This chapter endeavors to show that the relevant contrasting term to friend in liberal political theory is not enemy but self. Given the skepticism that suffuses liberal theory, the self remains an endlessly problematic construct that gives us ongoing opportunities for reimagining and reconstructing what the behavior of both friends and enemies is truly like. The chapter examines key terms in the liberal epistemological vocabulary such as skepticism, empiricism, nominalism, and conventionalism to clarify their import for the liberal (...) conceptions of personal identity, friend, and enemy. Throughout, the chapter shows how the Levinasian deployment of the same–other distinction with its devolution upon the concept of infinity offers us a revealing guide to liberal political thought and practice and thereby also constitutes an important implicit critique of Schmitt. (shrink)

The aspiration for peace has been a recurring theme in human history, yet war remains a persistent reality. This paradox raises fundamental questions: Can war be rendered impossible? How do historical enemies transition into allies? The international friend-enemy polarization threatens global stability, with contemporary political divisions exacerbating internal national conflicts. We offer a collection of papers and debates that presented at the 2024 Dublin conference ‘Dreams of Peace and Realities of War. The Friend-Enemy Polarization’. The first (...) section examines political polarization and enmity: Jacob Rogozinski’s analysis of absolute hostility in democratic societies questions whether democratic agonism can contain enmity without leading to destructive divisions. Nicholas Hayes-Mota revisits Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democracy, comparing it with Saul Alinsky’s community organizing to assess its practical viability. Nadia Urbinati critiques the decline of political intermediation, linking it to socio-economic inequalities and the erosion of democratic deliberation. Mauro Magatti explores globalization’s failure, arguing that it has fueled instability, reinforcing nationalistic and religious divisions. The second section focuses on inclusion and exclusion in politics, tradition, and religion. Seán Golden discusses Confucianism’s historical role as a counterbalance to militaristic realpolitik. Asma Afsaruddin explores Islamic peacemaking traditions, highlighting Quranic and Hadith-based principles of justice and mercy. Chandra Mallampalli analyzes India’s anti-conversion laws and Hindu nationalism, while Brian Levy examines South Africa’s struggle with economic inequality and identity politics. The final section addresses globalization and polarization in the digital age. Fulvia Giachetti critiques the neoliberal belief that free markets promote peace, while Assaf Sharon interrogates how authoritarian demagogues manipulate public discourse. Marina Calloni discusses algorithmic-driven political enmity, and Chiara Giaccardi advocates for ‘inter-independence’ as a framework for sustainable global relations. As history oscillates between peace and conflict, this collection of essays offers critical insights into the challenges of reconciliation, urging renewed efforts to institutionalize peace amid rising global tensions. (shrink)

The evolution of internation relationships is studied by means of a mathematical model based on a popular rule of triadic interaction: the friend of my friend is my friend, the friend of my enemy is my enemy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the enemy of my friend is my enemy. The rule is shown to lead to the formation and preservation of unipolar and bipolar configurations (...) of nations, with the strengths of relationships, both friendly and conflictual, intensifying through time. These results confirm speculations originally made in static, graph theoretic studies of the balancing of relationships within individuals, small groups and systems of nations. (shrink)

This book is the first detailed study of the plays of Sophocles through examination of a single ethical principle--the traditional Greek popular moral code of "helping friends and harming enemies." Five of the extant plays are discussed in detail from both a dramatic and an ethical standpoint, and the author concludes that ethical themes are not only integral to each drama, but are subjected to an implicit critique through the tragic consequences to which they give rise. Greek scholars and students (...) of Greek drama and Greek thought will welcome this book, which is presented in such a way as to be accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. No knowledge of Greek is required. (shrink)

This paper traces three paradigmatic responses to the presence of evil in nature. Thomas Henry Huxley depicts nature as the enemy of humanity that morality combats “at every step.” Henry Drummond views nature as benevolent, a friend of humanity, and the ultimate basis for morality. The paper argues that a third view, that of Thomas Aquinas, regards nature as creation, capable of being neither enemy nor friend of humanity but rather the context within which relations of (...) enmity or friendship develop between human beings and God. (shrink)

