Mar 27, 2020 09:12 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/discovering-judit...sm-of-fear
EXCERPT: . . . In contrast to such self-congratulatory rhetoric, Shklar’s criticism aimed primarily at checking the easy optimism of Cold War liberalism, which, despite challenges to its authority, continues to maintain the inflated image of Western democracies. In Shklar’s view, liberalism is neither a state nor a final achievement. She understood, better than most, the fragility of liberal societies, and she wanted to preserve the liberties they made possible. Judith Shklar saw the increasing availability of private consumer choice and the ever-expanding catalogue of rights often propounded in the name of liberalism as threats to the best achievements of Western democracies. In contrast to orthodox liberal arguments that aim at a summum bonum or common good, Shklar advocated a liberalism of fear, which holds in its sights the summum malum ‒ cruelty. Avoiding cruelty, and the suffering it causes, is the chief aim. Other vices such as hypocrisy, snobbery, arrogance, betrayal and misanthropy should be ranked in relation to this first vice.
Both communitarians and some conservative-leaning thinkers have in the 20th century promoted a return to classical republican ideals, based on prescriptive lists of virtues, as a way to maintain or recover good societies. Think of philosophers ranging from Alasdair MacIntyre to Michael Sandel, or of modern defenders of conservative ideas such as Leo Strauss and Roger Scruton. Shklar thought that these efforts were bound to fail. Modern individualism and pluralism had made a consensus on virtues impossible, and there was no turning back. This verdict didn’t preclude her from engaging with some classic republican themes in order to spell out what was wrong with the modern vices she’d identified, but she concluded that there was no agreement about the meaning of these vices. The great exception, she maintained, was cruelty.
Shklar’s book Ordinary Vices (1984) had been largely inspired by Michel de Montaigne and Montesquieu. These two statesmen and political thinkers loomed large for her because they paid due attention to what needs to be avoided at all costs: cruelty, unnecessary suffering, brutal punishment and fear. Both French thinkers, having been experienced political animals, favoured a rather minimalist conception of politics, free from utopian ideals. Their aim and major purpose was to achieve a decent society marked by the absence of fear, not to work toward a political paradise.
Such insight, Shklar argued, provided a form of reasoning and advocated a kind of politics that eventually gave birth to a modern skeptical political tradition. She picked up this fine thread, woven through the history of modern political life, drew it out and articulated it with great clarity and force. The liberalism of fear never became a state, a government or a lasting condition one could simply rely upon. Rather, it was a delicate achievement, always in danger of disappearing or being obliterated by the powers that be. Shklar grasped that the cataclysms of the 20th century made necessary and urgent the promotion of a more skeptical liberalism, one that prioritised avoiding cruelty. As Shklar points out, in light of the extreme experiences of the previous century (and, arguably, those of this one too), ‘liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind’.
Shklar’s argument has particular bite in a disenchanted world of intractable value conflicts. Her focus on the summum malum and how to avoid it is negatively strong. It is capable of underwriting a universalism of a very particular sort. In other words, Shklar has a theory of the ‘bad’. She wagers that we might be able to know collectively what we want to avoid, without having to agree on a comprehensive life plan or account of the good. This negative universalism works in the service of sustaining political pluralism.
With the liberalism of fear, Shklar had found her own voice. She was portrayed by a number of admirers as an ‘American Montaigne’. This was high praise indeed; but maybe more to the point (and more modest) was Patrick Riley, a former student of Shklar’s, who commended Ordinary Vices for expressing ‘the summa of Shklarism’. She had provided a modern conceptual armoury based on ‘a fusion of psychological confidence and moral skepticism’.
Quite a few critics complained that Shklar’s barebones liberalism was mainly a minimalism or even reductionism. Nothing could be further from the truth, as her consecutive writings and public statements show.
