sovereignty makes their particular history universal, or as Allen nicely puts it, “as democratic citizens, we are all Negroes” (p. 116). Placing black life at the center of American citizenship enables Allen to think radically despite her avowed liberalism. How many liberals today, for example, are willing to publicly state, “In my utopia universities would have no police” (p. 181)?

Yet this radicalism also exposes strains in Allen's political theory. Her emphasis on trust downplays the structural nature of some political conflicts. As a result, her effort to turn strangers into friends does not pay enough attention to contradictions among citizens that perhaps no amount of trustful talk can resolve. This is evident in her otherwise fine defense of rhetoric as a valuable part of democratic discourse. Through Aristotle, Allen defines rhetoric as a form of “trust production” and provides a persuasive defense of it against charges made by Habermasians that rhetoric and emotions distort deliberation. Yet her argument does not take into account forms of rhetoric that do not seek to generate trust but to draw lines in the sand. One thinks of Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Malcolm X, three of the greatest orators in American history, all of whom sought not to make friends but to “break up the crust of an ignorant prejudice,” as the abolitionist Phillips put it. These rhetoricians did not ask themselves “Would I treat a friend this way?” when they engaged others. Instead, they drew lines on the issues of slavery and white supremacy and dared their audience to choose the right side. If we grant that both Douglass's desire to “pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule” toward his pro-slavery opponents and Malcolm's warning to the American government that it is “the ballot or the bullet” contribute to the struggle for democracy, then theories of citizenship need to account for such rhetoric without dismissing it as distorted or distrustful.

Allen convincingly argues that one way to tone down the supercharged rhetoric of political discourse today is to treat strangers as friends. But perhaps this is not quite sufficient. As I was driving to work to write this review, I heard a caller on Bill O'Reilly's conservative radio talk show ask how Christian social conservatives could find common ground with secular liberals. O'Reilly bluntly stated, “You can't. It's really more a matter of who wins the game.” This statement is anathema to Allen's argument, of course, yet it raises a problem: How can one make a stranger a friend when he or she has already determined that you are an enemy? Talking to Strangers is an important contribution to democratic theory. Recognizing that some conflicts are not amenable to the habits of political friendship, however, might require that democratic theory also address those conflicts in which it might be necessary to confront, rather than befriend, the stranger.