Abstract

Civic friendship is a good way to illustrate how some central themes in John Rawls’ thought reveal a sense of philosophical unity. While his theory of justice takes different shapes along decades of philosophical writing, there is a constant interest in how members of a well-ordered society cooperate and interact to each other. This paper invites the reader to reexamine some places throughout A Theory of Justice and subsequent writings and aims at showing how important is to reach not only a just social organization but the right form of interaction between people who take part in the political forum and aim at reaching decisions for their everyday life. The right political relationship between people who don’t know each other but share the same core values cannot be described otherwise than through the ideal of political friendship. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that the far-reaching goal of a just society and its most valuable good is to achieve this kind of relationship for all of its members taken as a collective agent.