Heinz Bude
Die Aktualität der Freundschaft
[The topicality of friendship]
This contribution aims to explain why friendship is a highly relevant topic for contemporary society. One answer is the emergence of an older generation that no longer wants to rely on the family and mistrusts the welfare state. Friendship is a way of living in old age that repre-sents a third path situated between the fate of familial circumstances and free choice. Friend-ship remains, however, a form of socialization that is characteristic of youth and linked to the "wound of incompleteness". It is here that the impossibility of friendship as an intermediate social form is revealed. Nonetheless, this unique feature accounts for the potential of a "poli-tics of friendship" – a politics that takes up the notion of unconditional reciprocity and estab-lishes it as the foundation of a mode of political thought that sets singularity and universality in relation to one another.

Janosch Schobin
Sechs Farben und drei Rotationsachsen. Versuch über Verpflichtungen in Freundschaf-ten
[Six colors and three rotation axes: obligations in friendship]
Our friends are free; free to come and free to go. What is it, then, that forces them to stay, especially when we really need them? Good friends owe us succor in bad times: a friend in need is a friend indeed. But what is it exactly that we invoke, when we call on friends for sup-port? No contract binds friends and no authority monitors their actions. The question that arises is how commitments within friendships take shape and how friendship becomes bind-ing. This contribution attempts to retrace the processes in which demands made on friendship become realities.

Michaela Gummerum and Monika Keller
Freundschaftskonzepte und Handlungsvorstellungen in Freundschaft. Der Einfluss von Entwicklung und Kultur
[Concepts of friendship and notions of behavior: the influence of development and cul-ture]
Friendship is a phenomenon found in all cultures, and, moreover, one that accompanies peo-ple throughout their lives. This essay explores the notions of children and youths about friend-ship by characterizing their responses to hypothetical dilemmas. Reactions from various groups of respondents are compared in order to elucidate how concepts of friendship change in the course of psychological development and what cultural factors influence the ideas of children and youths about friendship and appropriate behavioral patterns. According to the work presented here, friendship is best understood as the result of a complex interaction be-tween psychological development and culture.

Sasha Roseneil
Neue Freundschaftspraktiken. Fürsorge und Sorge um sich im Zeitalter der Individuali-sierung
[New friendship practices: caring for oneself and others in the age of individualization]
This paper offers some reflections on a UK-based research project which sought to investigate the practices and experiences of care and intimacy of people living at the cutting edge of indi-vidualization. Working from a psychoanalytically-informed ontology and with a psychosocial methodology, the research consisted of a qualitative longitudinal study of those who might be considered the "most individualized" – people living outside co-habiting, conjugal couple relationships. Borrowing certain notions from Queer Theory, which capture key findings of the project, the paper aims to return to sociology new perspectives on friendship and care un-der conditions of individualization.

Ulrich Bielefeld
Nation und Weltgesellschaft
[Nation and world society]
At least for the time being, nation-states remain the accepted form of political organization in the world society. This world society became institutionalized in the mid-twentieth century as a world of post-sovereign nations, but so far it has failed to develop new forms of self-conceptualization that carry forward the old national forms. Meanwhile, however, a new im-age of the post-sovereign form of the nation is beginning to emerge. Nation still refers to the state and therefore to power, but in its new guise, it recognizes that the nation-state does not represent the sole possible form that power can assume. It has become apparent that laying claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force does not necessarily mean that that monopoly can actually be enforced. The state as a nation continues to refer to solidarity, but it no longer links brotherhood to the purported reality of an actual community. Current processes in which collectives are taking shape must be interpreted and analyzed on the basis of these observations.

Published 2008-07-07