From communitarianism to friendship 1

Basil Xydias
... that a city should be free
and wise and a friend to itself
Plato, Laws, 693b

As the title above indicates, I would like here to tell the story of my transition from
communitarianism to friendship; i.e. how I started searching for alternative ways to deal with
certain issues raised by contemporary communitarianism and ended up discovering platonic
friendship. I will argue that in Plato’s concept of friendship (‘philia’) one can find a general
political principle grounded on an interpersonal bond between free persons (the citizens-
friends) and not on the autonomy of separate citizen-individuals (‘liberalism’) or some
collective identities ontologically prior to the persons who share them (‘communitarianism’).
My hypothesis is that this political principle of ‘friendship’ can offer to modern political
thinking a ground for the simultaneous satisfaction of certain important demands that
otherwise would be contradictory: namely ‘freedom’, ‘community’ and ‘authenticity’.2

–I–

In 1987 a group of six friends started a project to find out what ‘community’ could mean in
our days. Under the rubric of ‘community’ we were seeking a way out of the “crowding
individualism” of modern societies (as K.Karavidas would put it); a way, however, that would
differ from any type of collectivism, Marxist or other. Having began our research from the
thought of Konstantinos Karavidas – a gifted communitarian Greek thinker of the inter-war
years – we soon realized that a viable notion of community was to be found neither “in a
vague, apparently historical, romanticism for our old communal formations, nor in any
dreams for the future structuring of the world.”3 So, we left behind the notion of a traditional
community, as well as the various futuristic communal constructions based on the model of a

1
This text was published in Greek at the philosophical magazine ‘Cogito’, 1 (July 2004), p.45-49. It has been
translated in English with a lot of help from my friends, Mr. Elias Markolefas and Mrs. Marina Tortoreli. For
some other relevant articles of mine, in Greek also, see: a) “Person and community – Human and the social fact”,
Leviathan, 11 (1991), p.159-166; b) “Community as a radical concept in the political thought of modern times
(on Ferdinand Tönnies)”, Nea Κoinoniologia, 13 (1991-92), p.64-74; c) “From lost community to the one that
rests to be found”, Synaxis, 55 (1995), p.41-49; d) “The notion of Greek-type community in P.Giannopoulos and
I.Dragoumis”, Ardin, 2 (1996), p.75-77; e) “A short story of communitarianism”, Ardin, 9 (1997), p.72-78;
f) “Without community”, Ardin, 10 (1997), p.57-60; g) “From Polis to Ecclesia”, Analogion, 3 (2002), p.23-31.
2
I use here the term ‘authenticity’ in the sense of a natural adjustment to one’s own real character or substance,
and not in the sense of an individual original uniqueness, explored by Ch.Taylor in his work ‘The ethics
of authenticity’.
3
K.D.Karavidas, Macedonian Hymns, 2nd Edition, 1945, p.93 (in Greek).
 -2-

self-managed group characterized by small size and direct democracy. Self-managed groups of
this kind do not have, in any case, any real connection with the organic bond we were
searching for in the notion of community; they are much more related to various radical
versions of the Enlightenment ideals of justice, equality etc. On the other side, as I already
mentioned, we knew that the traditional community would not lead us to anything better than
folklore, while we were interested in a notion of community that could be valid in our times.
This means that the community of interest to us should be in some way compatible with
individuality, large scale, and complexity, even if the inner character of all these elementary
qualities of modern societies would be probably different in its context. We learned from
Karavidas that there is no inconsistency in this rather tall demand, since the real community –
the one that did exist in the past, still exists in the present, and will exist in the future – is not
(and could not be) a formalistic model-type, but rather a “cunning animal” that can survive
under any historical circumstances and co-exist with the most diverse social and political
systems, assuming each time a different form.

In the context of this problem, our aim was not to describe the various communal structures to
be found in different historical periods, but rather to understand the conditions of their
emergence and their animating principle; i.e. what we called the ‘communal spirit’. In this
respect, Karavidas did not prove helpful to the end. Despite his keen insights and unique
observations (on what is and what is not community), we did not agree with his final
conclusion that the explanation of the emergence of the (Greek) community is to be found in
geography, or in the so called ‘spirit of the land’. Our main problem with this geographical
determinism was not the fact that it limits the possibility of communalism only to a few
privileged areas of Earth, but rather the suggestion that the ‘communal spirit’ is to be
grounded on a factor that renders human freedom completely irrelevant. We came to realize
that freedom is not just a historical condition that we should respect in our descriptive
reconstructions, but a fundamental ontological presupposition that gives meaning and value to
the very question we were asking. So we started searching for alternative sources.

