About the author
Latvian-born American political theorist (1928–1992), who fled both the Nazis and the Soviets in childhood and became the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's government department. A scholar of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the history of political thought, Shklar developed a distinctive liberalism centered on cruelty, injustice, and fear.
Synopsis
Shklar proposes a liberalism that begins not from natural rights or a theory of justice but from the summum malum — the worst thing — which she identifies as cruelty and the fear it breeds, especially the fear of arbitrary, abusive state power. The point of liberal institutions, on this view, is to limit power and secure the conditions of freedom for people who remember how readily governments terrorize. It is liberalism chastened by history.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workShklar argues that liberalism should 'put cruelty first' — taking as its foundation not a vision of the highest good but the avoidance of the worst, above all the fear inspired by the abuse of public power.
By founding liberalism on the avoidance of cruelty and fear rather than on any positive ideal, Shklar offers a version robust enough to survive disillusion: whatever else we disagree about, we know the terror of unchecked power. It is liberalism for a world that remembers atrocity.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with more ambitious liberalisms (Rawls's justice, Mill's progress) that aim higher than fear, and with critics who argue that a purely defensive liberalism, organized around avoiding cruelty, cannot inspire loyalty or guide positive politics.
Reading note
A short, powerful essay. Read it as the disabused, minimalist alternative to Rawlsian and perfectionist liberalism, and as a liberalism shaped by the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Best paired with
John Rawls, Political Liberalism; Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty.