Paul Ludwig's excellent book describes civic friendship as utility friendship, while ennobling what utility can mean. Aristotle guides him as he provides a “bifocal” account of civic friendship that realistically emphasizes its utilitarian aims while idealistically articulating its implicit higher aims. The “bifocal” approach avoids the “blowback” effect of liberal political theory's reductionism. Just as with Aristotle's view that taking a regime's governing principle to its extreme leads to its ruin, so too “blowback” occurs when one goes to the extreme of one's theory. Too much realism and lack of principle produce cynicism and injustice; too much idealism produces overreach and injustice owing to an improper sense of possibility. A “bifocal” approach strikes the mean of balancing realism and idealism.
Ludwig's Aristotelian practical political science draws out the potentialities of civic friendship from within liberal theory, whose reductionism fails to explain the success of liberal political practice. Liberal theory owes too much to the rational-actor model, to justice-as-fairness theory, and to identity, which even its exponents admit do not adequately explain political behavior.
Ludwig begins with an account of Aristotelian political psychology with special attention to the way friendship is rooted in thumos, and includes discussions of contemporary identity and recognition. He builds up his case for civic friendship as utility through the psychology of benefaction, as well as by considering associations as modern examples of civic friendships, and homonoia or like-mindedness as agreement on the principles of the regime. Homonoia means agreement of mind (contra the Latin concordia which emphasizes the passions). Civic passions “sleep” until they are threatened. It means also esteem for the regime, and affinity with other members, all of whom bear the imprint of the regime.
Ludwig's expansive case for civic friendship shears from Aristotle his metaphysics of energeia, which considers the distinctive “being-at-work” of the human animal. Dressing down Aristotle in modern natural right and the passions seems more realistic for liberals, but its own potential for “blowback” is worth noting.
Shearing off the metaphysics of energeia hinders Ludwig's attempt to combine two pieces of his argument. The first piece is the primacy of utility, defined generally as that which compensates for some need, deficiency, or evil. Ludwig claims that the “nonfoundational” meaning of utility found in Plato's Lysis informs Aristotle's account, and applies this, for example, when he demonstrates that we form our political identity in defiance of the hostile environment that surrounds us (62). Utility friendship, too, is marked off this way, as with the example of Freud's company of porcupines who shelter from the cold with one another, but only until their quills poke each other from getting too close. Only an enemy can define a friend (see 26, 35). The second piece is Ludwig's claim that civic friendship is a friendship by analogy whose prime analogate seems to be the contemplative friendship of friends jointly perceiving and thinking (74–89, 92–104, 109–18). Ludwig demonstrates how the intellectual virtues contained in contemplative virtue are perhaps the highest form of utility because they contribute to happiness. This perhaps offers a link in the chain tying the prime analogate to the lower analogues of friendship.
It is unclear how contemplative friendship can serve as an analogate for civic friendship without identifying something akin to it in the agora. Ludwig's agora is the market of exchanges between benefactors and beneficiaries. Their relationship is not simply “market hucksterism” because their exchanges are both useful and gracious, and enemies usually do not exchange at all (215). Even so, Ludwig's agora is a place of business and of busyness, and while there is an honoring of benefactors, it remains unclear how that honor gets shown or how the regime esteems itself to itself. Ludwig realistically claims that a “continent self, riven by factions that somehow cohere, becomes the new analogue for civic concord” (266). However, it seems that analogue would still depend on a higher analogue, the “self-love of the decent or ethical individual, who is not self-divided” (254), and the challenge is identifying how those two analogues relate.
Aristotle claims leisure is the distinctive activity of homonoia. He argues in Politics 7.15 that leisure is characteristic of the regime at peace with itself, enjoying civic friendship. The regime that only knows busyness is servile because it does not know what to do with itself at peace. It cannot face itself, just as millions of people could not be at peace with themselves during the coronavirus lockdown, which ended in the nihilistic violence of the riots. Peace is the purpose of war, and thumos must be trained for leisure.
The regime incapable of leisure will end up warlike and will need enemies because the worst thing for that regime is not to be at war (Politics 1334a8–1334b28). Ludwig's account of civic friendship as ennobled utility rigorously attempts to forestall that fate. Perhaps a regime composed of merchants who admire one another can help avoid that, but it is unclear how the regime predicated on enkratic citizens can avoid hastening decomposition without also holding some vision of peace that is prior to the regime's need for an enemy. For his part, Tocqueville thought regular church attendance was useful for taming the melancholy that comes with democratic individualism. For this reason, one might also consider how much damage to America was brought on by the coincidental collapse of the Soviet Union and its own secularization over the past generation. The need for leisure seems perfectly intelligible to Ludwig's nonmetaphysical Aristotle, but does one need the metaphysics of energeia to understand leisure as the aim of political life?
Aristotle claims philosophy characterizes leisure but unfortunately few partake of it, which renders its civic function as an outlet for thumos ambiguous. Even so, Ludwig's account of civic friendship as analogical seems to depend on the ability to find a civic location for leisure. Those locations would be sites not only where benefactors could be honored, but also where the regime celebrates the “shared love of things held in common,” which is the very root of belonging (292). Failure to constitute such civic spaces of leisure would seem to leave utility friendship lacking an analogue, and for contemplative friendship to lack political utility. Aristotle's discussion of education in Politics 8 and civic spectacles, most notably in the Poetics, serve as candidates for leisure or mimetic contemplation in the agora. Ludwig considers Politics 8 as education for civic friendship but not in terms of civic leisure (Aristotle's discussion of music would be the place to consider this aim [Politics 8.3]). Ludwig treats civic spectacles as instances of civic pleasures and indeed of civic education (119–20), which fits with the reduced Aristotle. But a more expansive discussion could elaborate how such spectacles form thumos, and express and form homonoia.
Ludwig's treatment of civic friendship is a formidable and welcome contribution to the conversation. For a work of practical political science that benefits liberal theory, the author deserves honor. But for a work of political theory, such honors are incidental to the conversation itself.
