| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. By Ivy Schweitzer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xii, 276 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3069-7. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5778-6.)

"I take my cue from Aristotle": this is perhaps the most telling phrase in Ivy Schweitzer's Perfecting Friendship (p. 9). The words project her rather extraordinary ambition; they also describe her reach. Her book is less a history than a symposium that happily and promiscuously includes Plato, Jacques Derrida, and a score of wise heads from the many centuries between. And in the last paragraphs of both the introduction and the epilogue, Schweitzer looks to the future, which she hopes will see a "renascence of friendship" and, with it, a new millennial dispensation of egalitarian democracy (p. 26). Many readers will be uncomfortable with that brazen ahistoricism, but those who set Perfecting Friendship aside will miss a brilliant exercise in analysis that is no less rich for being wayward.

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