The paper addresses the practice of singling out a ‘Friendship tradition’ in European political thought and suggests that this approach serves to obscure more than to illuminate the western debate about political friendship. The paper aims at showing that (i) in the works of philosophers normally associated with the friendship tradition one can find different (and sometime incompatible) understandings of political friendship; (ii) from philosophers outside the so-called friendship tradition one can gain insights into the variety of ways in which friendship manifests itself in politics.