We had already been aware of the controversy between liberals and communitarians that had
emerged those years in the United States. We had no doubt that this debate was the most
important incident in contemporary political and ethical philosophy. Personally, I soon joined
the ranks of the communitarians. I accepted their critique against the way liberals understood
justice, abstractly and without regard for concrete experience. I found the concept of
‘disembodied self’, with which M.Sandel explored the gaps of the liberal conception of the
individual as an abstract ‘agent of rights’, quite attractive. Furthermore, I shared with Sandel
his dissatisfaction with the ‘thin’ conception of the individual, this legalistic ghost without
flesh and blood that captures supposedly the political dimension of the individuality of human
beings, while removing them simultaneously from the relations that alone make possible the
emergence of a concrete personality. On the other hand, there were certain things I did not
like. I could not, for example, accept the moral relativism of some of the communitarians; i.e.
the idea that what is morally acceptable to us, here and now, may have nothing to do with
 -3-

what is acceptable to others, in another place and time. I would agree with communitarians,
like Ch. Taylor, who suggested that cultural pluralism does not necessarily lead to moral
relativism. Thus I believed that in the new age of globalization there can be ecumenical values
that make both possible and desirable the co-existence of all human beings on the basis of a
universal sense of justice, which could take different forms according to different traditions
and collective identities. This is the only perspective from which I could appreciate the
importance of contemporary communitarianism: not as the theoretical justification of a spirit
of isolationism, but as a step in the attempt of humanity to reach a global good through a
sequence of successive or parallel approaches on the basis of the accumulated experience of
particular traditions.

The controversy between liberals and communitarians was very interesting; especially, since it
provided the opportunity for an extensive reflection on the philosophical project of modernity
and pointed the way to fresh reviews of the classical treatment of the same issues. So, some of
the members of our group turned their interest to the discussion taking place in the United
States. And I would probably have done the same, if some instinctive doubts had not
prevented me. I sensed, for example, that the communitarians’ notion of ‘community’ was
derived from a general antithesis between ‘individuality’ and ‘collectivity’, and was not
related to the specific conception of ‘community’ as an organic bond that was the focus of my
interest. I also felt that the communitarians could not overcome the limits of the general
theoretical framework they opposed. In this respect, they seemed to me trapped between the
various forms of Kantian metaphysics and positivistic empiricism that dominate the
contemporary philosophical landscape. In light of what followed, I think now that these fears
were justified: the debate ended in a rather lukewarm compromise and most of the
communitarians found a ‘middle point’ of convergence with the moderate liberals within a
broader set of political and moral issues. But the question of a contemporary conception of
‘community’ in terms of an organic bond uniting its members was not answered; and this
question remains still urgent for me.

With these thoughts, I left aside recent theories and I searched for a more classical approach. I
found it in the book ‘Community and Society’ of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies
(1856-1936).4 This book is a foundational work for contemporary communitarianism, since
this is the fist time that someone contrasted ‘community’ and ‘society’ in the very particular
way that characterizes communitarian thinking.5 Until that time one would use these terms
either as synonymous, or just in order to distinguish social formations on the basis of simple
differences in size, cohesion etc. Tönnies used these terms in a radically new way, not merely
in order to distinguish between different social forms, but rather to illuminate the fundamental

4
The book was first published in German in 1887 under the classical title ‘Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft’.
5
In the various English editions and discussions of Tönnies book, the term ‘Gesellschaft’ has been variously
rendered as ‘society’, ‘association’, or ‘civil society’. In my view, the term ‘society’ captures best the meaning,
the feeling, and the antithesis Tönnies is aiming at.
 -4-

difference which, in his view, characterizes all forms of human co-existence, from the
beginning of humanity to our age.

