Political Fraternity

Democracy beyond Freedom and Equality

Angel Puyol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317226475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Fraternity is a feeling, and a moral virtue, but fraternity is also a political concept.

The French Revolution proclaimed an ethical and political ideal with its three principles: liberty, equality and fraternity. Since then, western political philosophy has gone to great lengths to analyse the liberty and equality, but has ignored, and even disdained, the third part of the revolutionary triad: fraternity. Forgetting or underestimating fraternity as a political category is unjustifiable. Political fraternity can help us to overcome some of the main problems with liberal egalitarianism and theories of liberty in current social and political thought, and it contributes to a better understanding of the real significance of justice and democracy.

In this book, Angel Puyol examines the theoretical and normative challenges of the political idea of fraternity, its history and meanings, its role in current political philosophy, its distinction regarding related concepts – such as relational equality, solidarity or civic friendship – the place that political fraternity should occupy in feminist criticism, and its relationship to social justice, global justice and democracy in modern-day politics.

1 A Very Short History of Political Fraternity

Every concept has its history and, if we are dealing with a political concept, that history is usually plagued with disputes and contradictions. The political concept of fraternity is no exception, so reconstructing its history is no mean feat.

The first thing that needs to be made clear is that a concept cannot be reduced to the etymological origin of the word we use to denote it. A concept encompasses a set of meanings produced in different historical circumstances that can be grouped together in a coherent way. Fraternity, for example, draws together the different strands of a specific political experience that is related to a particular way of conceiving social relations. As I understand it, the history of that experience includes five notable conceptions of fraternity: the civic friendship of Classical Greece; Christian fraternity; medieval fraternalism; revolutionary fraternity (during the French Revolution); and the modern-day idea of solidarity, which arose in the nineteenth century and persists today. A united history of fraternity can be traced through these five distinct conceptions,¹ despite the substantial differences between the concept of fraternity in each of them.

When writing a history of fraternity, the second thing that needs to be pointed out is the importance of relating the history of the concept to social history, that is, to the uses that the different historical actors have made of the concept: its social meanings at each moment. If we failed to do this, fraternity would have no real history and would be a mere contemporary recreation of an abstract idea.

Third, and connected to the previous point, to write a history of a concept is to create an interpretation, a specific vision of what the concept has meant and means to us, and of how it has evolved and been transformed over time. Writing the history of a concept consists, inescapably, of removing it from its original context and battering out all the transformations of meaning that it has undergone over time in order, finally, to weave all the threads together again in a critical analysis that aims to shed light on the meaning the concept has today. This is why it is not possible to invoke and draw on original sources without offering a specific line of interpretation. For example, we cannot read the political vocabulary of antiquity without translating it in some or other way to modernity, despite the fact that ancient and contemporary concepts may be incommensurable. This important caveat must be borne in mind when one traces the history of a concept, such as fraternity.

Taking all these methodological considerations into account, what follows is a proposed history of fraternity, insofar as relates to the political sphere. Instead of attempting to offer a complete history of fraternity, I have opted to review the history of political fraternity based on the five conceptions I indicate above, with the objective of clarifying the evolution and meaning of an idea that has been unduly overlooked by contemporary political thought.

Civic–Fraternal Friendship in Classical Greece

The first steps along the road of political fraternity were taken in Classical Greece via the idea of civic friendship. The Ancient Greeks did not distinguish private life from public life with the same clear demarcation as the modern world came to do. For this reason, it was no great leap for them to extend friendship, initially reserved for personal relationships, to the political community in its entirety. In fact, they understood that a certain form of friendship, or philia, in the public space was indispensable if the goal was to prevent tribal rivalries and those based on blood bonds from ruining the political project that was the city, or polis. In other words, without a certain friendship between the citizens, a special class of philia that supplied mutual respect between equals, the whole project of citizenship would falter. Without civic friendship there can be no citizenry and no city.

Both Plato and Aristotle were aware of this requirement. The city is not constructed purely with law or the force of those who govern. It was necessary for the citizens to see themselves as united by a bond as strong as that which presides over family relationships. ‘All of you in the city are brothers’, declares Plato (Republic III, 415a). Now, the question is: How should this brotherhood or fraternity between the members of the political community be interpreted? In the Platonic texts, we can find at least two different answers.

