ABSTRACT
A friendship is between the people who are friends, the unconstrained people who come to feel spontaneous affection for, and so befriend, each other. To speak of friendship, then, is to speak of people as responding to an internal spring of motive, their sentiments. Jonathan Parry provides a useful point of entry to the link between exchange and the self, when he refers to the 'ideology of the "pure gift"', one in which the giver and the gift are 'free and unconstrained'. Marcel Mauss has argued that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a marked change in the notion of the self in Western Europe, and in light of observation that the friendly self looks like the liberal's independent actor, it is worth noting that this period also saw the rapid spread of capitalism. The self-concept of polite society was enshrined in the spacious and unified architecture of the theatres, coffee houses, assembly rooms and public promenades.