In contrast to ‘holistic’ theories (Marcel Mauss, Louis Dumont, and others), Tönnies does not
consider community as a collective entity, as a collective subject. At the core of his theoretical
construction – even if this may seem strange at first glance – we encounter individual human
beings understood in an essentially modern way. These ‘individuals’, Tönnies claims, are self-
determined by their inner motives; i.e. by the type of will which occasionally leads them to
associate with other people. So, for Tönnies, ‘community’ and ‘society’ are two different
kinds of sociability, two ideal types of social bonds. ‘Community’ is every kind of bond
originating in people’s ‘natural will’ to be together on account of some spontaneous affiliation
that is itself vital for their existence. ‘Society’ is every kind of bond that is based on people’s
‘rational will’ to collaborate in order to achieve a common goal, a goal envisaged through
some kind of rational calculation. In both cases we deal with relations of peaceful co-existence
and mutual solidarity. Nevertheless, what counts in the first case is the bond itself, the
common existence; while what counts in the other case is the goal, the common benefit.
According to Tönnies, these two types of social bonds are rarely or never found in real life in
pure or unmixed forms. All the actual relationships and social structures of co-existence and
solidarity that we meet in real history or in everyday life can be understood as a combination
of these two pure ideotypes. Thus we can follow a hierarchy of scales or levels, starting from
blood relations (e.g. mother and daughter, fraternal bonds), passing through natural proximity
(e.g. neighborhoods, villages) to finally reach intellectual or spiritual proximity (e.g. nations,
religions); in this way we meet different types of community, in small as well as in large scale,
at a local or a global level, from the elementary relation between two people to the most
complex and complicated international structures. With this theory, Tönnies was able to
discuss the ‘communal spirit’ in a broad historical context, independently of special traditions
and without formal restrictions (small size, space proximity etc.). He did that in a theoretically
cohesive manner, which is compatible with the basic modern condition (the demand for
individuality) and recapitulates within its own perspective the relevant classical philosophical
debates: ‘nature vs. contract’, ‘volition vs. ratio’.

In this way, however, Tönnies brought to the fore once more the dilemma between the
demands of authenticity and freedom. For Tönnies the ‘community’ is the realm of the
authenticity modern individuals are seeking. Given the fact that all of us are lost in a rather
intricate world of exogenous conventions and roles, the ‘natural will’ of modern individuals is
essentially the way in which they relate to their ‘natural’ ‘organic’ condition. Nevertheless, if
you try to live your life in accordance with your own ‘natural will’, you effectively let yourself
be dominated by powers that surpass you. It may be that these powers correspond exactly to
the needs of your own nature and place you firmly within your authentic perspective;
however, they exist and function independently of your own creative activity. In this case, it
makes no sense to speak about freedom. If we want freedom, only our ‘rational will’ can point
 -5-

the way. In the context of the rational will, anyone can set, independently of any other
determinations, his or her own goals and objectives. Undoubtedly, this is a form of
arbitrariness that results from one’s separation from his/her own organic nature. And this is
exactly the kind of freedom-arbitrariness that leads to the individualization and fragmentation
that predominate in modern mass societies. Unfortunately, for Tönnies there is not a third way;
the dilemma is clear and unavoidable. Either we will choose to seek our lost authenticity,
trapping thus ourselvess within the confines of our organic nature, or we will prefer freedom
as a creative, though arbitrary and dangerous, exodus out of our nature. Although it may seem
odd, Tönnies recognised that the loss of our natural condition is the price we have to pay in
order to achieve our rationality. He chose freedom, hoping that in this way we might discover
again in the future the possibility of ‘community’ – in another form.

However, I was not at all willing to accept this dilemma. And I had early enough made up my
mind that Tönnies’ deadlock had not so much to do with his particular communitarian theory,
but rather with the deeper presuppositions of his point of view; i.e. the way he understood
fundamental concepts like society, nature, volition etc. In Tönnies’ background, I discerned
the bewilderment of a way of thinking that brings us back to Hobbes, or, even further, to St.
Augustine. So, I started to study Plato and Aristotle in a more systematic way, hoping that in
their thought there is some other foundation of these same concepts, which would permit us to
understand in a different way the question Tönnies had posed.

– II –

In the meantime, partly because of the normal fatigue associated with such joint efforts and
partly because of the different directions each one of us had started to follow, our group began
to split. It was already 1991. Some years later, in 1995, four of us gathered together again, this
time in order to study the issue of friendship in Aristotle. In this context, we thought it was
necessary to start with an introductory overview of the relevant works of Plato. So, I was
appointed by my friends to present to them the Lysis, the early dialogue in which Plato
discusses the issue of friendship (philia). In this, rather neglected, Platonic dialogue I found
the starting points for an alternative understanding – or, even better, for a radical reversal – of
the issues posed by Tönnies.

