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How, exactly, might friendship be relevant to politics? Friendship between political actors can be hypothesised to have specific effects; friendship between individuals in society can be hypothesised to have specific political outcomes; or friendship and politics can be understood to be conceptually connected. Mary Wollstonecraft makes friendship a central concept in her political theory of social justice and good government. This article analyses how politics and friendship are related in her texts, exploring her arguments that friendship in society is a condition of just government, but also suggesting that for Wollstonecraft friendship and citizenship are congruent with one another, and hence that the connection between politics and friendship is conceptual as well as causal.

Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben both consider the question of whether there can be politics without violence, offering contrasting responses. In the case of Agamben, the remnant (that which remains) is disruptive and destabilising of present institutions; in the case of Derrida the revenant, the spectre, promises a future that is open. This reading of the two theories suggests that Derrida's response to the question of politics and violence is more persuasive than Agamben's. But the abstraction of his argument, like the tensions and contradictions in Agamben's, means that we are not hereby furnished with the resources to think politically about violence.

John Locke (1632—1704) and Georges Sorel (1859—1922) are commonly understood as representing opposed positions vis-a-vis revolution — with Locke representing the liberal distinction between violence and politics versus Sorel's rejection of politics in its pacified liberal sense. This interpretation is shown by a close reading of their works to be misleading. Both draw a necessary link between revolution and violence, and both mediate this link through the concept of `war'. They both depoliticize revolution, as for both of them `war' is understood as extra-political. The revolutions of 1989 emphasize what actually is true of previous revolutions: they cannot coherently be thought of as extra-political.

In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument, deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from virtue. All of these arguments raise problems of validity. However, we find that they are reinforced by the representation of violence in terms of a specific aesthetic, either tragedy or sublimity, and by certain rhetorical textual strategies. We conclude that the persuasive force of these arguments for violence rests as much, if not more, on aesthetics and rhetoric, as it does on argument.

L'Europe entre intégration et globalisation. Différences sociales et cadres nationaux dans l'analyse d'entretiens collectifs organisés en France, en Belgique francophone et en Angleterre Le tournant qualitatif qu'ont connu les études européennes à la fin des années 1990 devait permettre d'approfondir la nature des relations que les citoyens de l'Europe entretiennent avec leur Union, et notamment de mieux prendre en compte les dimensions émotionnelle et identitaire. L'enquête comparative par entretiens collectifs dont nous rendons compte dans cet article met au contraire en évidence la forte indifférence à l'égard de l'intégration européenne qui caractérise les groupes populaires et ce, dans les trois pays de l'enquête. Cette indifférence s'explique notamment par le fait que les cadres nationaux de compréhension du processus d'intégration tendent à le noyer dans la globalisation. Le « dissensus contraignant » redouté par les spécialistes des études européennes ne concerne que les groupes les plus éduqués et surtout les plus politisés. Le miroir grossissant de cette approche très qualitative ne permet donc pas de mieux observer l'émergence d'une identité européenne, au contraire. Il conduit à souligner la diversité des processus d'appropriation ou de réaction à l'intégration et l'absence d'autonomie du niveau européen par rapport aux niveaux national et mondial dans les représentations des citoyens.