About the author
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.
Synopsis
Shklar argues that the liberalism worth defending is not a doctrine of progress or self-realisation but a response to the memory of cruelty and terror. Its summum malum is fear — especially the fear inflicted by governments on the people they rule. From this single starting point she derives liberalism's core commitments: the rule of law, the dispersal of power, and an unwavering protection of individuals against the agents of the state.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workLiberalism, on this view, begins not from a vision of the highest good but from the conviction that cruelty and the fear it inspires are the worst things we do to one another.
By making the avoidance of cruelty foundational, Shklar offers a liberalism that does not depend on agreement about ultimate values — only on the shared knowledge of what tyranny and terror feel like. It is a minimalist but unusually durable defence of limited government, built on memory rather than hope.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with perfectionist or communitarian critics who argue that a purely defensive liberalism is too thin to sustain a community or inspire loyalty, and with Hobbes, whose fear-based politics Shklar both draws on and turns against absolutism.
Reading note
A dense but short essay; read it as a corrective to more optimistic, progress-driven liberalisms. Shklar's question — 'what is the worst thing the state can do, and how do we stop it?' — is a powerful lens to carry into every other text on freedom and the state.
Best paired with
Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.