Pluralism, Generosity, Charity, and Friendship

• In Event: Politics and Friendship in the Cosmos

Abstract

The political doctrine of pluralism has received injections of new vitality in the past several decades. The impetuses for this (re)vitalization are multiple and primarily associated with the manifest failures of 20th-century liberalisms to provide satisfactory responses to the existential, economic, and political institutional crises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But is pluralism fit for purpose? In this paper I explore that question from the perspective of political friendship, drawing particularly on the work of William Connolly, Bruno Latour, and their interlocutors. If political friendship is a prerequisite (as classical Greek thought presupposed) for a stable and just political regime, can pluralism account for and make space for such friendship, in contrast to various forms of liberalism, which have been criticized for their impoverished or altogether missing accounts of political friendship?

Author

• Thomas W. Heilke, The University of British Columbia