Les Révolutions françaises. Les phénomènes révolutionnaires en France du moyenâgeànos jours

In this article, I examine friendship as a subject of political theory rather than as a social practice relevant to political life. As suggested by Francesco d'Altobianco Alberti in the poem recited at the first certame coronario, two ideas of political friendship existed side by side in Medicean Florence. They appeared in full in Palmieri's Vita civile and in Platina's De optimo cive. As I will show, the Ciceronian language of friendship is used in these works to resolve two key problems of Renaissance political thought: the need for political unity and the just way of appointing the governing elite. Palmieri placed friendship in the political sphere of concord: he was a republican imperialist who believed that civic friendship protected the political unity of the city, without which Florence would not have been able to expand. Platina, on the other hand, situated friendship in the political sphere of counsel: his concern was to support the selection of the most virtuous and knowledgeable citizens, worthy of access to public office. While Palmieri looked back to the city's medieval past, Platina cast light on the politics of friendship that allowed the Medici to stay in power.     

What can the concept of friendship contribute to the study of national identity?

ABSTRACT. This article argues that understanding national identity requires a reappraisal of friendship as a political sentiment. Although studies of nationalism underscored the transformation of face‐to‐face interactions into ties between ‘distant others,’ they failed to acknowledge how sentiments of friendship may be involved. First, following theorising in political philosophy, the Aristotelian paradigm of civic friendship is conceptually applicable to modern civil society based on characteristics such as volition, commitment and sentiment. Second, feminist scholarship has delineated how an implicit discourse of male fraternity underlies the historical realisations of the modern social contract and mediates the notions of both patriotism and nationalism. Finally, networks of male associations and transformations in collective affection from small settings to large‐scale societies contributed to the magnification of a politics of friendship. Consequently, rather than viewing fraternal friendship as a relic of traditional societies, it should be studied as a unique aspect of modern nationalism.     

The Making of an ‘All Weather Friendship’ Pakistan,China and the History of a Border Agreement: 1949–1963

China and Pakistan share what is widely known as an ‘all weather friendship’. The historical roots of this friendship can be traced to 1963, when the two countries entered into a border agreement that divided territory in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Since then, China has provided missile and nuclear technology to Pakistan. It has limited the potential for escalation in the time of war between India and Pakistan and is the largest economic investor in Pakistan. The benefits of this friendship for Pakistan are clear. Yet, there is little detail on what led to the making of the ‘all weather friendship’. This article provides a detailed account of Sino–Pakistani relations between 1949 and 1963. It argues that whilst the 1963 agreement led to a turning point, the Pakistani establishment – military and civilian – sought to engage China since 1949. They did so to create strategic options for themselves in the event that the US and the UK – Pakistan's main allies following independence – limited or worse, ended their support for Pakistan in its troubled relations with India. This article is based on primary sources available in the US, Britain, as well as recently declassified and hitherto unused papers in India.     

Between friendship and justice: on Lincoln’s political thought

Reading Aristotle and applying his notion of philia, or political friendship, across 26 centuries sheds significant light into Abraham Lincoln’s career. It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address. The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends who shared a commitment to nature and nature’s law as expressed in the Declaration.     

The Boundaries of Women's Power: Gender and the Discourse of Political Friendship in Twelfth‐Century England

The discourse of friendship was an integral part of political language and interaction in twelfth‐century England. Because the qualities that made a good political friendship – loyalty, wise counsel and generosity, among others – corresponded so closely to the criteria for successful lordship, historians often used the quality of a king's friendship as a signifier for the quality of his rule. Yet their treatment of women's political friendship was markedly different. The discourse of friendship therefore provides a window into the larger struggle over the representation of gender and rulership in twelfth‐century historical writing in England, reflecting chroniclers’ anxiety about female sovereignty. Twelfth‐century historians depicted women's participation in political friendship as acceptable only within certain circumscribed boundaries that corresponded to the sanctioned political roles for women in general. Otherwise, chroniclers attempted to efface the existence of women's political friendship, sometimes describing the same situations in different language depending on whether the main participant was male or female. Chroniclers also represented women as arbiters of friendship, showing men how better to conduct their relationships either through direct instruction or counter‐example. In both cases women reinforced male friendship, either by being excluded from it, or by demonstrating the correct way to carry it out.     

Violent Belongings: Partition,Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India

This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural friendship in eighteenth-century British expansion into Oceania. It suggests that it was in the breach more than the observance that discourses of friendship came to the fore, specifically in resistance to first contact and in accusations of theft. Seen to be motivated by either violent or avaricious passions, theft and native resistance tore the bonds of human sociability asunder. I argue that the significance of friendship was twofold. First, in a context of inter-imperial rivalry, friendship signified native consent in claims of possession over land and thus ensured conformity to legal norms. Second, it promised a system of order governed by norms of affective restraint that could sublimate the passions of natives, voyagers and nations.     