‘God’s Friend, the Whole World’s Enemy’: Reconsidering the role of piracy in the development of universal jurisdiction. Piracy holds a special place within the field of international law because of the universal jurisdiction that applies. This article reconsiders the role of piracy in the development of universal jurisdiction. While usually a connection is established between Cicero’s ‘enemy of all’ and modern conceptions of pirates, it is argued that ‘enemy of the human species’ or ‘enemy of (...) humanity’ is a medieval creation, used by Bartolus, which must be understood in the wake of the Renaissance of the twelfth century and the increased interest for the study of Roman Law. The criminalization of the pirate in the late Middle Ages must be understood not only as a consequence of royal power claiming a monopoly of violence at sea. Both the Italian city-states and the Hanse may have preceded royal power in criminalizing pirates. All the while, political motives in doing so were never absent. (shrink)

Charles Taylor identifies a close connection between morality and politics, noting that much confusion arises from poorly understood, and sometimes clearly mistaken, moral ontologies. Together with fellow communitarians and civic-republicans, Taylor argues that the rights-based judicial review of legislation rests upon a fundamentally mistaken Rawlsian/Kantian moral ontology. While accepting Taylor’s critique of Rawls’ moral ontology and its questionable ability to defend judicial review, I develop an alternative reading of judicial review relying on insightful new work by Wilfrid Waluchow. I conclude (...) that if we accept Waluchow’s common- law conception of the judicial review, there is good reason for Taylor to reject some of his deprecating comments about judicial review. I further suggest that a common-law conception of the judicial review may be amicable to the larger Communitarian and Civic-republican project. (shrink)

This article examines the question of whether the atheist and the believer can understand each other, to the point of being friends intellectually. The answer is no. The atheist and the believer can be best enemies, but their epistemic disagreement is definitely radical. For it is not a disagreement on religious belief itself, but about what allows the believer to believe. The article examines some aspects of John Greco’s concept of ”friendly theism’, the discussion of conciliationism and anti-conciliatonism, and the (...) epistemic role of the Holy Spirit. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's existential, republican concept of politics spurned Carl Schmitt's idea that enmity constituted the essence of the political. Famously, she isolated the political sphere from social conflict, sovereign regimes, and the realm of military violence. While some critics are now interested in applying Arendt's more abstract political ideas to international affairs, it has not been acknowledged that her original reconceptualization of politics was in fact driven by her analysis of global war, and in particular, the startling new challenges raised (...) by nuclear warfare. Arendt's early, unpublished manuscript on the nature of politics contains important reflections on the nature of war and empire. Surprisingly, these reflections tentatively explore the relationship between war and political freedom. A close reading of this work on war can help explain both her later, more radical non-violent concept of political action, and the difficulties she faced integrating her existential republicanism within the global context of conflict in the Cold War. (shrink)

Leading ‘agonist’ theorist Chantal Mouffe has attracted controversy by founding her democratic theory, as well as her Left populist politics, upon Carl Schmitt’s account of the friend/enemy distinction. Adopting Schmitt’s premises while rejecting his reactionary politics, Mouffe contends that liberal democratic politics can transform destructive ‘antagonism’ into constructive ‘agonism’ by converting ‘enemies’ into ‘adversaries’. Mouffe’s critics charge that Schmitt’s friend/enemy politics are ultimately irreconcilable with liberal democracy, rendering her agonism untenable. In this article, I offer a (...) qualified defense of Mouffe’s agonism by drawing a new voice into the debate: Saul Alinsky, the ‘dean of community organizing’. Because of its deep affinities with Mouffe’s agonism, Alinsky’s democratic organizing shows how her theory might plausibly be put into practice, enabling a more cogent response to Mouffe’s critics than her own work provides. Simultaneously, Alinsky’s organizing offers new insights and raises fresh questions about the role of enmity in democratic politics. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to discuss the cultural hindrances and assets that promote constructive self-to-others relationships and active citizenship. Building on Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, we argue that in contemporary societies the public and the private dimensions of the enemy have conflated, as the result of two concurrent phenomena: the politicization of otherness and the privatization of enemies. An integrated framework including approaches of social psychology and semiotic cultural psychology is proposed to account for both (...) phenomena. The notions of symbolic universes and semiotic capital are introduced as key concepts to understand the current socio-political dynamics and to promote fairer, more inclusive societies. (shrink)

Whom a prime minister or president will not shake hands with is still more noticed than with whom they will. Public identity can afford to be ambiguous about friends, but not about enemies. Rodney Barker examines the available accounts of how enmity functions in the cultivation of identity, how essential or avoidable it is, and what the consequences are for the contemporary world.

