REFRIEMAReassessing Friendship in Modern Age

STATE OF THE ART AND OBJECTIVES

IntroductionFriendship can be no more considered as a “lost problem” (Fraisse 1976) since from the end of the

eighties onward it has been brought back to life by an increasing number of studies. Whereas Fraisse rediscovered the meaning, function, and value of friendship in Antiquity, scholars who have dealt with friendship in the last three decades have shown that this relationship continued to play a key role in the Medieval period as well as in the Renaissance, the Early modern and the Modern Age. Nevertheless, as it is clearly stated in the introduction to the first issue of “Amity”, the first journal entirely dedicated to “friendship studies” that has ever been published, friendship remains an “unanswered question” (Smith 2013). This is true especially for modern friendship.

Whereas scholars of ancient and medieval friendship have shed light on the political, moral, spiritual and theological sides of this relationship, scholars of early modern and modern friendship have not yet fully grasped what happened to friendship from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. They have accounted for a variety of forms of friendship, but have not been able to offer a coherent interpretative framework. What is more, even though they have made great efforts to prove that friendship played a crucial role both for individuals and societies, in the private as well as in the political sphere, they cannot help but admit that friendship started to decline in the second half of the seventeenth century. The decline of friendship emerges not only in literature and moral philosophy, but also in politics. On the one hand, it seems that after Montaigne and Bacon, the only philosopher who took friendship seriously in his moral reflections was Kant. On the other hand, even thought scholars of political thought influenced by Derrida’s analysis have tried to shed light on early modern and modern forms of political friendship, they have confirmed, not denied, that friendship lost its political relevance.

My scientific proposal will challenge this view. It aims to reassess the meanings and functions of friendship in early modern and modern age by focusing on a specific genre of texts, the advice books on friendship and the advice books dealing with friendship, that flourished in the sixteenth century, spread across Europe in the seventeenth century and increased in the eighteenth century. This is an unexplored field of research since scholars have paid attention to Montaigne’s De l’amitié and, in minor part, to Bacon’s Of Friendship, but they have never thought that Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essays can be seen as the bulk of an iceberg.

This research proposal moves from the challenging and groundbreaking hypothesis that friendship has started to decline, both as a moral and a political relationship, in modern age since it has been sought where it cannot be found. To reassess the moral meanings and the political functions of friendship in modern age, that is between the beginning of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century, it is necessary to assume that Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essays can be read as advice books and consider these well known works as the bulk of an iceberg that has never been explored: it is the iceberg of the advice books on friendship and the advice books dealing with friendship. This is a groundbreaking, but well founded, assumption. It is well known, in facts, that Bacon’s Essays were intended to be, as the subtitle clarifies, Counsels, civil and moral (Vickers 1999, Ceron 2016) and that they took Montaigne’s Essais as their model (Kenneth 1991). It is not less known that Montaigne’s Essais were translated into English, Italian, and other languages in the XVIIth century, become Pascal’s profane Bible, were partially included in La Bruyère’s Caractéres, and deserved Voltaire’s and Diderot’s praises. The success of Bacon’s Essays is not less impressive since in 1619 they were translated into Italian for the second time and into French for the first time and it is probable that Hobbes himself prepared a translation into Latin (Skinner 1996). This research, however, will not focus on the reception and influence of Montaigne’s De l’amitié and Bacon’s Of Friendship. If anything, it will move from Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essays to take into account the whole corpus of the advice books on friendship and the advice books dealing with friendship that were written from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German. The possibility to offer a new and coherent interpretative framework that will permit to fully grasp what happened to friendship in modern age depends not only on the choice of focusing on a wide, but specific genre of texts, but also on the innovative way in which these texts will be analysed.

The corpus is still to be individuated, but a cursory inquiry through the most common bibliographical catalogues (SBN, BNF, WC) and meta-catalogues (KVC, EBBO) make evident that this an intriguing and fruitful field of investigation. It is worth mentioning some titles to be listed and catalogued, which opens up four different, but related lines of research:

1

Giovanni della Casa, Trattato de gli uffici communi tra gli amici superiori et inferiori; scritto da messer Giouanni della casa in lingua latina & dopo in uolgare tradotto (Napoli 1560), which was originally written in Latin and then translated into French;

Alessandro Piccolomini, Notable discours en forme de dialogue touchant la vraye et parfaicte amitié, duquel toutes personnes, et principalement les dames, peuvent tirer instruction utile et profitable (Lyon 1579), which is the French translation of Alessandro Piccolomini’s Dialogo della bella creanza (Venice, 1539);

Stephen Gosson, The ephemerides of Phialo : deuided into three bookes. The first, a method which he ought to follow that desireth to rebuke his freend (London 1579);

Walter Dorke’s A tipe or figure of friendship (London 1589), Giovanni Battista Gigli’s Idefilia cioè della vera amicizia (Venenzia 1645); Pierre De Villiere’s De l’Amitié (Paris1692), Jean-Baptiste Morvan’s Idée parfaite de l'amitié, (Paris 1691); Jaques Pernetti, Conseils de l’amitié (Lyon 1745), which translated into Italian( Consigli

dell'amicizia o sieno i doveri dell'uomo, Venezia 1752)

Advice books dedicated to friendship, as well as advice books dealing with friendship like Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essays, will be considered at the same time as literary and philosophical works and will be analysed as works of practical ethics, in which ethics is inseparable from politics since they give advice to teach to ordinary (learned) men a new kind of wisdom necessary to cope with the contingencies of life in the private as well as in the public sphere. Within this perspective, any preliminary distinction between the field of philosophy and the field of literature will be rejected. The research team will disclose how and to what an extent theories influence practices and practices influence theories of friendship. A close examination of the literary structure of each advice book and an accurate analysis of its genesis and reception will permit to show how friendship was described and experienced. The variety of the forms of friendship that will emerge in the course of the analysis will be studied without using prearranged classifications, it does not matter if they are drawn from ancient sources, like the Ciceronian opposition between ordinary friendship based on expediency and true friendship based on virtue and the Plutarchian juxtaposition of false friendship founded on flattery and true friendship, or are derived, as it has been noted (Hutter 1978) from Parson’s sociology, like the distinction between instrumental friendships and close, or emotional, friendship. It is plausible that in the advice books to be studied, like in Montaigne’s De l’amitié and Bacon’s Of Friendship, one will find references to different ancient texts, drawn from common place books rather than from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s Laelius, Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend and so on. It is also plausible that the citations of the ancient sources will be intertwined with each other and in turn interlaced with the references to early modern and modern sources. The examination of this network of quotations will aim not to shed light on the transformation of ancient forms of friendship in early modern and modern age, as it happens in the aforementioned studies on modern friendship, but rather to o establish if, how and why different vocabularies, or languages, of friendship can coexist and to what an extent they give rise to conflicts and contradictions.

