Curry on Schwarzenbach, 'On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State' (book review)

In  On Civic Friendship , Sybil A. Schwarzenbach engages the reader in an extended exploration of the question, "what holds a good and just society together?" (p. 1). The question seems a particularly urgent one if the reader accepts the author's stark premise that the United States is a democracy in steep decline, a society in which "loyalty and goodness--even justice itself--are frequently laughed at in the face of the almighty dollar, commercial success, or the fame afforded by the wielding of brute power" (p. xi). Schwarzenbach's remedy for this gloomy state of affairs is to resuscitate Aristotle's concept of  philia ,   or friendship among citizens. A shared commitment to  philia  is essential to the very survival of democracy. It entails, according to the author, "the awareness of reciprocity, the need for self-limitation in the face of the other, and even the concept of duty itself" (p. xi.) But Aristotle and his successors neglected to think through how the actual work of inculcating and sustaining civic friendships would be carried out--and by whom. This "forgotten category of ethical reproduction," she argues, has in fact fallen to women, who have performed their roles as caregivers largely outside of the public arena and thus beyond the concern of Western philosophical and political discourse. But it is in the traditional women's work of  caring  that Schwarzenbach sees nothing less than the radical potential to reconceptualize the modern state, saving democracy by restoring civic friendship to its essential place as a fundamental, shared political value. If John Locke claimed that a man owns resources by mixing them with his labor, Schwarzenbach counters with the "commonsense precept that things belong to those who  care  for them" (p. 18).