The first can be attributed to Plato himself, in the Republic, after he recognises that all the members of Athens are brothers. Plato considers that the best strategy for bringing about this civic fraternity is to separate children from their families at a very early age so that the state can teach them civic values that emphasise respect for the common good, over and above the interests of the individual or the clan. The breaking up of the family in favour of a higher social goal nips in the bud any possibility of citizens bonding with the tribe or placing blood ties before the common interest of the city, but at a very high price. On the one hand, the institution of the family becomes devalued and, on the other, the resulting society is built on inequality based on a naturalist argument in order to reinforce social unity:

‘All of you in the city are brothers’, goes the story we’ll tell them, ‘but as the god was moulding you, for those of you fitted to rule he used gold as part of the mixture in the process of generation, which is why you are the most valued, while for the auxiliaries he mixed in silver, and iron and bronze for the farmers and the craftsmen’.

(Plato, Republic III, 415a)

The fraternity that Plato describes in these pages serves to reinforce the social cohesion of the city against the risk of tribal rivalries destroying it, but there is no link here between fraternity and democracy.

The second interpretation appears in Plato’s Socratic dialogue Menexenus, which reproduces the funeral oration that Aspasia supposedly recited at the funeral of her lover, the most highly lauded governor of Athens: Pericles. The Greeks were convinced that their political system, based on ‘democracy’ (Plato, Menexenus, 238d) was the best. The oration is not an attempt to justify that political conviction, but rather to explain its existence, which is due to natural equality. As expressed in that oration, the reason why the people of Athens are more democratic than their neighbours stems from the fact that they were all born equal. This natural equality is not offered as some normative image to aspire to, but as a reality: Athens does not have an antidemocratic government because the citizens form a population with one shared common origin, because they are all children of the same mother earth. The birth equality of the Athenians (we could call it natural fraternity) generates the obligation of political equality (or civic fraternity), which in turn is honoured only in democracy. Natural differences between individuals are not sufficiently important to rupture the natural fraternity on which this political equality is founded. To exercise power, among the Athenians ‘no-one is disqualified by weakness or poverty or obscurity of birth’ (Plato, Menexenus, 238d). The democracy owes its existence to a prior natural equality:

By contrast, we and our countrymen, brethren all, born of one mother, do not think it right to be either slaves or masters of one another. Instead our natural equality of birth drives us to seek equality of rights in accordance with the law. Only when it comes to reputation for goodness and wisdom do we acknowledge one another’s superiority.

(Plato, Menexenus, 238e–239a)

Thus, in the oration in honour of Pericles, for the first time it is claimed that without fraternity there is neither political equality nor democracy.

Aristotle is imbued with this idea of fraternal equality in his exposition of philia as a political category. For Aristotle, what is good consists of preserving the best of the family – which is a strong personal commitment to others – and the best of the city – the sphere of common good, where personal interests become subordinate to the general interest. He locates this meeting point within civic friendship. In effect, instead of separating children from their families, Aristotle believes that the best thing to do is to mix up all the families in the city so that all the citizens end up feeling that the city is a natural extension of their own family. In this way, the common interest, initially linked to family or tribal interests, extends in a quasi-natural way to the city as a whole. This guarantees personal commitment to the common interest. The city will not survive unless the citizens:

inhabit one and the same locality and practice intermarriage; this indeed is the reason why family relationships have arisen throughout the states, and brotherhoods and clubs for sacrificial rites and social recreations. But such organization is produced by the feeling of friendship, for friendship is the motive of social life…. A state is the partnership of clans …

(Aristotle, Politics, 1280b30)

As Emilio Lledó (1985, p. 112) reminds us: ‘friendship demonstrates the need to move out beyond the personal sphere and to weave, with philia, the essential nodes of the social fabric’. From the association of families emerges the civic friendship that accompanies law and the citizenry in the formation and maintenance of the city.

Aristotle distinguishes three types of friendship, as determined by the relationship the friendship stands in with regard to utility, pleasure or mutual affection. In accordance with Aristotle’s criteria, only the third of these is a perfect friendship. Although certain passages lead us to understand that civic friendship can be identified with usefulness (Aristotle, NE, 1163b33); in fact, other sections of Aristotle’s work contradict such a hypothesis (Aristotle, Politics, 1280b25–35). So we can postulate that, if genuine friendship is that which is based on mutual affection, then civic friendship must form part of it.

These friendships [those based on utility or pleasure] thus are only incidental; for it is not as being the man he is that the loved person is loved, but as providing some good or pleasure. Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no longer pleasant or useful the other ceases to love him.