Aims and objectivesThis research proposal is intended to offer the first systematic and complete examination of the whole

corpus of advice books on friendship and the advice books dealing with friendship written from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. In this way it will be possible

to offer a better and coherent understanding of friendship in Modern Age to pay attention not only to friendship in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, but also to

friendship in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment and the French revolution, that studies on modern friendship tends to ignore

The analysis of the advice books on friendship and the advice books dealing with friendship written from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century will open up different, but related, lines of research that will shed new light on the moral and political relevance of friendship in modern age. These lines of research will be explored, as it will be indicated in the section regarding WP 2, 3, and 4, to reach specific objectives, that are the objectives of the research proposal. In particular, it will be possible:

to analyse the link between friendship and civility, by placing sixteenth and seventeenth advice books on friendship within the broader contexts of manual of civil conversations and conduct manuals

to find a bridge between the reflections developed by the authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth advice books on friendship, French Moralists like La Rouchefoucauld and Vauvenargues, Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire

2

to take seriously Derrida’s link between friendship and fraternity and thus grasp how friendship was conceived by the political readers of the French Revolution.

The analysis will be developed through a ground-breaking approach that will allow not only to avoid the fragmentation and fill the gaps that characterise the contributions on early modern and modern friendship, but also to go beyond the main limits that the following analysis of the state of art on friendship studies will put into the foreground.

The limits of friendship studiesa) state of the art of friendship studies in Antiquity and Middle Age

Scholars of ancient friendship have focused on philosophical theories of friendship. A considerable number of studies copes with the eight and the ninth book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero’s Laelius. Of Friendship (see Price 1989, repr. in 2004; Schollmaier 1994; Stern-Gillet 1996; Smith-Pangles 2003; Nichols 2009, Stern-Gillet 2014). Whereas there are commented editions of Aristotle’s books on friendship (see, for instance, Laurenti 1988 and Pakaluk 1998), Cicero’s view of friendship has never been object of such a detailed analysis. Nevertheless it is well known that both for Aristotle and for Cicero the perfect form of friendship, without which there is no happiness for human beings, can only exist between good men and is based but on virtue. It is not less known that Aristotle and Cicero laid their emphasis on the political meanings and functions of friendship. Aristotle did not limit himself to declare that friendship keep the polis united, but went as far as identifying different forms of friendship that are present, together with different forms of justice, under any form of government but tyranny. Cicero’s view is different: founding friendship on virtue rather than on expediency, he tried to gave a moral basis to the political ideal of concordia civium he defended in the late Roman republic. Only in the last ten years scholars have disclosed the importance of pre-Platonic (Spinelli 2006), Stoic (Banateanu 2001), and Neo-Platonic conceptions of friendship (Schramm 2013).

The most evident limit of friendship studies on ancient times is that literature and philosophy are held to be enclosed area with no connections. In large-scale studies in which one can find a general framework of the Greco-Roman perspectives (Fitzgerald 1997) or the classical idea of friendship (Pizzolato 1993; Konstan 1997), philosophers and writers are simply placed side by side. There are no studies in which literary works are analysed with a view to philosophical reflections, and philosophical works are examined in light of literary conceptions of friendship. The analyses of friendship in Sophocles’s tragedies (Blundell 1991), Horace’s epistles (Kilpatrick 1986) and Seneca’s moral letters (Wilcox 2012) make no exceptions. Craig’s recent monograph (Craig 2012) offers the most general overview of friendship in Latin poetry (Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Propertius), epistles (Fronto’s and Cicero’s letters) and narrative prose (Petronius) with no concern for the idealized philosophical models of friendship. This monograph revolves around the assumption that Roman friendship is not the evolution of Greek philia and thus is to be studied per se. In the wake of Bachtin’s theory of speech genres, Craig considers the various discourses on friendship as utterances to be located within the framework of a specific code and focuses on the descriptive and performative function of labels in given contexts. He is interested in the workings of the code of friendship, not in the psychological and socio-political reality that this code might veils. Indeed, since it is the utterance that applies the vocabulary of friendship that determines the meaning and function of this relationship, nothing can be veiled: it is not possible to go beyond the level of textual and inter-textual analysis or, to use Craig’s language, it is possible to read friendship, but not to interpret it.

Medieval friendship is now more studied than ancient friendship. The main contributions about it can be divided into four different groups. Whereas the last group studies medieval friendship per se, the first four groups tend to see medieval friendship as a transformation of the ancient, namely Aristotelian and Ciceronian, conception of friendship.

1) The first group includes monographs dedicated to “big thinkers” such as Dante (Modesto 2015), Aquinas (Schwartz 2007), Augustine (MacNamara 1964, Ital. transl. 1970, It repr. in 2000, Burt 1999) as well as collected essays in history of ideas, in which medieval conceptions of friendship are compared and contrasted with ancient and early modern conceptions of friendship. A case in point is the volume in honour to McEvoy, the editor of the most complete anthologies of ancient and Medieval philosophical texts (McEvoy 1997 and 2004) on friendship and the author of important research on the medieval reception and transmission of ancient ideas on friendship (McEvoy 1999). In a volume in his honour (Kelly and Roseman 2004) the medieval conception of friendship developed by Augustine, Buridan, Aquinas, and Bernardino of Signa is analysed together with that ones by Aristotle, Clement of Alexandria, and Montaigne, whose view appears to mark a turning point that gives rise to a new, modern, idea of friendship. What is a stake in these works is how and to what an extent friendship, such as a preferential affection between two individuals, can be compatible with the law of love, according to which human beings, who are sons of God, should be attached to each other regardless of emotional compatibility and personal acquaintance. To put it in Lewis

3

term (Lewis 1969), the problem is the relationship between philia and agape. This problem has been rephrased by Jaeger (Jaeger 1999) and other scholars of history of emotions, to whom friendship appears to be a form of “ennobling love”, that is a ethical and non-romantic love, which is linked to outward behaviours rather than to inner feelings, and achieves social functions in relation to honour and reputation. Nevertheless, the hearth of the matter does not change.

2) The second group of contributions includes heterogeneous works that focuses on specific trends of Medieval thought such as patristic (Romano 1995) and monasticism (McGuire 1988 and 2002), peculiar texts of Medieval culture such as the philosophical commentary to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Sére 2007) or limited geographical areas such as the Spain of Alfonso X (Stone 1990; Scorpo 2014). The volumes on Spain are groundbreaking works since they show the vitality of an European area erroneously held to be peripheral. Even though they tackle very different subjects, McGuire’s and Sére’s studies share the belief that theories are inseparable form practices of friendship. On the one hand, McGuire has interpreted monastic friendship literature arguing that it is possible to identify emotional bonds and feelings on the basis on the language the monks used to describe their relationship. On the other hand, Sére has disclosed that Medieval commentators of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics adapted a theory which was conceived for the citizens of the polis and excluded the possibilities of friendships with the slaves, to the courts of medieval monarchs and the hierarchies of the feudal society. This adaptation discloses the medieval roots of two relevant Renaissance traditions, the tradition of the friends of the prince and the tradition of friendship between superiors and inferiors, on which I will return later. What is worth of emphasis here is that after McGuire’s and Sere’s studies, scholars of medieval friendship have considered theories and practices of friendship as correlated sides of the same question (Baratto 2010, Lori Sanfilippo 2012).

