3 On this point note Spragens’s (1999: 186–7) remarks
on ‘civic friendship’:
‘It is not only close friends who may share the
common interests, common attachments, common
purposes, and common values that generate the
behavioral cohesion of amicable and cooperative
association. Quite large groups of people may share
these goods in common, and on the basis of pursuing
them together they may form the quasi-erotic bonds
of social concord Aristotle referred to as homonoia:
‘friendship between the citizens of a state, its
province being the interests and concerns of life’.