Plato understands friendship as a special kind of bond, which – like Tönnies’ ‘community’ –
redefines and reorganizes all human relations on the basis of intimacy (oikeioteta). However,
in his discussion of the features of this bond, Plato proceeds with a series of paradoxical
reversals, which seem odd, both with regard to our common sense intuitions and to Tönnies’
doctrine. At first, we see Plato rejecting physical kinship to be the primary starting point of
intimacy. The intimacy that leads to happiness (eudaimonia), he argues, is not based on the
natural love parents feel for their children, since this love does not make the children happy.
And indeed, how could one be happy, he continues, when someone else restricts him and does
 -6-

not let him do what he wishes? Yet, what else can the parents do with their children, since they
know that their immature wishes are not based on wisdom (phronesis) and knowledge
(gnosis)? Therefore, the kind of intimacy we are interested in – as free persons, we would say
– is a different one. Someone becomes intimate (oikeios) and friend (philos) to someone else,
claims Plato, when the later acknowledges that the former could be useful to him by being
better (wiser) than him in something that is vital to him (209c). And then – in relation to that
thing – the second person grants to the first the right to act freely on issues that bear on the
second person and his possessions, letting the first person do what he would wish. In this way,
the first one becomes true ‘master’ and a ‘free person’ (210b), while the second one ‘makes
use’ of him, having the benefit that his life and possessions (at least in relation to that specific
thing) are taken care by a wiser person than himself. This is the foundation for the kind of
intimacy and friendship that would make sense for Plato. Let me hasten to add that for the
issue under discussion here it does not matter at all if what Plato describes as friendship fits
with our general idea about friendship (we would need another discussion to clarify this
point). At present, it would be enough to agree that Plato’s friendship is indeed a type of
intimate bond (a bond of proximity), which situates and defines human relations within a
perspective of happiness (eudemonia); this perspective may be quite different from the
perspective of authenticity that we saw in the case of communitarianism, but its function is
homologous.

Let’s stay in this issue for a while. First, it is clear that the bond of friendship introduced here
by Plato is a political type of bond, since it is described in terms of freedom and power (to rule
over someone else). This point brings us to a second crucial reversal. Plato does not
understand freedom and power as two different things, but as the two sides of the political
bond we are talking about. The free person is not just the one who does whatever he likes to
himself or to his own possessions, but the one who is granted by others the right to rule over
them (to be their master). And this type of freedom-power is not a natural right that anybody
would obviously share (like individual freedom in ‘societies’). It is fundamentally a moral or
rather spiritual achievement, presupposing prudence (sophrosyne) and wisdom (phronesis).
Plato is here speaking about two souls who meet each other in an asymmetrical relation, based
on the willing assent of both parties: the one who possesses this moral or spiritual virtue, and
the one who is capable to appreciate and acknowledge it as being useful to him. In a way, this
relation resembles Tönnies’ ‘society’, since it implies some kind of exchange. Yet, in this case
the two parties do not relate to each other just to exchange their goods or to join forces for a
common purpose, and then retire back in their particular individual space. Rather, they stay
inseparably united on the ground of the consensus created by the mutual actions of the wise
and free ‘ruling’ (of the one) and the willingly and beneficially ‘being ruled’ (of the other).

What is the source from which this consensus (‘homology’) of ‘friends’ in the ‘friendly’
relation of ruler and ruled derives? Is there a kind of ‘physiology’ of platonic friendship like
the one Tönnies suggests for his ‘community’? Plato does not give a direct answer to this
 -7-

question. He prefers to approach it by raising more specific questions like the following: Who
become friends: people who are similar or different to each other? What do they really wish
for: the direct object of their desire or something else for the sake of which they desire this
object? What could that object be: the good (agathon) or the intimate (oikeion) to them?
Discussing these questions in his characteristic puzzling (aporetical) way, Plato seems to
come to a deadlock, but this is in fact his way for sketching the outlines of his theory. In order
to accomplish this task, Plato relies also on the dramatic development of his narrative, which
points us back to things known from Phaedrus and Symposium. E.g.: In order to join your
company – says Socrates at the beginning of Lysis – you should tell me who is the beautiful
among you (204b). In other words, the initial approach of the souls of the friends is based on a
fundamental attraction the one has for the other. Thus we have a fundamental non-linguistic
consensus, the starting point of which is beauty. The friendly bond is built on this consensus,
but develops through a common search for the truth that takes the form of a dialectic dialogue.
In this way, instead of the contradiction between a ‘natural’ and a ‘rational’ will, we encounter
the synthetic function of ‘liking’ (philein) as a continuous transition from ‘natural’ attraction
to verbal consensus (common ‘logos’). In this process the two friends do not merely discover
their supposedly given nature in order to organically adjust themselves to it. Rather, they
develop their verbal consensus and in this way they create their nature by becoming better, i.e.
by harmonizing themselves with beauty and truth. So, we find here another concept of
‘authenticity’, which is not incompatible with freedom and logical thinking. On the contrary,
Plato’s ‘authenticity’ presupposes both freedom and logic, since they provide the only way of
harmonization with our real ‘nature’. But this is a nature that we should not merely discover,
as though it was contained in the past data of our organic existence, but a nature that we have
to actually create – a nature that does not push us from below (through impersonal physical
impulses), but one that attracts us from above (through the excitement born by a look or a
thought). The bond of friendship provides us with a rule and a signpost that the creative
movement of our reason towards this ‘nature’ is not arbitrary.