4)The fourth group of contributions focuses exclusively on literary works. Hyatte’s work (Hyatte 1999) is worth of particular consideration since it insists on the continuities between Middle Ages and Renaissance literature and emphasises the importance of the vernacular translations of Cicero’s De amicitia, which have never been object of specific research. By contrast, more recent contributions are influenced by gender studies. Clark’s work (Clark 2009) makes clearer than Bray’s monograph (Bray 2003) that the literary representation of male friendship can be the lens through which it is possible to shed light on homo-sociality, homoerotic desire, and homosexual relationships. Studies on male friendship are the counterpart of studies on female friendship (Cosslet 1988, Hutson 1997, Donoghue 1999, Anderson 2012). For obvious reasons, the latter address Early modern and the Modern age rather than the Middle Ages. What is worth emphasising here, however, is another feature: works dealing with the literary representation of male medieval friendship generally do not take into account the reflections on friendship developed by philosophers in the same period. In this case, as well as in the case of studies on ancient friendship, there is no connection between literature and philosophy.

5)The fifth group of contributions on medieval friendship is the most innovative. It consists of studies dedicated to collections of letters (McLoughlin 1990, Haseldine 1994 and 1997, Goetz 1999, Garnier 2000, Cantella 2007, Haseldine 2006, Nederman 2007, Haseldine, 2011) and other documentary sources like treaties of alliance, agreements, and records of cooperative groups, including sworn associations, prayer associations and confraternities (Southern 1990, Althoff 1990 and 1992, Jamroziak 2005, Ysebart 2005, Saurette 2010, Lazzarini 2010, Mews and Crossely 2011) which borrow from sociology the method of the social network analysis. Since in the volume edited by Haseldine one can find also McEvoy’s analysis, it is evident that this approach to medieval friendship is not incompatible with the traditional approaches that focuses on the reception of ancient ideas of friendship in Western thought, (Haseldine 1999). The approach based on the method of social network analysis is also complementary to those studies on specific area of medieval Europe (van Eickels 2002; Oschema 2011) in which friendship is analysed as a separate category of social and political relations, in contrast to the long tradition of anthropological research influenced by Mauss’s seminal essay on gift-exchange, in which friendship was viewed as a part of the inextricable and unself-conscious web of instrumental exchanges constitutive of pre-market social organisation. There are, however, many reasons to insist on the differences rather than on the analogies between those approaches and the approach based on the method of social network analysis: a) unlike the former, the latter is interested in practices rather than in theories of friendship; b) it rejects pre-existing categories and seeks to identify a pattern of action and language that is constitutive of all the relationships labelled as friendships; c) it studies the formation and operation of actual friendship in specific social contexts rather than the features of theoretical, highly idealised, forms of friendship and thus focuses on practices, not on theories, of friendship; d) it analyses the roles of friendship networks in the formation of social bonds and political groupings and discloses how the (including or excluding) language of friendship can be used to establish group or institutional identity, maintain and defend shared interests, recommend other for patronage, promote political agendas and so on.

4

The approach that characterises the last group is intriguing, but has at least three limits. Firstly, this approach addresses friendship among medieval elite group and is blind to friendship among ordinary (learned) men. Secondly, this approach cannot offer a coherent and consistent interpretative framework for the varieties of friendship that it detects. To fill this gap, Haseldine has suggested that scholars could benefit from sociological theories about trust-building (Haseldine 2013), but nobody has never tried to follow this possible line of research. Thirdly, this approach discloses the political implications of specific networks of friendship, but does not examine friendships qua political relationships.

Renaissance friendship tends to be viewed as a part of medieval or modern friendship. For instance, in the volume on medieval friendship edited by Haseldine (Haseldine 1997), Burke’s essay explores the meaning of renaissance friendship from the perspective of cultural history by focusing on rituals of friendship, portraits and album amicorum. By contrast, in the volume edited by Classen and Sandige (Classen and Sandige 2010), there is an essay dedicated to Leonardo’s drawings that is placed between the essay on Montaigne’s De l’amitiè and Bacon’s Of Friendship. There are, however, a few exceptions. Langer’s pioneering work (Langer 1994) examines Renaissance forms of perfect friendship through a multidisciplinary approach that rejects sharp distinction between literary and philosophical works, and highlights that a fully account of modern friendship cannot be grasped if commonplace books, florilegia and similar collections of ancient sources continue to be ignored. Kent’s work explores the meanings and functions of friendship in the Florence of the fifteenth century by combining the analysis of literary texts with studies in visual arts and social history. To show how Florentines of various occupations and rank experienced friendship, the scholar not only links theories and practices of friendship, but also proves that forms of instrumental friendship based on political patronage and patronage of art were perceived as authentic forms of close friendship (Kent 2009). The only book that deals specifically with the political meanings and functions of friendship is the book in which I have examined Palmieri’s Vita Civile, Alberti’s Libri della Famiglia and the mirrors for prince written in Latin by Giovanni Tinto Vicini, Iovianus Pontano, Bartolomeo Platina, and Francesco Patrizi of Siena (Ceron 2011). As I have shown, in these works friendship was a political relationship since it was conceived, in Aristotelian and Ciceronian terms, as a moral bond grounded on virtue. Qua political relationship, friendship played different roles in two different spaces. In the space of concord, the language of friendship was used to face the problem of the unity and the harmony of the city. In the space of counsel, the language of friendship was used to solve the problem of the selection of governing élites. As proved by Patrizi’s mirror for prince, in which there is not only a section on civilis seu socialis amicitia, the form of friendship that unites citizens of different occupations and ranks, but also a reflection on the friends whom a prince should choose as counselors and helpers to manage his power, the space of concord and the space of counsel can be complementary. What is more, the space of counsel can be though as a contraction of the space of concord. In fact, whereas in Aquinas’s De regno and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum it is argued that a virtuous prince should be friend of all his subjects and thus friendship is the model of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, in the mirrors for princes written before Machiavelli’s Prince, it is stated that a perfect prince should choose as counsellors and collaborators only the most virtuous of his subjects, who are worth of his trust.c) The gaps of friendships studies on Modern Age

Modern friendship is less studied than Medieval and Ancient friendship. Studies on modern friendship should span three century, but pay more attention to the fifteenth and the seventeenth century than to the eighteenth century and do not explain what happened to friendship in the age of the Enlightenment and the French revolution. They make far more evident than studies on Ancient and Medieval friendship not only the necessity of going beyond the distinction between literature and philosophy, but also the need of offering a coherent interpretative for the moral meanings and the political function of the forms of friendship that they analyse. What is more, they confirm rather than deny that friendship looses relevance both as a moral and a political relationship from the second half of the sixteenth century onward. In spite f their efforts, scholars of modern friendship have not undermined, but rather strengthen, conventional wisdom: it is still true not only that Montaigne’s De l’amitié and Bacon’s Of friendship are the swan song of friendship in modern literature and moral philosophy, but also that modern friendship differs from ancient friendship because it is depoliticised (Fusillo 2005, Portinaro 2009).One can distinguish five group of contributions on modern friendship.

