Friendship and the emergence of the social: A study of representations of friendship in early social thought

The dissertation investigates the modern intellectual tradition of theorizing friendship relative to the problem of the social. I consider the work of Rousseau, Smith, Tocqueville and Durkheim, all of whom made use of representations of friendship to pose questions that were fundamentally social. Friendship is a common theme in the tradition of political and philosophical thought and the early social theorists both develop and depart from this tradition in significant ways. As I argue, through reflecting on friendship, the early social theorists addressed central questions of social thought. The chapters in this dissertation are structured around four such problems: the self, the public, social solidarity, and the place of the political in the era of the social. The early social theorists were not only interested in these specific problems, but in the more general problem that some recent theorists refer to as "the rise of the social." I argue that we cannot understand modern representations of friendship outside of the problem of the social. However, there is no consensus among the theorists discussed in this dissertation on what the social is, what friendship is, or how they are related. There is likewise no consensus on what the emergence of the social means for the much older tradition of theories of political friendship. The contribution of this dissertation is to enrich our understanding of representations of friendship in early social thought, including their relationship to the social and to the political.