The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity

In antiquity, it was not only Aristotle who assumed the people are more to be understood in relation to one another than as individual or solitary constructs. Friendship was vital to figures such as Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, because it supplied the type of bonding or fellowship without which they supposed no society could survive - a person unfit for communal life, for Aristotle, must be either a beast or a god. This examination considers the changing attitudes to friendship since antiquity and notes that almost no major modern philosopher has expounded friendship as an ideal for society.