"The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity considers the changing attitudes to friendship since Antiquity and notes that almost no major modern philosopher has seriously expounded friendship as an ideal for society, as is strikingly revealed in the book's essays on key figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century and Nietzsche in the nineteenth. In the twentieth century, Martin Buber is one of the few important figures to press for some species of return.

But the success of that appeal is unclear. Jacques Derrida, on the one hand, insists 'there is no friend', meaning that the project is no longer feasible; Horst Hutter, on the other hand, pursues the ideal, while frankly proclaiming in this volume that friendship will not and cannot be what it was."--BOOK JACKET.