This book develops an interpretive sociology of friendship as a private, personal and public relationship. Drawing on social theory, philosophy, history, politics and literary examples, Harry Blatterer examines the meaning of friendship, and why friendship matters for the social sciences. 

Chapters move from the beginnings of friendship in likeability, mutual liking and trust to the ambiguities of friendship endings. Distinguishing between friendship and friendly relations, they also examine the relationship between dyadic friendships and groups of friends, political friendships, despotic and democratic suspicions of friendship’s partiality and the fate of friendship under capitalism and digital sociality. 

Friendship and Sociality contributes to sociological theory, the sociology of intimate life and critical studies of privacy, democracy, capitalism and digitality. It argues that friendship, for all its everyday ordinariness, is a useful lens through which to study the conditions for autonomy and flourishing intimate relationships. Friendship, it turns out, retains as subtle subversiveness as a social accomplishment cultivated for its own sake.

Harry Blatterer is Associate Professor in Sociology in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Australia. His research examines the changing meanings of friendship, intimacy, personal relationships, privacy, gender and the life course. His books include Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty (2007), Everyday Friendships (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and the co-edited Modern Privacy (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).