The Liberalism of Fear

March 26, 2020 5:21 PM

Judith Shklar: The theorist of belonging An astute commentator recently suggested that Isaiah Berlin would be Riga’s greatest political thinker ‒ if not for Judith N Shklar. We are seeing the beginning of a rediscovery of Shklar and her contribution to 20th-century intellectual life, but she remains something of an insider’s reference. Who was she and what did she have to say that is so important? How did this Jewish émigrée girl from Latvia come to be regarded by many legal and political theorists as one of the 20th century’s most important political thinkers?

The Liberalism of Fear (pdf, 1989)

liberalism's deepest grounding is in place from the first, in the conviction of the earliest defenders of toleration, born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute vice, an offense against God or humanity. It is out of that tradition that the political liberalism of fear arose and continues amid the terror of our time to have relevance.

posted by dmh (3 comments total)

Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar? (Foreign Policy, 2018)

“The Liberalism of Fear” is fundamentally an essay about the boundaries of liberalism. Over the course of the mid- to late 20th century, liberalism became encumbered by considerable cultural baggage in Western politics. It had come to be associated with the progressive technocracy of a self-appointed best and brightest and the judicial enforcement of substantive policy outcomes; it was a school of thought that both claimed to represent the people and seemed to avoid the messy practice of democratic politics. In part for that reason, some thinkers on both the right and the left came to use it as an epithet, shorthand for a halfhearted and weak-kneed lack of conviction. Think of Robert Frost’s joke that a liberal is someone who won’t take his or her own side in an argument or — in the immediate past as Shklar was writing her essay — George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign disdaining liberalism as culturally elitist and effete.

In her essay, Shklar tries to recenter liberalism by insisting it is essentially a political, not a philosophical or legal, doctrine. Liberalism is concerned with freedom, but the substance of freedom is to be determined by the individuals seeking it for themselves, not the philosopher divining its nature from her office. By placing limits on liberalism, Shklar also wanted to give it more force, in the service of protecting people from undue power — state power, above all. She thought the philosophical and juridical liberalism of rights and justice associated with Immanuel Kant and Rawls, as well as the aspirational liberalism of self-development found in John Stuart Mill’s work, ultimately went astray because it distracted from the most urgent political task associated with freedom: restraining state violence.

Shklar avoided that error by building on a different foundation than other liberal theorists. Whereas Rawls implied that liberalism earned its moral legitimacy by pursuing justice, Shklar treated people’s experience of injustice as worthy of moral consideration on its own. For Shklar, the capacity to sense injustice was independent of, and perhaps even more morally significant than, the sense of justice Rawls typically appealed to.

posted by dmh at 4:21 AM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

I need to read more Shklar apparently. I've been thinking a lot recently about the asymmetry between pain and pleasure: whether a given human will experience a given stimulus as painful is much more predictable than whether they would experience it as pleasurable. I had up till now only considered that from the angle that it was easiest for people to be abusive rather than compassionate. I had not thought about the possibility that that could also mean it's easier to rally people against a shared injury than for a shared benefit, which probably says a fair bit about my current level of optimism in the course of history.
posted by PMdixon at 5:41 AM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Thank you very much. I had never heard of Shklar before and now I am reading, reading.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:31 PM on March 27, 2020