Liberal theories of civil disobedience have long come under attack.1 The list of charges is considerable. What is often called the “orthodox” liberal view has been reproached to limit the aims of civil disobedience to claims of equal rights, while actors have used civil disobedience to reclaim democratic participation (Markovits, 2005). Liberal accounts of civil disobedience are also said to have “sanitized” the practice of civil disobedience by subjecting it to overly strict conditions, too often at odds with the intensifying dynamics of its concrete enactments (Celikates, 2016a, p. 983). Moreover, liberal theories seem unable to take into view those more recent examples of civil disobedience in which causes, aims, and actors transcend the frame of the nation state (Celikates, 2019). Deficits such as these have amplified calls for moving “beyond the liberal paradigm” (Celikates, 2016b). In this article, I reconstruct Judith N. Shklar's late work on obligation, resistance, and disobedience to argue that there are good reasons for not moving beyond the liberal paradigm too quickly. My aim is threefold: First, I want to offer a cogent interpretation of Shklar's recently published lectures On Political Obligation (Shklar, 2019) and an essay on the obligations of exiles (Shklar, 1993/1998a), complementing these posthumous and unfinished writings with further archival sources. Second, in doing so I present Shklar as an unorthodox liberal theorist of civil disobedience, whose reflections anticipate several more recent developments in the field and who can hence respond to some, albeit not all the deficits that liberal approaches have been traditionally diagnosed of. Shklar presents civil disobedience as a medium of active citizenship, which for her is however not a bond of collective political action, but a bond of conscience. Shklar's liberal view does not require civil disobedients to appeal to a shared sense of justice, and it also does not confine the practice of civil disobedience to the frame of the nation state. My third aim is to address a question raised by current Shklar scholarship. Against conservative readings of her “liberalism of fear,” recent interpreters have convincingly emphasized the role of democracy and citizenship in Shklar's mature writings (Gatta, 2018; Müller, 2019, p. 148; Scheuerman, 2019a, p. 62; Misra, 2020, p. 4). While some interpreters lend a radical tinge to Shklar's democratic liberalism, reading her as an ally of postfoundational political thought (Gatta, 2018, p. 3; also see Stullerova, 2014), others remain hesitant to do so (especially Bajohr, 2019, pp. 159–163). Locating Shklar in the debate on civil disobedience can shed new light on this quarrel. As I intend to show, Shklar can respond to some of the challenges raised by radical democrats. But we should be careful not to overemphasize the radical or even “activist” nature of her thought. Rather than blurring the limits of Shklar's democratic liberalism, we should try to delineate its features as a liberal approach. A caveat before proceeding any further: Readers might be surprised that there is much talk of political obligation in an article on civil disobedience—but just as much as the reader of Shklar's On Political Obligation will be astonished to find that the bulk of the book is about resistance and disobedience. From a Shklarian perspective, separating the questions of rule following and rule breaking is artificial. And there are good reasons to follow Shklar's lead in this point, as most theories of civil disobedience make at least implicit claims about political obligation. This will become clear in section two, in which I briefly recapitulate three typical approaches to rule breaking and rule following in democracies. In a next step, I turn to Shklar's historical account of resistance, disobedience, and obligation and suggest that the examination of loyalty conflicts provides the sociological and psychological groundwork for her theoretical arguments. The fourth and longest section zooms in on Shklar's reading of Thomas Hill Green, and more importantly, her reading of Henry David Thoreau. Through the representative example of Thoreau, Shklar discovers practices of disobedience as a source of horizontal obligations to one's fellow citizens and fellow human beings. This horizontal obligation manifests itself in a liberal notion of positive freedom that revalues the argument from conscience as an expression of a sense of injustice. I discuss how this view answers to the criticisms that liberal accounts of civil disobedience have received. Section five turns to Shklar's work on the political obligation of exiles. Exiles are Shklar's representative example to examine the vertical obligations of citizens to obey the law in a “society of strangers” (Shklar, n.d.