ABSTRACT
Influenced by sociologists Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, the twentieth-century emergence of the field of comparative politics contained an implicit bias against friendship, which was assumed to have no place in the modern, law-based state. Friendship, it was assumed, belonged to the private sphere as the personal choices of individuals to pursue relationships in their spare time. And yet friendship was far from apolitical. Observers of nineteenth-century capitalism, including Emile Durkheim, called attention to the loneliness experienced by industrial workers who had migrated from rural communities. In the twentieth century, leading scholars, among them Hannah Arendt and Gabriel Almond, warned that anti-democratic political movements sought out friendless, socially excluded people for recruitment. While philosophers such as Michel Foucault pointed out that intimate relationships have long been shaped and controlled by political forces, comparative politics has yet to address directly the political nature of friendship.
