Linguistic Study of the Relation between Friendship and Leadership in Farabi’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

The present study attempts to investigate the relation between friendship and leadership or, in another word, types of authority and interpersonal communication, from linguistic point of view. Friendship is considered as an important concept thorough out the political philosophy. In ancient Athens, it was considered as a human virtue, like justice, equality, and fraternity; and philosophers was so interested in the term that in constructing their ideal polis, friendship would always played a basic role. On the other hand, leadership is to guide and manage the community on the predefined system, which was aimed to lead people to the philosophically selected telos. Using Skinner’s methodology, that is author-context hermeneutics, it could be said that in Farabi’s political philosophy there is a direct and organic relation between friendship and leadership. In another word, leader of the utopia (Madina-al-Fadhila) succeeds when there is friendly relation among all members of the society, from all different social classes. Thus, friendship is mutual: the leader to the subjects and the subjects to the leader.

Keywords

• farabi
• friendship
• hermeneutics
• leadership
• political philosophy