Abstract

The chapter by Ana Romero-Iribas and Consuelo Martínez-Priego is both unique and timely insofar as it approaches the concern with atomisation and social connection from the perspective of a recent event: the Covid-19 pandemic. This has had a fragmenting consequence for both individuals and institutions, leading to loneliness and isolation. The chapter considers civic friendship to be a remedy to this. Civic friendship involves other-orientated emotions. It is a concern for both self and others, and aims at collective goods. However, it is not just emotional—it also has a rational component. Thus conceived, civic friendship offers a solution to the problems of fragmentation from three perspectives. From the point of view of the sociological, it is a relationship that is based on trust between citizens and cooperating to promote shared interests’; from the point of view of political theory, it offers a defence to totalitarianism by promoting freedom; from a psychological point of view, civic friendship binds other-orientated emotions. Thus this chapter also illustrates how friendship transcends disciplines as the topic and discussion is situated between political philosophy and social and emotional psychology. Civic friendship cannot be reduced to the emotions—but it cannot exist without them either. According to Romero-Iribas and Martínez-Priego, civic friendship is characterised by other-orientated emotions. The action which results from these emotions is guided by concern for the shared life of the subject and the other. These emotions are therefore not utopian or altruistic (self-sacrificing), they are rational emotions and wholly suited to political life. In discussing civic friendship in these terms, this chapter does much to free the emotions from being confined to the personal view of friendship which would view than as idiosyncratic and irrational, and to put them on a rational and generalized basis in politics and society as a whole.