About Judith Shklar
Latvian-born American political theorist (1928–1992), a refugee from both Nazism and Soviet communism who became the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government department. Shklar's hard-won skepticism about utopian politics and her focus on cruelty, injustice, and the experience of the victim gave liberal theory one of its most morally serious modern voices.
Books by Judith Shklar
Liberalism of Fear
A bracing reframing of what liberalism is for. Rather than grounding liberalism in a vision of the highest good, Shklar grounds it in avoiding the worst evil — cruelty, and the fear it breeds. 'Putting cruelty first' yi…
Read about this book →The Liberalism of Fear
One of the most influential restatements of liberalism in recent decades, and the most minimalist. Shklar argues that liberalism need not rest on a grand theory of the good or of progress; it rests on the avoidance of t…
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