[...] Such an alternative vision could still have made Shklar a hero of the New Left and maybe of the traditional liberal Centre in the early 1970s or even later, but her skepticism made her resistant to becoming a public mouthpiece for a movement or to being turned into a substitute parent. She didn’t shy away from criticising some aspects of the student politics of the late-1960s and early ’70s. She thought them frequently mistaken in their politics of suspicion which often portrayed the US as if it were already a fascist state, and she often found their histrionic happenings and protests over-the-top. She’d escaped Latvia before Nazism and Stalinism arrived, so to her it was obvious that there was a difference: the US, despite its many faults and its sometimes worrying foreign policies (including war efforts such as Vietnam) was clearly not a totalitarian society... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . In contrast to such self-congratulatory rhetoric, Shklar’s criticism aimed primarily at checking the easy optimism of Cold War liberalism, which, despite challenges to its authority, continues to maintain the inflated image of Western democracies. In Shklar’s view, liberalism is neither a state nor a final achievement. She understood, better than most, the fragility of liberal societies, and she wanted to preserve the liberties they made possible. Judith Shklar saw the increasing availability of private consumer choice and the ever-expanding catalogue of rights often propounded in the name of liberalism as threats to the best achievements of Western democracies. In contrast to orthodox liberal arguments that aim at a summum bonum or common good, Shklar advocated a liberalism of fear, which holds in its sights the summum malum ‒ cruelty. Avoiding cruelty, and the suffering it causes, is the chief aim. Other vices such as hypocrisy, snobbery, arrogance, betrayal and misanthropy should be ranked in relation to this first vice.
Both communitarians and some conservative-leaning thinkers have in the 20th century promoted a return to classical republican ideals, based on prescriptive lists of virtues, as a way to maintain or recover good societies. Think of philosophers ranging from Alasdair MacIntyre to Michael Sandel, or of modern defenders of conservative ideas such as Leo Strauss and Roger Scruton. Shklar thought that these efforts were bound to fail. Modern individualism and pluralism had made a consensus on virtues impossible, and there was no turning back. This verdict didn’t preclude her from engaging with some classic republican themes in order to spell out what was wrong with the modern vices she’d identified, but she concluded that there was no agreement about the meaning of these vices. The great exception, she maintained, was cruelty.
Shklar’s book Ordinary Vices (1984) had been largely inspired by Michel de Montaigne and Montesquieu. These two statesmen and political thinkers loomed large for her because they paid due attention to what needs to be avoided at all costs: cruelty, unnecessary suffering, brutal punishment and fear. Both French thinkers, having been experienced political animals, favoured a rather minimalist conception of politics, free from utopian ideals. Their aim and major purpose was to achieve a decent society marked by the absence of fear, not to work toward a political paradise.
Such insight, Shklar argued, provided a form of reasoning and advocated a kind of politics that eventually gave birth to a modern skeptical political tradition. She picked up this fine thread, woven through the history of modern political life, drew it out and articulated it with great clarity and force. The liberalism of fear never became a state, a government or a lasting condition one could simply rely upon. Rather, it was a delicate achievement, always in danger of disappearing or being obliterated by the powers that be. Shklar grasped that the cataclysms of the 20th century made necessary and urgent the promotion of a more skeptical liberalism, one that prioritised avoiding cruelty. As Shklar points out, in light of the extreme experiences of the previous century (and, arguably, those of this one too), ‘liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind’.
Shklar’s argument has particular bite in a disenchanted world of intractable value conflicts. Her focus on the summum malum and how to avoid it is negatively strong. It is capable of underwriting a universalism of a very particular sort. In other words, Shklar has a theory of the ‘bad’. She wagers that we might be able to know collectively what we want to avoid, without having to agree on a comprehensive life plan or account of the good. This negative universalism works in the service of sustaining political pluralism.
With the liberalism of fear, Shklar had found her own voice. She was portrayed by a number of admirers as an ‘American Montaigne’. This was high praise indeed; but maybe more to the point (and more modest) was Patrick Riley, a former student of Shklar’s, who commended Ordinary Vices for expressing ‘the summa of Shklarism’. She had provided a modern conceptual armoury based on ‘a fusion of psychological confidence and moral skepticism’.
Quite a few critics complained that Shklar’s barebones liberalism was mainly a minimalism or even reductionism. Nothing could be further from the truth, as her consecutive writings and public statements show.
[...] Such an alternative vision could still have made Shklar a hero of the New Left and maybe of the traditional liberal Centre in the early 1970s or even later, but her skepticism made her resistant to becoming a public mouthpiece for a movement or to being turned into a substitute parent. She didn’t shy away from criticising some aspects of the student politics of the late-1960s and early ’70s. She thought them frequently mistaken in their politics of suspicion which often portrayed the US as if it were already a fascist state, and she often found their histrionic happenings and protests over-the-top. She’d escaped Latvia before Nazism and Stalinism arrived, so to her it was obvious that there was a difference: the US, despite its many faults and its sometimes worrying foreign policies (including war efforts such as Vietnam) was clearly not a totalitarian society... (MORE - details)