Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Encountering Friendship with Francesco Alberoni / Harry Blatterer and Sveva Magaraggia -- The Meanings of Friendship -- Friendship as Encounter -- The Times of Love and Friendship -- Friendship as Ethical Form of Love -- Preferences, Impartiality and Friendship -- Friendship and Power -- Three Social States -- Friendship and Love’s Paradise Lost -- Friendship and Group Solidarity -- Childhood, Adulthood and Friendly Company -- Self, Friends and Benefactors -- Eroticism and Friendship -- Power and Ambivalence, Envy and Desire -- Morality and the Logics of Market and Organization -- Friendship and Creative Action -- Spiritual Friendship -- Familiar Friendship -- Ideal and Reality: Brothers, Friends, Caritas -- Bibliography.

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In Friendship , Francesco Alberoni offers a wide-ranging analysis of intimacy. Traversing disciplines, he untangles the meanings of friendship from family and friendly relations, from love and passion and the everyday experiences of coupledom. Friendship is the just relationship. Rather than based on exchange, it is an encounter between two intimates that repudiates the logics of the market, the depersonalizing norms of modern bureaucracy and the objectives of collectivities whether they be couples or social movements. Intimate and just, friendship partakes of the world while resisting its dehumanizing drift. Marrying philosophical poetics with social science sensibility, Alberoni shows that the extent to which we live up to the ideals of friendship marks our capacities to realize the republican virtues in concrete everyday life.

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