From Political Friendship to Befriending the World

Political friendship is typically portrayed as a dyadic relationship. In this traditional model, friendship is conceived as a positive intersubjective experience of relation-to-self and relation-to-other, assuming the reciprocity and equality characteristic of symmetrical relations of recognition. This essay explores an alternative, triadic model of political friendship, suggested by the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt makes the claim, at odds with most modern accounts, that “politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endures beyond them.” I suggest that the dyadic model of political friendship is incomplete; a more adequate paradigm would foreground triadic relations of interest, concern and care for the phenomenal world itself, conceived as the quasi-objective intermediary of human artifice. As a “public thing,” a shared world is a necessary condition for intersubjective friendship and therefore is deserving of a properly political mode of acknowledgement and friendship in its own right.     

Refusing Reform,Reworking Pity,or Reinforcing Privilege? The Multivalent Politics of Young People’s Fun and Friendship within a Volunteering Encounter

This paper analyses initiatives which took British young people from ethnic minority and disenfranchised backgrounds to volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa. It asks whether decolonial possibilities can be seen in the politics of youthful fun and friendship amid a practice undeniably driven by interpenetrating neocolonial logics, where enrolment in helping “needy” others is seen as a means to “improve” working-class and racially marked youth. The paper argues that volunteers’ investments in leisure constituted a politics of refusal towards how they were acted upon as objects of concern. More ambivalently, playful, friendly interactions between British and African youth disrupted relations of charitable pity and signalled desires for solidarity and equality, but cannot be claimed as fully decolonial. At times, fun also re-entrenched neocolonial and other oppressive relations. Overall, the paper demonstrates that a close reading of the multivalent, affective politics of young people’s fun and friendship can reveal much about the reproduction or subversion of contemporary neocolonial logics that operate both within and beyond the borders of postcolonial Britain.     

Trading Sentiments

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between commerce, cross-cultural friendship and empire in the published Voyages of Pacific salt pork trader John Turnbull. Turnbull published two versions of his Voyages, the first in 1805 and the second in 1813. Through exposing the variations between the two versions of his Voyages and analysing the reception of each text in the burgeoning periodical literature at the time, I explore how his commercially oriented critiques of cross-cultural friendship transformed into unbridled enthusiasm in the second reprint. I explain this shift as both a consequence of a shift in genre, from commercial voyaging to scientific voyaging, and as a reflection of two competing ideas of the relationship between friendship and commerce. The first version reflects a Smithian ideal, where friendship is excluded from commerce, while the second version shows a natural law conception of friendship as commercial imperialism in its ideal, and morally virtuous, form.     

Political Friendship in Churchill's Marlborough

This article examines Winston Churchill's biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, as a character study and as a statement of Churchill's own fundamental political wisdom. It argues that Marlborough's capacity for friendship is key not only as a tool for statecraft, but as its very purpose. It examines Marlborough's friendship with Eugene of Savoy as the backbone of the alliance against Louis XIV. It also considers Churchill's purpose of writing the biography as an expression of friendship as the fundamental purpose of politics.     

FRIENDSHIP NETWORKS*

ABSTRACT This paper develops a model of social networks different from those presented in the recent literature. In contrast to existing models, the level of investment in link formation is a continuous decision variable, and links form stochastically rather than deterministically, with the probability depending on the noncooperative investment choices of both parties. Since the network structure is then stochastic rather than deterministic, the actual pattern of links cannot be specified, as in previous models, with the analysis focusing instead on which links are most likely to form. This alternate approach leads to a much simpler mathematical structure than in previous work. The analysis, which is couched in the context of friendship networks, shows that individual investment in friendship formation is too low. In addition, the analysis shows that, in an asymmetric setting where one individual has personal magnetism or a broad group of acquaintances, friendship links involving this attractive agent are most likely to form.     

丁宝桢与诤友薛福保的君子之交

本文追述了丁文诚公与诤友薛子季怀的君子之交,以及他们是如何相对＂于千里之外者,其用心庸得己乎＂这段史料。＂贤人进,则民生遂＂,正如黎庶昌所言：＂观文诚两次特荐,非获季怀之助,知季怀之深,而能若是乎？＂另从阎敬铭[1]的翘首企盼之情中,也可见一斑……     

Odd bedfellows: Nietzsche and Mill on marriage

This paper examines Nietzsche's views on love and marriage in the works of his middle period. Contrary to the general consensus in the secondary literature regarding Nietzsche's ideas on these matters, it shows that he offers several positive reflections on love and marriage. Indeed, at times he accepts that friendship is possible between the genders and even models marriage on friendship. Modelling marriage on friendship creates an overlap between Nietzsche's thought and that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. However, it is argued here that, albeit for different reasons, none of these visions of marriage as friendship succeeds in fully accommodating sexuality.     

