The Liberalism of Fear
March 26, 2020 5:21 PM Subscribe
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)
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.
Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar? (Foreign Policy, 2018)
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]
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
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:31 PM on March 27, 2020
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