This chapter takes two issues – the affective energies of populist strategy, and the new problems of transacting politics in the first era of mass representative democracy, mass literacy, and mass media – as its starting point. One response attaches to the word ‘friend’, which circulates as a refrain through a vast archive of works by and about radical politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is axiomatic to say that ‘the people’, despite its apparently universalist claims, is wielded as a language of inclusion and exclusion. But what is at stake when addressing a populace of ‘friends’ and using ‘friendship’ as a tool for mass rhetorical appeal? This chapter traces friendship as a populist form in radical political culture, where political identity emerges from available opportunities to assemble through a staging of sociable encounters; taking the Arbeter Fraint anarchist group as the case study allows this chapter to examine the embodied material contexts within which radical ideas emerged and through which they were put into circulation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.