In this way, Plato settles his accounts with the intimacy associated with natural bonds and
traditions and establishes his notion of community on the basis of friendship, understood as a
free interpersonal bond which defines a political principle common to all scales and levels:
blood relatives, neighbors, fellow-citizens and finally the entire humanity, including fellow-
countrymen as well as foreigners, men as well as women (209c-210b). This political principle
becomes the ground of an empirically founded political rationality that transcends physical,
geographical, or cultural limitations. This principle could be extended by us in various
directions. We could imagine, for example, a wide community based on a universal
friendship-intimacy towards the wise man or wisdom (210d); or a political framework of
mutual friendly interdependent relations, where someone may grant to others the right to rule
over him and to be free to do on him whatever they like, to the extend and on the domains that
he acknowledges that they are better than he is (if I am not mistaken, this is a direction taken
by Aristotle). Plato himself is doing something similar in his last work, the Laws, taking there
 -8-

the principle of friendship-intimacy as the basis of the ideal state and the measure to every
other type of governance (“friends have all things in common”, 739c). The result is the
detailed exposition of a system of political institutions that would be based on the principle of
friendship, while taking into account the fact that the actual rulers would never be as wise as
the ideal wise men6.

– III –

At this point, my personal cycle, opened in 1987 as a quest for a viable notion of ‘community’,
may be closed. I still feel some affinity for communitarianism, and I do appreciate its radical
criticism, as well as many interesting practical ideas I have found in it. Nevertheless I do not
see it as a real way out of the predominant way of thinking, but rather as an awkward
expression of its inconsistencies. The ‘community’ of communitarianism is definitely not a
worthy alternative to ‘society’, but rather its reversed image. I do not know if the path of
friendship, as sketched it in the preceding remarks, will prove to be more fruitful. What I do
know is what Plato would answer to someone who would insist on the antithesis between
authenticity and rational self-interest: ‘But, authenticity is our only interest, my friend’ –
Socrates would say. And in this way he would point toward the possibility of a type of
freedom that is neither arbitrariness nor separation, but the hope for a substantive form of co-
existence, and of a type of power that is not imposition or usurpation, but creative concern for
the fellow citizen. And I also have the impression that such a reversal would be very close to
the synthetic spirit of Karavidas, as well as to the inmost hope of Tönnies that a new form of
‘community’ might be discovered in the future through the path of ‘society’.

6
It is generally accepted that the Laws is a second, revisionary effort of Plato to discuss the issues concerning the
formation of the city in more modest way than the Republic. Yet, it is supposed that the modesty of the Laws is
based on some kind of empiricism vs. Republic’s strong theoretical claim for Justice; a more realistic approach,
not grounded so strongly on a coherent theoretical core. But this is not so. There is a strong principle on which
the political system of the Laws is erected, and this is friendship. Thanks to the strong line of interpretation
suggested by the Lysis, I started to realize little by little that friendship together with justice are the two parallel
axes around of which Plato articulates his political theory: friendship and justice are two sides of the same coin.
There can be neither friendship without justice nor justice without friendship. This claim shapes the entire
Platonic work. Nevertheless, a more careful look reveals that it is very important to see which is in each case
Plato’s starting point, and that is what makes the difference. Justice is the starting point in the Republic; the work
in which Plato seems to argue for a compact system that many have blamed as the origin of every totalitarianism.
On the contrary, in the Laws, where the legislator aims at being prudent (sophronein), at wisdom (phronesis), and
at friendship – all three being the same according to Plato (see 693b, 693c and 701d) – the political system
constructed is more tolerant. I would argue that we cannot gain a full appreciation of Plato’s political thought
without reading the Laws in the light of the Lysis.