国际关系的演化变迁与中印"兄弟"情谊的大起大落

中印"兄弟"情谊的大起大落,是尼赫鲁时代中印双边关系最引人注目的特征。尼赫鲁时代中印"兄弟"情谊的大起大落与许多因素相关,国际关系的演化变迁即是其中的重要因素。全球冷战背景下的印巴敌视、中美对抗、中苏友好、美巴结盟催生了中印兄弟情谊的到来;而中苏分歧、印苏友好、中美敌对、印美接近、印巴对抗、中巴联合则加剧了中印关系的恶化与破裂。尼赫鲁时代中印"兄弟"情谊的大起大落,从国际关系演化变迁的视角,为当代和未来中印关系提供了值得反思和借鉴的经验与教训。     

Michael Psellos on friendship and love: erotic discourse in eleventh‐century Constantinople

This paper examines representations of friendship and desire in the writings of the Constantinopolitan author Michael Psellos (1018–c.1078). Within the Byzantine context of strict Christian constraints regarding expressions of sexual desire, Psellos reconfigures the dominant late antique image of friendship as unity, inspired by divine authority, with the subversive model of erôs as the pursuit of bodily pleasures. Therewith, Psellian discourse may be regarded as representative of novel trends in eleventh‐century Byzantium that anticipate the re‐appearance of romantic fiction. As is argued here, such novel trends are to be understood within the context of Byzantium's continuous dialogue with its past, rather than as part of linear historiographical narratives.     

正视历史是发展中日关系的重大课题

20世纪的历史教训值得铭记,维护和发展和平友好的国际环境是人类共同的责任,当今日本社会对历史认知与和平友好的人数比例上存在着“人间大,两头小”的客观现状,这是由于日本人有缺陷的和平观,偏颇的历史观和教育的偏向性造成的,日本应向亚洲各受害国人民真诚地谢罪,勇敢地承担起战争的责任,中日两国应面向未来,以前瞻的态度处理中日关系,共同为亚洲的稳定与发展及世界的和平做出贡献。     

Montaigne,Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism

Abstract

Shakespeare shows how enforceable contract not only undergirds the city of Venice, which makes a multicultural society possible, but its corrosive effects on non-contractual relationships like friendship, love, and marriage. This is evident in the decisions, actions, and relationships of Antonio, Bassanio, Portia, and Jessica. Although Shakespeare concludes the play on a happy note, the conclusion one can reach is that, despite its advantages, regimes based on commerce and contract fail to create the conditions for friendship, love, and marriage to flourish.     

Make,mend and befriend: geographies of austerity,crafting and friendship in contemporary cultures of dressmaking in the UK

Dressmaking is a practice infused with historical significance which in the contemporary context of austerity has renewed social, cultural, economic, political and moral importance. Drawing on writing from across the social sciences we advance a geographical understanding of dressmaking by focusing on the themes of feminism and crafting practices, austerity, fashion and consumption, and friendship and encounters in order to theorise the everyday spatialities of contemporary crafting cultures. In doing so we argue that the recent return to dressmaking cannot be understood as an extension or repetition of historic practices but that contemporary dressmakers are claiming a history and geography of their own. To conclude, we argue that dressmaking and other related fabricultures have much to offer our understanding of austerity, feminism and friendship and thus merit further theoretical and empirical investigation.     

中共主要领导人早期中日友好思想述论——以李大钊、陈独秀、毛泽东和周恩来为中心

中共主要领导人李大钊、陈独秀、毛泽东和周恩来等,早年在对日本民族和人民观察与思考的基础上,赞赏日本民族是一个伟大的民族,并将日本人民和日本军国主义政府区分开来,积极主张中日两国人民之间的真正友好,从而形成了中国共产党的早期中日友好思想。     

Notes Toward a Dissident Theo-Politics

The following essay asks what theo-political grammar might effectively address the growing crisis of democracy in North America. Previous responses to this made by political theology and liberation theology are still rooted in a dialectical mode of analysis, thereby concealing the discursive limitations that constrain possibilities for material progress. As a response, I posit a Dissident Theo-Politics that borrows from post-structuralist thought. This Dissident Theo-Politics recognizes Whiteness to be the central source of meaning in the USA, thus its most important symbol and apex of its theology, that is, a god. Theology considered in this way invites new discursive options that produce different yet non-oppositional ways of engaging the complicated crises in American democracy. The constructive strategy I put forward is a radical democratic friendship based on love (philia) extended disproportionality between those who are perceived as social unequals. Using both Derrida and Ella Baker I argue for radical democratic friendship as a source to inspire insurgent energies to provisionally re-set US socio-political conditions.