1) The first group encompasses monographs on different kinds of literary works: Shakespeare’s comedies, women’s fictions written in Victorian England (Cosslett 1988, Hutson 1997), Cervantes’s poetry (Gils-Osle 2013) and so on. It is possible to include in this group also Shannon’s monograph, but it analyses the literary representations of friendship that emerge from Shakespeare’s comedies and other literary works written between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century to show how the likeness of sex and station urged in friendship paved the way to a utopian political discourse (Shannon 2001). It has in common with the other works included in this group two things: i) it does not connect the literary representations of friendship with

5

the philosophical reflections of friendship developed in that period, ii) even thought it makes a few reference to Monatigne and Bacon, it does not analyse literary works entirely dedicated to friendship and friends in modern age. The reason of this exclusion is plain: like Shannon, scholars of modern friendship, as well as scholars of Medieval friendship, have paid attention only to the most known, influential, and studied works, whose place in the history of literature is unquestionable.

2)The second group consists of multi-period and multi-disciplinary volumes of collected essays, which cope with the transformation of ancient and medieval conception of friendship and shed lights on a variety of modern forms of idealised friendship based on virtue. Despite the efforts of the editors, who offer long introductions not only to highlight connections between single essays, but also to outline a general interpretative framework, these volumes identify relevant tiles of a mosaic, but do not disclose how to compose them. The reason why the mosaic cannot take form is simple: these studies make visible the outcomes that scholars of different disciplines, who have been not involved in a real interdisciplinary dialogue or in a shared project, have achieved individually and independently. The volume edited by Descharmes and other scholars (Descharmes, Heuser, Kruger and Loy 2011) is a case in point. To explore theories and practices of friendship, it jumps from the analysis of medieval collections of letters (Haseldine) to the works written by the French moralists of the seventeenth century (Zeeb), from the investigations on patronage in German Medieval courts and German pre-modern society (Asch) to anthropological analysis of on Brazilian and African societies, and takes into account also friendship between political leaders of the twentieth century. The volume edited by Lochman and other scholars (Lochman, Lopez, and Hutson 2011) is less fragmented, but lacks of unity since it offers a series of case studies that should offer new and specific answers to different big questions. Just to mention a few: how was friendship configured in relationships shaped by gender? To what an extent quotidian experience in urban and courtly settings affected traditional discourses of friendship and other interpersonal relationships? How did interpersonal relationships receive literary, intellectual, and/or performative expression? Did friendship transcend the dichotomy between public and private sphere?. There is a group of essays that call attention to the role of friendship in the literary works of Milton and other writers who belong to the wide family of early modern and modern Republicanism, but the others have in common only the fact that regard a specific period of time spanning from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. The 20 essays collected by Sandige and Classen (Classen and Sandige 2010) deal with the reinterpretations of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s model of idealised friendship that emerged in a very wide set of Latin, German, French, English, and Spanish literary and philosophical texts, from Augustine’s Confessions to Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Eassys. As a whole, these essays confirm the relevance of literary discourses that extol the ethical value of friendship, but at the end of their long introduction the editors cannot help but note that the ideal of friendship started to decline in the second half of the seventeenth century. The essays collected by Gowing and other scholars (Gowing, Hunter and Rubin 2006) makes no mention of the decline of friendship, but they are essays in social and cultural history that should address Europe, but actually regard England and include under the “manifestations of friendship” to be analysed not only erotic bonds and homosexual relationships, but also the reciprocities of the village life. In the essays edited by Caine (Caine 2008), it seems that friendship does not decline after that Montaigne and Bacon wrote their essays, but this volume explores the changing ways in which friendship was understood and experienced in Europe from the Hellenic period to present time through an accurate selection of literary sources. The transition from Christian friendship to secular sentimentality, for instance, comes to light in a chapter dedicated to the analysis of English, German, and French women’s fictions written during the Enlightenment. This chapter is intriguing since it enlarges the context in which Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse is usually played (Fauskewag 2007), but it does not offer a complete and systematic account of the conceptions of friendship developed during the eighteenth century.

3)The third group of contributions includes collected essays edited by historians of philosophy who have tried to show how friendship has changed from the antiquity to the modern times. The pioneering volume edited by Badhwar (Badhwar 1993) distinguishes between moral and political friendship. The latter is Aristotle‘s civic friendship, Mill’s conjugal friendship and feminist friendship. The former is Kant’s friendship. More than a half of the books revolves around the passage from Aristotle’s teleological and eudemonistic ethics to Kant’s deontological ethics, which reduces the moral value of friendship since it requires that moral agents are impartial and therefore ignore personal preferences, love and attachment. The Kantian essays of this volume essays find their roots in Bloom analysis on friendship and morality (Blum 1980) and can be linked to more recent debates in which the analysis of friendship results in a critique of (direct, indirect, subjective, or objective) consequentialism (Card 2004). Also in the volume edited by Merle and Schumacher (Merle and Schumacher 2005) modern friendship is held to be nothing else but Kantian friendship. The more recent volume edited by Caluori do not move the discussion onto a further stage since after Bacon and Montaigne it takes into account only Kant and the analysis of the Kantian conception of friendship is an introduction to consequentialist approaches to friendship (Caluori 2013). What one of the

6

rare anthologies of philosophical texts that dare go beyond the Middle Ages suggested many years ago, is still true: after Montaigne and Bacon, in modern philosophy of friendship, there is only Kant (11998).

In these three groups Modern Age should span three century, but the eighteenth century is not object of systematic and in-depth examinations. Two contributions, that form another group, make far more evident the lack of interest in the literary and philosophical reflections of the Enlightenment thinkers.