(Aristotle, NE, 1156a11–22)

We should not forget that one of the goals of civic friendship is the consolidation of the city, and therefore types of friendship that are ‘easily dissolved’ would not meet its ends. Civic friendship depends on a moral sentiment that can be transformed into a virtue, since:

perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their own nature and not incidentally, therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good – and goodness is an enduring thing.

(Aristotle, NE, 1156b7–13)²

The polis needs civic friendship, and not just law or mutual economic interest. Justice, the giving to each person their own, is an inseparable part of the political, but it is insufficient for the city to endure. It is necessary for the citizens to consider themselves equal to each other: that they see themselves as men who are all equally free, naturally equal. That is to say, they must see themselves as brothers (with equal rights and duties that unite and oblige them in ideal conditions), despite the fact that the clan from which each originates, their ethnic group or blood ties do not confirm this union, or precisely because they do not. Civic friendship is the attempt to morally bond together citizens who do not have strong blood ties or tribal bonds between them. Friendship provides the moral force that is lacking in the anonymity of the public sphere, necessary to live together and invest the required effort to maintain mutual respect.

If we were right in saying that friend wishes good to friend for his sake, his friend must remain the sort of being he is, whatever that may be; therefore it is for him only so long as he remains a man that he will wish the greatest goods.

(Aristotle, NE, 1159a8–11; emphasis added)

Of course, for Aristotle, natural or fraternal equality excludes women, slaves, children and outsiders. Quite a few centuries will pass before fraternity becomes universal, first with Christianity (although solely in a moral and spiritual sense) and later with the Enlightenment (also in a political sense), but we should not deny Stagira’s most famous son his credit for being the first to think of a political and egalitarian fraternity that defines the citizenry of the polis.

Thus we can see that civic–fraternal friendship is closely related to justice and equality. Friendship is a model of reciprocity among equal peers. Some ‘kind of friendship … involves an inequality between the parties, e.g. that of father to son and in general of elder to younger, that of man to wife and in general that of ruler to subject’ (Aristotle, NE, 1158b7–14). Meanwhile, there is another class of friendship, of genuine friendship, as Aristotle tells us, that is based on equality (Aristotle, NE, 1158b1–5). Aristotle is searching for a virtuous relationship for citizens who are equally free and who do not belong to the same originating tribe or family: a relationship that demands equal respect for the freedom of the other and mutual support in case of need (whether that be through paying taxes or defending the city, to give two examples). The Stagirite chooses the relationship between friends as that which should govern the relationship between free citizens because it is the one that best fits the success or ends of the political relationship: the defence of the common interest of the city. Civic friendship unites the citizens in the common objective of defending the city, which is a precondition for free existence. This is why civic friendship is a moral virtue.

Although civic–fraternal friendship is related to justice, the two do not entirely coincide. In justice, as noted above, each is given its own, that is, what each person deserves, which is not necessarily an equal quantity or proportion. In friendship, in contrast, the other is given ‘an equal quantity of affection and service’ (Pallí, 1985, p. 335), independently of what they personally deserve, or because each deserves the same insofar as it is based on the equal condition of the citizenry. Moreover, although friendship does not coincide with justice, it is the image from which justice originates, because it is based on equality, just as justice itself is. Justice is necessary because friendship is not sufficient to eliminate conflicts between citizens. We must not forget that civic friendship is a normative proposal to enable the city to achieve its ends, so justice must reinforce, through law, the equality that is derived from the ideal relationship of friendship. Friendship is the origin of justice because it gives equal weight to the interests of all; it is also one of the requirements of justice because, without civic–fraternal friendship, the citizen would see justice as an external imposition on their own personal interests and would eventually rebel against it. This is why, Aristotle says: ‘when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality’ (Aristotle, NE, 1155a25–28).

Thus, civic–fraternal friendship defends an egalitarian principle, because it exists between and for equally free citizens; at the same time, it defends the social unity of the society of citizens against the tightest bonds of clan and blood, and raises those individuals to the condition of free and equal citizens. Only free and equal citizens are finally men and not mere animals or instruments of utility. According to Aristotle, in the city of Athens this privilege corresponds to male adult sons of the city – as I have said, not to women, children, slaves or outsiders.³ Although the universalisation of fraternity is yet to come, its foundations have now been laid.

Christian Fraternity

Christianity has traditionally adopted the idea of fraternity as one of its flagships.⁴ It would not be possible to write a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Very Short History of Political Fraternity
• 2 What is Political Fraternity?
• 3 Some Current Criticisms of Political Fraternity
• 4 Fraternal Justice
• 5 Fraternal Democracy
• 6 Global Fraternity
• Index