Rethinking personal and political friendship with Durkheim
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the contribution that Durkheim's sociology can make to recent scholarship on the public and political significance of friendship. The concept of political friendship deals with the problem of how anonymous strangers can feel a principled solidarity, such that they recognize each other as moral equals and show a willingness to act in each other's interests. Because the new scholarship on political friendship aims to reveal the social bonds that underlie the political, we argue that this literature will benefit from a deeper engagement with social theory, particularly Durkheimian sociology. A Durkheimian approach reveals how friendship is not just a personal and private bond between individuals, but also a collective representation expressing some of the highest ideals of social relations, including justice, equality, and respect. Ultimately it is these idealized – or better, sacred – meanings of friendship that are driving the current interest in political friendship, hence the need to analyse them. The paper treats Durkheim as a conceptual resource for enriching current debates on political friendship, but it also offers an analysis of his own ambivalent approach to friendship as a way station on the road to broader forms of solidarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".