4) The fourth group of contributions on modern friendship includes works that should take into account Enlightenment thinkers, but ignore them. In Zeeb’s monograph (Zeeb 2011), Montaigne’s view of friendship is closely linked to La Rouchefoucauld’s Maximes (1655) and Chamfort’s Maxims et pensées (1795) since the author of the Essais is held to be the Father of the French moralists. To explain how friendship became a dynamic, dialogically open, and reflective phenomenon Zeeb reads the works of these French moralists in light of Foucault’s philosophical reflections on the hermeneutics of the subject and the microphysics of power. Her reading is intriguing since it privileges the comparison between the French moralists and Foucault to the more traditional comparison between the French moralists and Nietzsche. Nevertheless, one can wonder why Zeeb makes no reference to the entry “amitie” that Claude Yvon and Denis Diderot wrote for the Encyclopedia and the voice “amitié” that Voltaire’s wrote for his Philosophical dictionary. This entry and this voice are crucial not only because they offers a clear sign of the relevance of friendship in the second half of the eighteenth century, but also because they suggest that to understand why and how friendship become a dynamic and open phenomenon is necessary to pay attention to the passions stemming from self-love, on which the French Moralists of the seventeenth an the eighteenth century, prior to Diderot and Voltaire, laid their accent. The only volume that address friendship from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment does not analyse how friendship was conceived by Voltaire, Diderot and other Enlightenment thinkers since it is a work in history of mentality and history of emotions that traces the emotional landscape of modern France through the analysis of private letters and diaries and other sources written by ordinary people (Daumas 2011).The decline of friendship in Modern Age

One can suppose that Enlightenment has no place in friendship studies on modern age since in the second half of the sixteenth century friendship, at least in its idealised forms, started to decline. The studies on friendship and politics carried out by historians of modern political though leads to think that friendship lost its relevance not only in the moral but also in the political field. According to Devere, the resurrection of friendship has been also a resurrection of political friendship. To prove this, he has offered a chart of he main contributions published in the last thirty years where one can find references to the political meanings and functions of friendship (Devere 2010). Devere’s chart, howevere, is misleading since it tends to equate the contributions of psychologists, according to which personal identity is shaped through friendship (for instance, Kelly and Roseman 2004), political sociologists (Allan and Adams 1998, Pahl 2000, Pahl and Spenser 2006) and anthropologists (Bell and Coleman 1999) who have gone in search of the social glue necessary to current societies, historians of ideas who have tried to explain why friendship remain central to the good life (Linch 2005, Vernon 2005, and more recently Nehamas 2016), scholars of philosophy of law opposing perfectionism (Zanetti 2002), scholars of history of philosophy who focused on the political implications of Aristotle’s and Cicero’s view of friendship (Smith-Pangle 2003). What is more, Devere’s chart makes no distinction between the contributions of historians of modern political thought and the contributions of scholar of political philosophy involved in current academic debates.

Devere has good reasons to argue that friendship has been re-included in on-going debates of political philosophy. In one of his most relevant contribution to friendship studies (Devere 2010, in Classen and Sandige 2010), he has highlighted many interesting connections: the feminsit/friendship connection, which has given rise to a revised, liberal version of the Aristotelian concept of civic friendship in contrast with the model of friendship proposed by the feminists theorists of the ethics of care (Schwarzenbach 2009); the communitarian/friendship connection, according to which friendship reinforces justice (Sandel 1982) and is primary to the formation of any form of community (MacIntyre 1988) since it creates mutuality, reciprocity, respect, belonging and solidarity; the post-colonial/friendship connection, which outlines model of affective citizenship or affective communities (Gandhi 2006). There at least three other connections: i) scholars who have developed their reflections from a Rawlsian perspective have recently looked at Aristotle’s view of civic friendship (Schollmeier 1994, Spragens 1999) or have blended it with Emerson‘s idea of friendship (Scorza 2008) to argue that current liberal democracies need shared believes and common ethos, not only to join the citizens, but also to strengthen political participation; ii) friendship has been explored in the field of interstate relationship (Carnevali 2001, Koschut and Oelsner 2014) and from a global and transnational perspective (Brunkhorst, 2005); iii) friendship has been even seen as a relationship that has the potential, at least in its deepest and closest forms, to undermine what he sees as the dominance of 'neo-liberal' economic, political, and social structures (May 2012). What is to be pointed out here, however, is that the contributions in which these connections come to light regard current academic debates in political philosophy and are to

7

be told from the volumes of collected essays in history of modern political thought than can be found in Devere’s chart. In facts, whereas the former sheds light on the resurrection of friendship in politics, the latter deal with the decline of friendship in politics. They can be included in the fifth and last group of contributions on modern friendship.

5) The fifth group of contributions on modern friendship consist of volume of collected essays that focus on the political meanings and functions of friendship. As I have noticed in my bibliographical essay (Ceron 2012), the volume edited by Smith and King (Smith and King 2007) and the volume edited by Von Heiking and Avramenko (Von Hieking and Avramenko 2008) are influenced by Derrida’s thought-provoking analysis. In Politiques de l’amiitié (Derrida 1994), Derrida links friendship to fraternity, and presents fraternal friendship not only as the ideal extolled, together with liberty and equality, during the French Revolution, but also as the unacknowledged pillar of modern, that is liberal and democratic, states. Moving from Nietzsche’s and Schmitt’s thought, he aims to unravel the link between friendship and fraternity to open the possibility of a non-fraternal friendship and a “democracy to come” that get rid of reciprocity and likeness and thus can be based on the irreducible singularity of the Other. When Derrida traces the genealogy of the link between friendship and fraternity, he refers not only to the Christian concept of God as the father of all human beings, but also to the parallel that Aristotle draws in the Nicomachean Ethics between friendship among brothers and friendship between citizens in democracy. For this reason, even thought he is not a supporter of civic friendship, Derrida has somehow urged scholars to cope with the political meanings and functions of friendship. The volume edited by Smith and King revolves around Derrida’s reading of Schmitt’s thesis that the political is based on the opposition between friends and enemies and uses it to rethink the role of friendship both in in the domestic politics and in the international system. By contrast, the volume edited by von Heiking and Avramenko compares ancient, modern, and post-modern conceptions of political friendship. Here modern age is the age of Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, the American founders, and Tocqueville, that is the age of individualism, social contract theories, liberalism, and democracy. Montaigne view of friendship has to do with politics simply because friendship preserves a private space of a critical reflections on shared values that could be useful in political life. In Hobbes’s works, friendship tends either to be relegated to the private sphere or to be seen as a form of cronyism that endanger political power. The other essays on modern age confirm that friendship lost its political relevance since it was absorbed by concept like trust, patriotism, and spirit of association. If one takes into account another volume influenced by Derrida’s thought, which is included in Devere’s chart, it is possible to add to the list of the concepts that would have incorporated friendship also Smith’s idea of sympathy and benevolence (Velasquez 2003). The volume edited by King and Devere (King and Devere 2000) deals with modernity rather than with modern age, but it is worth being mentioned here since it shows that the theory of commercial society developed by Smith, Hume and other Scottish thinkers challenged the political meaning of friendship since it discloses that friendship was a public good because it was conceived as a private sentiment.

