Friendship and Strangership: Rethinking Political Friendship through the Work of Adam Smith

This article considers the contribution that Adam Smith's work can make to current scholarship on the political significance of friendship. Smith's approach to friendship is important because he decouples it from intimacy and uses friendship to theorise solidarity and mutual identification between strangers. He theorises not only the friend, but also the stranger, and furthermore, their interrelationship. So closely are the friend and the stranger intertwined in his work that scholars have recently coined the term ‘strangership’ to describe his characterisation of amicable stranger relations. Smith does develop a rich concept of sympathy as the animating principle of stranger relations. I argue, however, that Smith's approach remains limited by his weak and depoliticised conception of strangership, which is premised on the similarity of strangers and obscures difference, exclusion and inequality. Addressing these limitations is important for developing understandings of political friendship and strangership appropriate to diverse societies of unequal strangers.