Liberalism and the Articulation of Cruelty: An Essay on Judith Shklar and D. M. Thomas

Abstract

The writings of the late Judith Shklar (1929-92) are at the center of a "considerable reinvigoration of the liberal political imagination" in the last twenty years. So writes the distinguished political theorist Bernard Yack in his introduction to a collection of essays written in honor of Shklar, published in 1996 under the title Liberalism without Illusions. The sixteen contributors to this collection include the most influential political theorists and historians of liberalism, such as Michael Walzer, Rogers M. Smith, Quentin Skinner, and Bruce Ackerman, to name a few. All the contributors acknowledge the influence of some aspect of Shklar's analysis of the development of liberalism. Shklar's work ranges over all the essential phases of liberal thought: the question of tolerance brought on by the religious wars of the seventeenth century; equal justice for citizens in the creation of modern republics and constitutional democracies; and the challenges of big government and military force in the minds of liberals who are faced with totalitarian regimes during the Cold War era. In the fields of political philosophy and intellectual history, she has written authoritative studies on Montesquieu, Rousseau, American citizenship, and the problem of legalism. Her distinctive treatment of liberalism's concern with the freedom and dignity of the individual culminates in an original definition of the core of liberal doctrine based in a fundamental protection from fear, cruelty, and pain, what she terms the "liberalism of fear." 1 Her work links the broadly political concerns of classic liberalism--constitutional rights, a focus on the individual as the center of political discourse, a concern with personal development and welfare--to a detailed analysis of liberalism's gradual transformation of traditional concepts of virtue and vice into new moral concerns with betrayal, misanthropy, hypocrisy, and cruelty. This new set of moral concerns, or "ordinary vices" as Shklar [End Page 465] calls them, follows liberalism's success in founding civil society upon the concepts of individual autonomy, tolerance, and freedom from persecution for one's religion or race. 2