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Freedom is a universal human value. And among all social relationships friendship holds the greatest potential for it to be realized. But it's not the kind of freedom that those who can only conceive of it as an unfettered independence from others hold as their central creed. It's not the kind of "live and let live" freedom that some think suffices to make for a "good society" simply because we refrain from encroaching on the freedoms of others. It's not the kind of "freedom of choice" we are asked to (literally) buy into, although the freedom to choose a life of our own is a significant achievement for those who are able to actively do so. Those versions of freedom either de-emphasize or ignore its very wellspring: our sociality, our need and capacity to exist and to create, in concert with others, the conditions for an autonomous existence. The web of interdependences we weave together delivers its basic conditions; it holds us and frees us in holding us. Without its hold we fall, while the exercise of power constricts it, strangling freedoms large and small. The kind of freedom friendship can deliver is the freedom to be yourself. Not despite others, but because of them. Not because in these others you may find a willing audience that listens to your concerns and opinions, but because together you can create intimacy that allows the continuance of what Arendt, while critical of a modern retreat to the intimate sphere, with reference to Rousseau, has called the "rebellion of the heart" (1958, p. 39).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137316400_8

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