In his speech of welcome to the members of the Classical Joint Meeting at Cambridge in August, 1958, the Master of Peterhouse praised classical scholars for the detachment and pertinacity with which they continue their pursuits while the world is on the edge of the abyss. The remark might be taken to have one more edge than the abyss. At a time when it can no longer be assumed that a knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics is part of (...) the learning of any man who has any learning at all, there are two opposite temptations which beset those whose profession is the study and teaching of the ancient classics. The first is the sentimentality which goes on singing dithyrambs to the Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome, on the assumption that the relevance of ancient texts to modern perplexities is too nearly self-evident to need explaining. (shrink)

_Private Language_ is that it almost universally sees KW as offering, in his sceptical solution, an account of meaning attributions (i.e., statements of the form, "X means such-and-so by 's'"; hereafter, MAs) which takes their legitimate attribution to be a function of something other than facts or truth conditions. KW is almost universally read as having rejected any account of meaning attributions which takes them to be stating facts or corresponding to facts. In a word, KW is understood as offering (...) a nonfactualist account of MAs. And given that KW's sceptical challenge to the possibility of meaning rests on his negative assertions that there are no meaning facts, and that KW offers a sceptical solution to the sceptic's claim that meaning is impossible, i.e., a solution that by definition "begins . . . by conceding that the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable" (K, p. 66), it seems impossible that there would be any doubts about the accuracy of the "almost universal" reading of KW as a nonfactualist. (shrink)

We debate whether permissivism is true. We start off by assuming an accuracy-oriented framework, and then discuss metaepistemological questions about how our epistemic evaluations promote accuracy.

In this essay we explain some of the problems of the Venezuelan criminal justice sub-system and, in general, the criminal law enforcement. That is to say, that which is expressed in the persecutory actions of the investigating authorities and the criminal courts, after having established in Venezuela a Carl Schmitt concept of Dual State with the purpose of eliminating “bourgeois” democracy and implanting the model of so-called Socialism of the XXI Century. In this sense, it is a question of identifying (...) the flagrant persecution and violation of human rights of those who do not have the capacity to resist the attacks emanating from the State in the abusive use of coercion and legal violence. With the Dual State want to impose an utopia by force, which leads to dystopia, due to the division and polarization of society with the dichotomous politics of friend-enemy, In a process of etiquette and "demonization" of the enemy. (shrink)

The most contentious aspect of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concerned its amnesty‐granting powers. In return for perpetrators providing full disclosure about their crimes, the TRC was authorized to release them from both criminal responsibility and civil liability. This essay takes up the thorny question of how such a commission might be morally justified. Part 1 discusses the political circumstances that led to the creation of the TRC. Part 2 provides a critical survey of some previous attempts to (...) justify the commission's work. Part 3 offers a new justification, grounded in Adam Smith's notion of sympathy; after outlining some of the benefits of sympathy for political reconciliation, I argue that the work of a South African–style truth commission can promote sympathy between former enemies. (shrink)

Much has been written on love and friendship, but not a lot on the nature of an enemy, in a manner analogous to the nature of love itself. To understand something about what it means to be an enemy is not at all self-evident. And if we do not know what an enemy is, do we really know what a friend or a lover is? An understanding of what it means to be an enemy might (...) offer us something like the reverse negative of love or friendship. From holding the reversed negative to the light perhaps we can also gain some sight of the "unreversed" original. The article discusses the fact that we live life as something that offers us a certain affirmative delight in the "to be" as good. It explores how this is changed in relation to different forms of threat. It situated the nature of an enemy in terms of the equivocal constitution of the human being as passio essendi and conatus essendi. Different kinds of enemy are investigated by considering the "reversed negatives" of these four forms of love: self-affirming love, erotic love, philia, and agapeic love. (shrink)

