Friendship : the forgotten meaning of a vital nexus in political life

Abstract

This dissertation will demonstrate that men have aesthetic, ascetic, and therapeutic capacities with public ramifications. It will demonstrate that these capacities enable men with different values, goals, rules, and expectations to live together. When men share these capacities in interactions with each other, public friendship can be said to exist. This dissertation will argue for the thesis that public friendship is a means to the good life for men. This is not to suggest that friendship is the only means, but simply that it is a means. This is to suggest that regardless or how one may construe the good life for men, there is something intrinsic to the relationship practically known.as friendship which makes it both a means to the actualization for a specified good life of men and a component or that end...--Introduction.