Virtue or Art?: Political Friendship Reconsidered

In Talking to Strangers (2004), Danielle Allen argues that democratic citizens will need to acquire new habits for contending with distrust in order to prolong the democratic experiment. Though Allen's solution recalls her reading of the Republic, it is to Aristotle, not Plato, that she turns f...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Eitel, Adam (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Wiley-Blackwell [2016]
Dans: Journal of religious ethics
Année: 2016, Volume: 44, Numéro: 2, Pages: 260-277
Sujets non-standardisés:B Gratitude
B political friendship
B Danielle S. Allen
B Democracy
B Virtue
B Plato
B Thomas Aquinas
B Piety
B Aristotle
Accès en ligne: Volltext (Verlag)
Volltext (doi)
Description
Résumé:In Talking to Strangers (2004), Danielle Allen argues that democratic citizens will need to acquire new habits for contending with distrust in order to prolong the democratic experiment. Though Allen's solution recalls her reading of the Republic, it is to Aristotle, not Plato, that she turns for help theorizing those habits. Drawing upon the Nicomachean Ethics, she proposes arts or techniques that might substitute for and outpace justice by enabling democratic strangers to treat one another like friends. While I endorse Allen's analysis of the problems posed by rising levels of distrust, I propose a different solution. First, I argue that the habits Allen describes would have to be virtues and not merely techniques in order to effect real political change. Then, second, I identify those habits as “piety” and “gratitude”—virtues which, I contend, are not so much substitutes for as supplements to justice. My argument thus elaborates Thomas Aquinas's account of justice and its “potential parts” in the Summa Theologiae.
ISSN:1467-9795
Contient:Enthalten in: Journal of religious ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/jore.12141