Civic Friendship and Democracy: Past and Present Perspectives by Dominique Krista Leigh Dery Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Spragens, Jr., Supervisor ___________________________ Michael Gillespie ___________________________ Ruth Grant ___________________________ Suzanne Shanahan Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 i v ABSTRACT Civic Friendship and Democracy: Past and Present Perspectives by Dominique Krista Leigh Dery Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Spragens, Jr., Supervisor ___________________________ Michael Gillespie ___________________________ Ruth Grant ___________________________ Suzanne Shanahan An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 i v Copyright by Dominique Krista Leigh Dery 2015 Abstract My dissertation seeks to clarify the stakes of recent calls to increase civic friendship in our communities by initiating a conversation between contemporary and historical theoretical work about the requirements and consequences of using friendship as a model for social and political relationships between citizens. Friends’ lives are bound together by shared activity and by mutual concern and support; in what ways do relations between citizens, who often begin as strangers, take up these attitudes and behaviors? What kinds of civic friendship are possible in our contemporary democratic communities? How are they cultivated? And what are their political advantages and disadvantages? These questions guide the project as a whole. I begin by canvassing some recent and popular work by Robert Bellah et al., Robert Putnam, and Danielle Allen in order to clarify the claims they make about different forms of civic friendship. The chapters that follow focus on the work of Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Adam Smith respectively in order to respond to various gaps I find in the contemporary accounts. I assess what each thinker, contemporary and canonical, can offer us today as we continue to think about the most sustainable and fair ways in which citizens can relate to one another in vast and diverse contemporary democracies. Along the way I address several important over-arching issues: the relationship between self-interest and care for others; the relationship between different sorts of equality and civic friendship; and the different roles that reason, emotions, iv habits, and institutions play in the cultivation of various kinds of civic friendship. I conclude that equality and justice ought to be both prerequisites and consequences of civic friendship, that self-interest is not a sufficient source for robust civic friendship and that instead some kind of imaginative and emotional motivation is needed, and that civic friendship must be understood as both a moral and a political phenomenon. v Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Contents ......................................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ix 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 2. Contemporary Visions of Civic Friendship: Bellah, Putnam, Allen ................................ 13 2.1 Habits of the Heart ......................................................................................................... 14 2.1.1 Civic Volunteers and Civic-Minded Professionals: On Care in Politics ............ 18 2.1.2 Politics of Interest, Community, and Nation ......................................................... 24 2.2 Bowling Together: On Social Capital ........................................................................... 27 2.2.1 Friendship, Freedom, and Equality ........................................................................ 30 2.2.2 Bridging vs. Bonding ................................................................................................ 32 2.3 Talking to Strangers ....................................................................................................... 36 2.3.1 Rivalrous vs. Equitable Self-Interest ....................................................................... 38 2.3.2. Soft Berets and Crossing Early: The Strategy of Political Friendship ............... 43 2.4 Road Map and Guiding Questions .............................................................................. 46 3. Defining Aristotelian Civic Friendship ................................................................................ 49 3.1 Politics and the Greater Good ....................................................................................... 52 3.2 Political Potluck: Diversity in Community ................................................................. 55 3.3 A Taxonomy of Aristotelian Friendships .................................................................... 59 3.4 Friendship of Shared Virtue .......................................................................................... 63 3.5 Friendship of Shared Pleasure ...................................................................................... 66 vi 3.6 Friendship of Shared Utility .......................................................................................... 68 3.7 Against Cooper on Care For a Friend’s Own Sake .................................................... 71 3.8 Bickford Against Civic “Friendship” ........................................................................... 75 3.9 Yack on Political Fellow Travellers .............................................................................. 77 3.10 Frank on the Marketplace ............................................................................................ 81 3.11 The Uses of Aristotelian Civic Friendship ................................................................ 91 3.12 The Limits of Aristotelian Civic Friendship ............................................................. 95 4. Defining Tocquevillean Civic Friendship .......................................................................... 101 4.1 Tocqueville’s Travels .................................................................................................... 103 4.2 The Rising Tide of Democracy .................................................................................... 105 4.3 Twin Dangers of Democracy: Democratic Despotism and Individualism .......... 107 4.4 Civic Friendship as Association ................................................................................. 114 4.5 Civic Friendship as Compassion ................................................................................ 121 4.6 Civic Friendship as Self-Interest Well Understood ................................................. 124 4.7 Making Sense of Motivations and Manifestations of Tocquevillean Civic Friendship: Interactions Between Association, Compassion, and Self-Interest ........ 128 4.8 Taking Tocqueville Seriously ...................................................................................... 133 4.9 Knotted Concepts: Compassion and Self-Interest Well Understood .................... 135 4.10 Villa on Civil Society .................................................................................................. 141 4.11 Berger on Political Engagement ................................................................................ 147 4.12 Sabl on Community Organizing ............................................................................... 152 4.13 The Uses and Abuses of Democracy in America ................................................... 157 vii 5. Defining Smithian Civic Friendship ................................................................................... 165 5.1 On Smithian Sympathy and Propriety ...................................................................... 168 5.2 Stoicism and Ambition: Sympathy’s Limits ............................................................. 172 5.3 Justice as Bare Minimum and Beneficence as Ornament: Two Threads of Smithian Civic Friendship .................................................................................................................. 177 5.4 On The Impartial Spectator ......................................................................................... 185 5.5 Limits and Obstacles to Impartiality .......................................................................... 189 5.6 Hanley on Beneficence and Noble Praiseworthiness .............................................. 196 5.7 Griswold on Beneficence in Ordinary Life ............................................................... 202 5.8 Forman-Barzilai on Negative Justice Amidst Cultural Diversity .......................... 209 5.9 Moving Beyond the Limits of Smithian Sympathy ................................................. 216 6. Conclusion .............................................................................................................................