Friendship Among Nations: History of a Concept

This is the study of the role that friendship plays in diplomacy and international politics. It analyses how friendship has been practiced in pre-modern political orders and modern systems of international relations. The book highlights how instrumental friendship was for describing and legitimising [...]
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This is the study of the role that friendship plays in diplomacy and international politics. It analyses how friendship has been practiced in pre-modern political orders and modern systems of international relations. The book highlights how instrumental friendship was for describing and legitimising a range of political and legal engagements with foreign countries and nations. It emphasises contractual and political aspects of diplomatic relationships based on the idea of utility. It is these functions of the concept that help the world stick together when collective institutions are either embryonic or no more.

The book draws on a contextualist and rhetorical approach developed by Quentin Skinner. It offers a conceptual history and genealogy that traces the incremental changes in diplomatic linguistic conventions used in the late medieval period and of that used during the period of a more dramatic conceptual change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roshchin argues that contractual friendships were among key diplomatic instruments to maintain the binding character of new political arrangements and, thus, to substitute for a lacking central authority.

Friendship among nations will be of interest to students in areas such as international relations, international political theory, English School, political theory, international history, history of concepts, history of empire and imperialism.