Areti Giannopoulou has written an ambitious book that proposes and defends a new economic order based on the fundamental importance of political friendship to human flourishing. Turning to Aristotle to establish the meaning and value of friendship, Giannopoulou argues that political friendship consists of a concern for the well-being of others combined with a disposition to contribute to that well-being, and a set of actions that actually benefits the other. Political friendship also requires that the friends spend time together. Noting that there is disagreement over how Aristotle understands political friendship, Giannopoulou's interpretation is that political friendship is a form of virtue friendship and not merely based on utility. She argues that, given Aristotle's distinction between trade agreements and civil association, political friendship entails not mere legal respect for the interests of the other, but “a genuine positive concern for each other's well-being” (27). That well-being can be judged by the character and motives of one's fellow citizens. Citizens are, in part, flourishing if they are disposed to do the right thing and the right thing involves showing concern for the character, motives and material well-being of one's fellow citizens. The good society does not take people as it finds them, but shapes and molds their character in such a way that they are genuinely interested in the well-being of their fellow citizens. In contrast, in a commercial society, we are largely, if not exclusively, motivated by self-interest, material gain, and profit.
For Giannopoulou, this vision of political friendship is the basis for a democratic system in which citizens decide how best to advance the common good. Indeed, they must come together and talk about such issues in order to flourish. In making political decisions, citizens would come to understand the needs of others and hence develop the character of others. In such a society of friends, the common interest and the self-interests of the citizens are joined together. Divisions that appear unbridgeable would melt away, insofar as “working together on civic affairs and being mutually aware and concerned for the other and for the city all bring people closer” (26).
For Giannopoulou, the idea of political friendship is meant to apply not merely to the political realm, but should also apply to economic production. By opening up the economy to the decisions of friends, citizens once again have the opportunity to act on behalf of the well-being of others. Just as in the political realm, workers do what they do for the sake of the other. Consequently, production is driven not by the self-interested pursuit of gain, but by the welfare of one's fellow citizens. For Giannopoulou, all market and exchange relationships, because they are driven by self-interest, are incompatible with friendship and human flourishing. Exchange cannot create a real community and money alienates individuals from one another. Any theoretical position (e.g., market socialism, solidarity economics, care ethics, and the views of such writers as Daniel Engster, Sibyl Schwarzenbach, Friedrich Hegel, and Axel Honneth) that entertains the possibility of bridling capitalism or sees the market and money as neutral economic instruments simply fails to understand the essential incompatibility of such relationships, institutions, and instruments with human friendship and flourishing. These theories must be either rejected outright or modified in a way that shuts down any role for capitalist institutions. In particular, postmodern antiessentialists who suggest that markets could be radically rethought fail to understand the true nature of exchange relationships.
The position that Giannopoulou eventually settles into is one that combines Marxism, degrowth, Otto Neurath's associational socialism, Martha Nussbaum's human capabilities approach, and an ethics of care. Neurath's associationalism rejects centralized planning and advances a form of socialism composed of multiple, overlapping communities of workers and producers. These associations are a way to replace “the internationalism of the ‘money order’” (110), admit multiple loyalties, and, perhaps, scale up the possibilities for political friendships. The perspective of degrowth provides an image of an economy that has left behind the desirability of growth, sustainable or green development, accumulation, affluence, possessive individualism, and the commodification of the world. It rejects complex uses of green technologies that would require the services of experts and bureaucrats. Instead, Giannopoulou favors a “smaller economy, an economy of a lower ecological footprint,” which would not “necessarily entail scarcity and misery” (137). Instead, she conceives of a world of simplicity, conviviality, and “joyful sobriety” (143). Such a system, she argues, could realize political friendship: “degrowth by nourishing the organic substratum of political friendship establishes [a] political friendship mentality and paves the way for a decisive economic shift” (145).
Many will contest the desirability and feasibility of Giannopoulou's project: advocates of free markets (obviously), defenders of the view that capitalism can be controlled, opponents of Aristotle's teleology, skeptics of a finis ultimus, as well as those who would defend the value of trade, the desirability of affluence, or the utility of having a medium of exchange. Others will question whether all individuals in her world would be “joyful” or even permitted to live their lives as they wish (97). In addition, some will argue that degrowth socialism, like many forms of socialism, too easily ignores or fails to understand the full power of the bonds of familial, tribal, ethnic, national, and religious commitments and how those bonds can distort political and economic decisions. In short, Giannopoulou stands in opposition to much of the world as it is.
Perhaps the fundamental question raised by Giannopoulou's book, however, is whether friendship can knit us together both politically and economically. Here, her position both resembles and departs from the view offered by G. A. Cohen in Why Not Socialism? (Princeton University Press, 2009). In his famous camping metaphor, Cohen argued that “it suffices that I treat everyone with whom I have any exchange or other form of contact as someone toward whom I have the reciprocating attitude that is characteristic of friendship” (ibid., 52). By focusing on the treatment of others, Cohen could be suggesting that if we adopted an ethos of generosity and acted “as if” everyone we encountered was a friend, then we could have a society bound together by communal reciprocity. In contrast, Giannopoulou's reliance on friendship requires that citizens are truly doing the right things for the right reason and that they are not merely acting “as if” others were virtuous. Citizens need to know how successful their political and economic institutions have been in cultivating the characters of the membership and not merely whether their fellow citizens have done the right thing. Without spending time together to get to know one another's character they could not have political friendship based on virtue. Bracketing the desirability of assigning such a task to political institutions (once again a central dispute within political theory), it is difficult to see how associations beyond face-to-face communities could have the necessary confidence in the characters of their membership. This challenge does not render Giannopoulou's ideal infeasible, but it does increase the distance between her world and our own.