As it should be evident, friendship studies in modern political thought tell a story of decline, not a story of resurrection. They have nothing to say about friendship during the Enlightenment and ignore what happens to friendship in the French Revolution. Those gaps are not filled by Linton’s monograph. The title promises an analysis of virtue, friendship and authenticity in the French Revolution, but Linton limits herself to explain why Robespierre and other Jacobean leaders chose terror. The conception of friendship developed by political thinkers and political leaders of the French Revolution is taken into account only in the notes of two pages, in which there are reference to studies on Masonic rituals of friendship as well as to the aforementioned volume edited by Caine and Sandige, in which there are only analysis on French moralists of the sixteenth century and the women’s fiction of the eighteenth century (Linton 2013, pp. 42-45). Like the monograph dedicated to friendship in the American Revolution (Liebiger 1999), Linton’s monograph results to be but an examination of personal relationships between political leaders in a certain, and crucial, historical situation.

A reassessment of modern friendshipThis research proposal moves from the challenging and groundbreaking hypothesis that friendship has

started to decline, both as a moral and a political relationship, since it has been sought where it cannot be found. To reassess the moral meanings and the political functions of friendship in modern age, that is between the beginning of the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century, it is necessary, as it has been already clarified, to assume that Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essays can be read as advice books and can be considered as the bulk of an iceberg that has never been explored. The research team will study these works following a groundbreaking approach:

The members of the research team will develop their research not independently and autonomously, but trough a constant and real interdisciplinary dialogue that will allow to share specific skills and knowledge

8

advice books dedicated to friendship, as well as advice books dealing with friendship like Montaigne’s Essais and Bacon’s Essays, will be considered at the same time as literary and philosophical works and will be analysed as works of practical ethics, in which ethics is inseparable from politics since they give advice to teach to ordinary (learned) men a new kind of wisdom necessary to cope with the contingencies of life in the private as well as in the public sphere;

any preliminary distinction between the field of philosophy and the field of literature will be rejected:

the analyses will focus neither on theories nor on practices of friendship, but rather on how The research t theories influence practices and practices influence theories;

the variety of the forms of friendship that will emerge in the course of the analysis will be studied without using prearranged classifications, it does not matter if they are drawn from ancient sources, like the Ciceronian opposition between ordinary friendship based on expediency and true friendship based on virtue and the Plutarchian juxtaposition of false friendship founded on flattery and true friendship, or are derived, as it has been noted (Hutter 1978) from Parson’s sociology, like the distinction between instrumental friendships and close, or emotional, friendship.

The research will aim not to shed light on the transformation of ancient forms of friendship in early modern and modern age, as it happens in the aforementioned studies on modern friendship, but rather to o establish if, how and why different vocabularies, or languages, of friendship can coexist and to what an extent they give rise to conflicts and contradictions

Expected impactThis research proposal will offer close examination of the corpus of modern advice books on friendship and

modern advice books dealing with friendship that have never been explored. In this way it will shed new light on how friendship was conceived in the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which friendship studies on Modern Age have ignored. The reassessment of modern friendship, for this reason, will shed new light on the philosophical and political thought of the Enlightenment thinkers and the leaders of the French Revolution. Friendship studies will benefit from this research also because it will provide a new method of analysis which crosses the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and political thought, studies modern friendship per se and is not intended to disclose how ancient and medieval conceptions of friendship changed in modern age.

METHODOLOGY My previous studies on friendship ensure that I will be able, as PI, to coordinate the research. Since I

took a PhD in history of modern philosophy and developed my post-doc research in history of modern political thought, I will not limit my self to supervise and coordinate the project to ensure that the members of the research team will work together and will be engaged in a constant dialogue to develop they research, but I will gave my contribution to the development of specific part of the project, as it will be indicated.

This is intended to be an interdisciplinary research project in history of ideas to be developed from a European perspective by scholars of history of literature, history of political philosophy and history of political thought who are expert in modern age. Each member of the research team will follow the approach prevailing in his/her field of research. As far as the history of political philosophy, for instance, the researchers will adopt the contextual approach that is usually associated to the so-called School of Cambridge (Bevir 2011). Nevertheless, in the course of their analysis, for the whole duration of the projects, the members of the research team will be involved in methodological discussions to individuate, stage by stage, on the basis of the hypotheses to be verified and according to the expected outcomes, how to carry on and improve their research. For this reason, as PI I will organise and coordinate:

General methodological sessions , regarding the whole work plan, every six months for five years, Specific methodological sessions , regarding the specific work packages of the work plan, every five

months, before the general sessions, for five years. During the general sessions, it will be also established how to organise the international conferences that will disseminate the outcomes of the research. The work plan that I shall propose as PI consists of five, different but interrelated, work packages. Since it refers to a work in progress, it is open to modifications that will be justifiable only if they will depend on the outcomes of the analyses and will improve the research. The first work package, however, is not subject to alterations. It guarantees that this challenging and groundbreaking project will achieve measurable and realistic goals, even though it is not possible to assure that all the expected results will be realised.WP1: the virtual library of advice books on friendshipTo reassess the meaning, value and function of friendship in modern age it is necessary to begins with the identification of all the advice books entirely dedicated to friendship or dealing with friendship that were

9

written in Italian, German, French and the Spanish, between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. This corpus of works, which has never been explored, will be prepared by a PhD students in modern (Italian, French, Spanish and German) literature, a PHD students in history of modern philosophy and the PI. The bibliographical survey will be carried out through online catalogue such as SBN, Gallica, World cat and so on, but the member of the research team demanded to visit European and USA libraries to have access to specific catalogues that will be useful to develop the research (for instance, the catalogue of conduct book for women in the British Library and the catalogue of courtesy books in the NewBerry Library). The libraries to be visited will be individuated in the course of the analysis. For this reason, a voice of the budget is dedicated to fund research travel and stays abroad. Once it will be obtained, the list of advice books on friendship and advice books dealing with friendship will be published on line on a website, which is intended to offer the virtual library of early modern and modern friendship. Each work that will be place in this virtual library will be endowed with a sheet containing bibliographical references, a summary of the contents, and a brief comment on the most relevant topics. A section of the virtual library will be dedicated to friendship in common places books and references books like Domenico Nani Miabelli’s Polyanthea (which saw many editions between 1503 and 1681) and Giusto Fontanini’s Biblioteca Italiana (Roma, 1721). Another section of the virtual library will offer the first catlaogue of the translations of Cicero’s Lealius into the vernaculars.

The virtual library will be realised thanks to the collaborations of software developers and web graphic designer in order to disseminate the outcome of the research and make them accessible to academic and non-academic users.

