Doing friendship, thinking friendship. An introduction

By way of incessant dialogues with his contemporaries, so states Hannah Arendt’s in her 1954 article Philosophy and Politics: The Problem of Action and Thought after the French Revolution, “Socrates tried to make friends out of Athens’ citizenry”. Friendship, she continues, inspired exactly the kind of activity that was needed to foster a “community” out of “people who are different and equal. The community comes into being through equalizing […]. The political, non-economic equalization is friendship, philia.” This much remains true of friendship up to the present day: Friendship is at the root of our understanding of how democratic political communities function because it designates a field that tackles the production of equality as the basis of how we come together as a society.