Friendships in the Hothouse Power, Politics and the Possibilities of Friendship

Abstract

A cliche of mainstream politics is that ‘one can’t have friends, only allies’, yet theorists of leadership have remarked on how regularly success is attendant upon productive ‘pairing’ relationships. This paper looks at a number of such relationships to ask, how are we to understand the borders of an ‘instrumental’ alliance versus a ‘friendship’? To what extent does the freight of instrumental intentions undercut contemporary ideas of friendship, or do such cases merely exemplify one end of a spectrum of contemporary possibilities (and should we thus modify our ideas of friendship within modern career structures)? While concentrating on the ways in which friendship has been understood in politics, this paper suggests that the proximity of politics and political careers to power and achievement might make this domain a fruitful amplification of the tensions (and the potentials of friendship) within success-oriented modern career structures.