‘I Love you Whom the World calls Enemies’: Mary Astell Against Political Friendship

Both champions and critics of political friendship in contemporary political theory draw exclusively on canonical, male figures such as Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli or Hobbes. Resisting this tendency, this article recovers the critique of political friendship we find in Mary Astell, the seventeenth-century philosopher and pamphleteer known as ‘the first English feminist’. Astell, like Aristotle, argued for a thick conception of friendship which relied on virtue. Unlike Aristotle, however, Astell rejected a thinner kind of political friendship, one which did not require virtue. This article proposes that we should see Astell as providing a defence of the usefulness of political enmity . After true and virtuous friends, enemies were best at fulfilling the end of friendship – to point out one’s flaws and improve one’s virtue. Astell’s critique of political friendship and her appreciation of enmity is especially relevant for contemporary proponents of civic friendship and scholars who argue for partisanship as a form of friendship.