GOVT 86.65 Friendships: Personal and Political

Is friendship the glue that holds citizens together? Or is friendship a subversive withdrawal from civic life? Do friendships create civic bonds or foster resistance to government? How do civic friends differ from personal friends? Is there even such a thing as “civic friendship”? In this course, we shall study classic and contemporary texts about the nature and kinds of friendships and about the relationship of friendship to politics. How does the love between friends differ from romantic love, marital love, and the love of humankind? What are the implications of online “friending”? What is civic friendship, and how can it work in mass democracies?

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Government