Recent debates about the values and virtues of the sciences have been marked by philosophical errors and misunderstandings among both the supporters and the critics of the value of science. Some authors, such as Wilson defending the ultimate value of science and Appleyard decrying the influence of scientific modes of thinking, both assume the positivistic stance to understanding science. Others, such as Dawkins, Maddox and Wolpert, come through as scientific realists, celebrating the power of science to reach beyond what can (...) be perceived. Yet all three neglect the role of instruments and apparatus and miss the importance of the part that social forces play in the creation of belief. Finally Maddox slips into assuming that the only truly scientific approach to understanding human life scientifically is to follow the pattern of realism and model making as it is exemplified in the physical sciences. Psychology can be scientific without being reductionist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Between Friends All is Common”:The Erasmian Adage and TraditionKathy EdenIn 1508 eager readers received the Aldine edition of Erasmus’s Adages, the Adagiorum chiliades. Replacing the much smaller Paris Collectanea of 1500, the Italian edition included among its many accretions and alterations both a new introduction and a different opening adage. In place of the prefatory letter to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy (Ep. 126, CWE, 1, 255–66), Erasmus substituted a (...) fuller prolegomena or introduction (Ep. 211) that reworked portions of the earlier praefatio.1 Then, following the new introduction, he displayed much more prominently, in first position, the ninety-fourth adage of the Paris edition, which reads in Greek, τὰ τῶν ϕίλων κoινὰ; in Latin, amicorum communia omnia, often translated into English as “friends hold all things in common” or “between friends all is common” (LB, II, 13F–14F; CWE, 31, 29–30). By his own account, moreover, Erasmus begins this vast compilation of ancient sayings in this way so that this particular proverb about friendship may serve as a favorable omen for the work as a whole (LB, II, 13F–14A; CWE, 31, 29).While Margaret Mann Phillips and others have appreciated the marked relocation of this adage to initial position as evidence of Erasmus’s deep commitment to amicitia—a well-documented feature of his lived experience, a constant [End Page 405] topic throughout his literary works, and the focus of more than a few other adages2 —I will argue that this relocation commits Erasmus to something more than friendship, crucial as that is to his sense of community as the foundation in turn of the best societies. Read in conjunction with the prolegomena, the first adage announces a special alignment between friendship as a social practice and the proverb as a discursive practice. In forging this alliance, I suggest, Erasmus advances his own literary agenda by pursuing three related aims: in the first place, he transfers to this peculiar literary form the esteem that regularly attaches to friendship in the ancient tradition handed down by the Adages; secondly, building on this transfer of esteem, he theorizes proverbial statement as the quintessential instrument of this tradition in particular and of traditionality more generally; and finally, as an almost inevitable consequence of this theory, he invites his readers to understand tradition itself, mutatis mutandis, as a complex, associative relation patterned after the ancient notion of friendship. Whereas in earlier works such as the Antibarbari he follows Augustine and Jerome in figuring the traditionary relationship in terms of one culture despoiling another—the so-called spoiliatum Aegyptorum—here he substitutes the association of friends for the appropriation of enemies.3Not only moved between 1500 and 1508 but also substantially expanded, the first adage in the Aldine and subsequent Basel editions mentions several ancient authorities, among them Euripides, Terence, and Cicero. More important for my purposes, however, the revised adage features Plato and, even more so, Pythagoras. The Italian philosopher deserves special mention as the father not only of the adage but also of the way of life it engenders. As Erasmus writes at the end of the 1515 version of the adage,Not only was Pythagoras the author of this saying, but he also instituted a kind of sharing of life and property in this way, the very thing Christ wants to happen among Christians. For all those who were admitted [End Page 406] by Pythagoras into that well-known band who followed his instruction would give to the common fund whatever money and family property they possessed.4If Pythagoras is worthy of mention for instituting a society founded on common property, Plato too deserves citation as the most passionate spokesman for such a society. Taking its cue from the Pythagoreans in imagining a community innocent of the words “mine” and “not mine,” Plato’s philosophy of common ownership, says Erasmus, most nearly approximates Christ’s own thinking on this issue.5 [End Page 407]By placing this particular proverb at the head of more than 4000 proverbs and then by identifying it more specifically with Pythagoras and Plato, Erasmus signals the protreptic aim of the entire collection. Issuing a call for communitas in the radical... (shrink)

A review essay of key works and trends in the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe, before and after 1989. The topics examined include the nature of the 1989 velvet revolutions in the region, debates on civil society, democratization, the relationship between politics, economics, and culture, nationalism, legal reform, feminism, and “illiberal democracy.” The review essay concludes with an assessment of the most recent trends in the region.

A number of clarifications of the target article and some corrections are made. I clarify which concepts the thesis was intended to be about, what “descriptionism” means, the difference between “concepts” and “conceptions,” and why extensions are not determined by conceptions. I clarify the meaning of “substances,” how one knows what inductions to project over them, the connection with “basic level categories,” how it is determined what substance a given substance concept is of, how equivocation in concepts occurs, and the (...) role of language in the conception of substances. Finally, I clarify exactly why I said that concepts of individuals, real kinds, and stuffs have “a common structure,”. (shrink)