The examination of books placed in the virtual library aims to answers specific questions: How is friendship described in these texts? Which are the typologies of friends and friendship that one can infer from the texts? Which are the ancient and modern sources that the author refers to in his work? How and why they are used? Do the different vocabulary of friendship the author uses coexist? Why yes? Why not? Is friendship described only as a moral relationship? Does friendship has political function? Which are these functions? To what an extent is friendship a political relationship since it is a moral relationship based on virtue? Why, if this happens, friendship is held to be dangerous for or incompatible with politics? The set of question will be better defined during the methodological session of this work package and the methodological session regarding the whole project.

To disseminate the outcome of this part of the research, after the creation of the website, the research team will organise at least one international conference. The conference will launch the publications of the advice books worth of commented editions and eventually of translation into English or other languages. Moreover, it will be a springboard for the publication of a coherent and systematic volume of collected essay on WP1 topics, whose cost is envisaged in the budget. The members of the research team will be also, and obviously, invited to submit articles to the most relevant academic journals interested in these topics and eventually to write a monograph.WP2: friendship and civility

The presence of Trattato de gli uffici communi tra gli amici superiori et inferiori in the catalogue of advice book on friendship suggests to look at Della casa’s Galateo and Guazzo’s Civil conversazione, two advice books that spread across Europe and become the model for many other conduct manuals (Burke 1993 and Wyatt 2005). As Quondam has shown (Quondam 2007 and Quondam 2010), Della Casa and Guazzo are the Italian moralists who created a new, European, ethics. It was a relative and distinctive ethics, based on duties rather on rights, according to which savoir faire is the art that ordinary men needs to play their social roles in the stage of the world. How was friendship described in this kind of advice books? Did the author of these works make use of different vocabulary of friendship? Why? To what an extent they coexist? Are there conflicting vocabularies? Was friendship linked, as it is plausible, with civility, rather than with fraternity? What does it means to be civil in making friends with someone or in breaking up with him? To what an extent disparities of rank, occupation, and power, as well as gender difference, can be exceeded via friendship? Does friendship act as an equalizing factor? Which is the code of conduct that friendship prescribes? Is this code of conduct useful both in the public and the private sphere? Why yes? Why not? The set of question will be better defined during the methodological session regarding this work package and the whole project. To find answers to these questions, it will be necessary to review the sate of the art on the advice books modelled on Della Casa’s and Guazzo’s works which were written in English, Italian, Spanish, German and French. The research can benefit not only from the studies on the theories of the honest men and the honest woman (Magendie 1993), but also from inquiry on politesse, social relationships (among others, Malherbe 2008, Picard 2008). It is to be pointed out, however, that what is at stake is diffeernt: the main aim of this work package is to disclose not how friendship fostered grace and good manners, but how friendship helped ordinary men and women to face life in the private and the public sphere.

10

A Phd students in Early Modern Literature, a PhD students in History of Early Modern Philosophy, and the PI, will carry out this part of the research. To individuate the Italian, English, French, Spanish and German advice books on good manners and civil conversation to be studied, they will be demanded to consult the most relevant catalogues of European and eventually USA libraries. To disseminate the outcome of the research, the senior scholars will and the PhD students will be expected not only to submit articles to the most relevant academic journals interested in these topics, but also to organise at least one international conference. The conference will be a springboard for the publication of volume of collected essay on these topics, whose cost is envisaged in the budget as well as the cost of research travel and research stay abroad.WP3: advice books on friendship French moralists and Enlightenment thinkers

Since Montaigne’s Essais has a place in the catalogue of advice books dealing with friendship to be examined, and Montaigne is held to be the father of the French moralists, the field of investigation to be explored will be widen in order to analyse not only the French moralists already studied by Zeeb, but also French moralists like Pascal and Vauvenargues. As it has been already highlighted, this analysis should lead to the analysis of the conceptions of friendship developed during the Enlightenment, not to the exploration of Foucault’s philosophy. A review of the sate of the art on the French moralists in the sixteenth and eighteenth century (Parmentier 2000, Le Meur 2005, Van delft 2008) will be preliminary to further analyses. The works written by the French moralists of seventeenth and the eighteenth century will be examined also as a model that was imitated by Italian, German, and Spanish writers of that period.

The starting point of the analysis will be four theses that Johnson has formulated, but not developed since in his monograph he has focused on the literary representations of male friendship from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (Johnson 2003). According to Johnson:1) Pernetti’s Conseil de l’amitié and similar works written by de Sacy (Traité de l’amitié, 1726), Caraccioli (Caractéres de l’amitié, 1726), La Chapelle (Reflexions sur l’amitié, 1729) echoed the reflections on friendship developed by the French moralists of sixteenth and the eighteenth century, who had highlighted the deleterious effect of self-love and had clarified that passions stemming from self love make friendship a weak and fragile relationship. 2) the works written by Pernetti, de Sacy, Caraccioli and La Chapelle, like the work of the French moralists of the seventeenth century, had an European circulation and were imitated by French, Italian, German, and Spanish writers 3) the works written by Pernetti, de Sacy, Caraccioli, La Chapelle, and other writers gave voice to the same concern that surfaced in the entry “amitié” that Claude Yvon and Denis Diderot wrote for the Encyclopédie as well as in in the voice “amitié” of Voltaire’s dictionary. 4) to understand how friendship was conceived in the advice books on friendship writtenin the first half of the eighteenth century is necessary to examine also works on civil society and sociability such as Claude Buffier’s Traité de la societé civil (1726) and Francois Pluquet’s De la sociabilité (1767).

In this work package, Johnson theses will be developed by moving from the challenging assumption that there is a close link, to be explored, between the ideas on friendship surfacing in the works written by the French moralists of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century and the ideas on friendship coming out from the literary and philosophical works written by Enlightenment thinkers. The bridge between the former and the latter can be found in the works written by Pernetti, de Sacy, Caraccioli and La Chapelle, to be studied in connection with treatises on civil society and sociability of that period. In this way, it will be possible not only to include, for the first time, the reflections on friendship in the age of Enlightenment in friendship studies on early modern and modern age, but also to offer a coherent interpretive framework.

Enlightenment will be examined not as French, but as a European trend of thought. A review of the sate of the art on the literary and philosophical production of Enlightenment thinkers will be part and parcel of the analysis and will lead to individuate the literary and philosophical works to be examined. For instance, the voice “amitiè” in Voltaire’s dictionary is to be studied together with Voltaire’s poetry The temple of friendship and there is no doubt that Diderot’s plays will be taken into account. Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse cannot be excluded from this field of investigation, but it is to be read as a political fiction, which offered the model of an imaginary society, the society of Clarens, in which all social bonds are shaped as friendship. According to Starobinsky, this is a form of friendship that results in a total fusion of the wills, which Rousseau borrowed from Montaigne’s De l’amitié, and can be seen as the literary transfiguration of the general will: Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse adds to the ideals of liberty and equality put forward in the Social Contract, the “republican ideal” of fraternity (Starobinski 1985 and 1988).

