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Hobbes and Friendship

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Hobbes Against Friendship

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Abstract

The past twenty-five years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in friendship as a political concept. Supporters of the revival of friendship often suggest that Thomas Hobbes—the seventeenth-century theorist of state sovereignty—is partly responsible for the exile of the concept from modern political theory. The engagement with such claims is the entry-point of this study in current debates; we will see that Hobbes did not deny that men are capable of genuine friendship; he did not dispute the occurrence of practices of friendship among individuals and states; rather Hobbes rejected friendship as an explanatory and normative principle of political action; indeed the demolition of Aristotelian philia and its foundations was a major aim of Hobbes’s political science and one of its lasting contributions to modern political thought.

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  1. School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Gabriella Slomp

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  1. Gabriella Slomp
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Correspondence to Gabriella Slomp .

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Slomp, G. (2022). Hobbes and Friendship. In: Hobbes Against Friendship. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95315-7_1

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