The research team will be engaged in literary, as well as philosophical and political analysis. The philosophical backdrop to the first two theses formulated by Johnson is the account of human nature developed by philosophers like Hobbes, Hume, and Rousseau, according to whom not virtue, but self-love and the passions stemming from it move men to act. The political backdrop to the fourth theses formulated by

11

Johnson is the concept of civil society elaborated by Hobbes, Locke and other theorists of the social contract, according to which civil society is not the sphere of the human relationship (as it was in manuals on civil conversation and conduct manuals), but rather the sphere of the state, the artificial entity without which human conflicts brought about by self-love and the passions stemming from it cannot be regulated. It is crucial that the political backdrop of WP3 will be explored by taking into account the role of patronage in the process of sate building (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984; Kettering 2002). This part of the research will be carried out by three post-doc scholars, who are expected to be expert respectively in history of Modern Political Thought, Modern literature, and Enlightenment philosophy.

The research aim to answer a specific set of questions: How is friendship described by French Moralists in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century? Is it still founded on virtue? To what an extent is it possible to combine the vocabulary of virtue and the vocabulary of self-love? Are these vocabularies conflicting? Why? How they are harmonised? Did self-love make friendship incapable to be a component of human happiness? Which is the vocabulary that Pernetti, de Sacy, Caraccioli, La Chapelle and other authors of advice books on friendship used? In these works is friendship conceived as a weak and fragile relationship? Why? How is friendship described in the literary and philosophical works of the Encyclopaedists and the Enlightenment thinkers? To what an extent is it challenged by self-love and the passions stemming from it? Can friendship be strengthened? Is it possible to avoid or reduce effects of self-love? Do French Moralists, authors of advice books, Encyclopaedists and Enlightenment thinkers lay their accent on conflicts between friends? If friendship is conceived as a conflicting relationship, is it still possible to be civil in making friends with someone and breaking up with him? Does friendship loose its relevance in politics because of its fragile and conflicting nature? Which are the political functions that friendship continues to play? To what an extent can it help ordinary men to face the circumstances of political life? The set of questions will be better defined during the methodological session regarding this work package and the whole project. During this session, it will be established which of the works examined will be not only catalogued in the virtual library but also published in commented editions.

To disseminate the outcome of the research, the members of the research team will not limit themselves to submit articles to the most relevant academic journals interested in these topics, but they will also organise two international conferences. The conferences will launch the publications of the advice books worth of commented editions and eventually of translation into English or other languages. The conferences will also act as springboards for publication of coherent and systematic volume of collected essay on modern friendship, whose cost is envisaged in the budget. The budget covers also the research travel and the research stay that will be necessary to individuate the works worth of in-depth examinations.WP4: friendship and fraternity

Work package 3 points to the French revolution. As it has been clarified, the analysis of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse is included in work package 3 and is to be considered, in line with Starobinski’s reading, as the works that adds to the ideals of liberty and equality put forward in the Social Contract, the “republican ideal” of fraternity. One can seek this ideal of fraternity also In Mary Wollenstoncraft’s literary works and in the other women’s fiction analysed in the volume edited by Caine. Nevertheless, if one wants to take seriously the link between friendship and fraternity that Derrida has highlighted this in not enough. It is necessary to explore the link between friendship and fraternity in the political writings of the leading figures of the French Revolution. Scholars of friendship have never analysed it, even thought it is well known that Robespierre called for the erections altars to divine friendship and Saint-Just argued that a man, who do not believe in friendship should be banished from the Republic (Fortunet 1982). This part of the research will be developed by two post-doc scholars in History of Political Thought who are expected to be familiar with wide family of the republican traditions that developed in Renaissance, early modern and modern Europe (Viroli 2002, Van Gelderen and Skinner 2004) and Rosanvallon’s idea that the central dynamic of modern French political culture is the struggle between the monist political model generated during the French revolution and the parallel emergence of intermediary bodies (Rosanvallon 2007).

A review of the studies on fraternity during the French Revolution (Antoine 1981, David 1987, Ozouf 1988, Martinelli, Salvati and Veca 1989) is preliminary to further research. The analysis of the political writings of the Jacobean leaders and the leading figures of the French revolution aim to answer the following questions: How do they describe friendship? Friendship is till conceived as a virtue or is it a passion? It is a private relationship that regards the public and political sphere? Is it a political relationship since it is a moral relationship? Is it fragile? Why yes and why not? How can it foster fraternity? To what an extant does it strengthen citizenship? Is friendship the model and basis for all the social ties that should join citizens together? Does it act as an equalising factor? Can it exist regardless of gender difference, disparity of rank and wealth? Does it prescribe a shared code of conduct? Does it give rise to a shared ethos? The set of question will be better defined during the methodological sessions regarding this work package and the whole project. The philosophical backdrop to this analysis is Bodei’s thesis that Jacobean thinkers did not

12

restore the Aristotelian and Ciceronian language of idealised friendship, but used it to elaborate a new, and modern, political usage of passions (Bodei 1991).

To disseminate the outcome of the members of the research team will not limit themselves to submit articles to the most prestigious academic journals interested in these topics and eventually to write monographs, but they will also organise at least one international conference. The conference will launch the publication of a volume on friendship and fraternity. The cost of the publication is envisaged in the budget. The budget also provides for research travel and research stay in France that will be necessary to develop this part of the research. Work package 5: outcomes and outreach

During the methodological sessions regarding the whole project, the research team will establish how to organise the international conference that will disseminate the outcomes reached in any work package. In the last two years of the projects, the methodological sessions will dispose also a final international conference, which will give further visibility to the aims achieved and will act as a springboard for the outreach of the research. After the first year, the research team will establish stable scientific contacts and scientific exchanges with the members of research centres and the universities that have a deep interest in friendship studies all over the world. In the last two years it will reinforce the contacts and the exchanges already established. To ensure that this goal will be reached, it is necessary to forecast a work package dedicated to this specific activity and the organisation of the final conference. All the research team, under the supervision of the PI will be involved in it. The budget envisages the costs for the travel and the say of the speakers who will take part to the final conference.

As far as the dissemination of the research, it is to be pointed out that the budget provides not only for the publications of the volume that will stem from the final conference, but also for 5 monographs that could be written by the members of the research team on specific topic related to the project. A section of the virtual library will be dedicated to the promotion of the conferences and the publications that will be planned. Nevertheless, to ensure that the project will be publicised in the best way, the research team will be in contact with the press office o the host institution. It cannot be excluded that it will be necessary to recruit an expert of social networks and communication management.

The following Pert chart makes clear how the work packages are linked to each other:

The following Gantt chart show the main tasks and the chronology of the research proposal:

13

14

15