-c, p. 4). This complements the arguments reconstructed in section four, showing how Shklar de-sanitizes the liberal view of civil disobedience without giving up the idea of “respect for the law.” When is rule breaking justified in democratic regimes? I recall three typical answers to this question, which will serve as reference points for my discussion of Shklar in the rest of the paper.2 According to the first position, democracies permit a limited space for legitimate rule breaking in the face of unequally distributed fundamental rights. As the majority principle threatens to continuously disadvantage certain minorities, rule breaking appears justified after all legal paths have been exhausted. But even then, rule breaking must follow certain rules: civil disobedience should be “public,” “conscientious,” and nonviolent; it should appeal to the sense of justice of the majority and prove “fidelity to the law”, as Rawls (1971/1973, p. 364–367) most influentially held. It is also on his example that we discover that the principles which justify (the exceptional) rule breaking and (the more normal) rule following are in fact one and the same: in the case of Rawls, it is the principle of natural duty to sustain and further just institutions. If legitimate and successful, civil disobedience restores the citizen's obligations to obey the law. This, in short, has typically been the “orthodox” liberal view.3 The second position objects that civil disobedience is not only practiced out of the liberal concern for equal rights but also out of the democratic concern for “the participation of all in ruling and being ruled” (Cohen & Arato, 1994, p. 590). Civil disobedience can reclaim spaces for democratic practice and active citizenship against the paralysis and usurpation of democratic procedures. Rule breaking thus proves a means to reinvigorate the only source of political obligation which is truly democratic: consent, or, as Markovits (2005, p. 1927) puts it, an “individual sense of authorship of the collective decision.” For these critics of the liberal view, political obligation, that is, the principles that lead citizens to obey the law and support political institutions, matters as much as it does within liberal accounts of civil disobedience. Consequently, it is often submitted to similarly demanding conditions. Arendt's (1969/1972) and Habermas’ (1985) accounts of civil disobedience are a case in point (Scheuerman, 2018, pp. 71–79). This position has been called republican, radical democratic or simply democratic. I will use the latter denomination, reserving “radical democratic” for the next type of critique. In many cases, civil disobedience seems at odds with and indeed directed against the majority's moral sentiments; it is often failures of this sense of justice that make civil disobedience necessary in the first place. In fact, it is difficult to see why one should appeal to it at all when the majority's sense of justice is taken to be systematically distorted or biased and has shown itself to be largely immune to critical challenges. (Celikates, 2016b, p. 38) This criticism is not only principled but also far reaching in its implications. In its wake, civil disobedience ceases to secure an almost just status quo in favor of stronger, transformative aims. The fidelity-to-the-law proviso is said to be implausible on the same grounds (Celikates, 2016a, p. 985), and even the condition of nonviolence is subjected to critical scrutiny (Celikates, 2016b, pp. 41–42). Hence, it is not surprising that civil disobedience at times becomes synonymous with resistance (Balibar, 2014, p. 280; Delmas, 2018, p. 17). It is also particularly from within this paradigm that the transnational dimension of recent civil disobedience has been put on the agenda, untying the qualification of disobedience as “civil” from “formal notions of citizenship” (Celikates, 2019, p. 69). Against the upsurge of this radical vision for civil disobedience, William E. Scheuerman (2015) has warned of the “anti-legal turn” it implies. Radical democrats in his view misread “respect for the law” as respect to the law as it is. “In light of the necessity of overhauling the orthodox liberal theory of civil disobedience,” Scheuerman (2015, p. 447) asks, “how might its valuable ‘legalistic’ intuitions be successfully salvaged and updated?” Judith N. Shklar's reflections on resistance, disobedience, and obligation, I argue, can pave the path to one possible answer. Rule following in politics had been a concern for Judith N. Shklar as early as 1964. Continuing her earlier critique of an ever more conservative liberalism (Shklar, 1957/1969), her book Legalism criticized the idea that the rules “are simply there”—whether derived from higher principles, such as natural rights, or resulting from a legal positivist approach. Shklar stressed that the task of political science does not consist primarily in a theoretical justification of rule following, but in understanding its historical, ideological, and sociological conditions (Shklar, 1964, p. 3). She resumed these reflections in her recently published lectures On Political Obligation (2019) and her posthumously published essay Obligation, Loyalty, Exile (1993/1998a) (also see Ashenden, 2019). Shklar's Harvard lectures offer rich and often innovative interpretations of key texts in the history of political obligation, resistance, and disobedience. Her tableau reaches from Crito and Antigone to medieval theories of resistance, the formation of the liberal consent theory of political obligation in early-modern contract theory, nineteenth-century abolitionism, civil disobedience in the twentieth-century civil rights movement, and the obligations of exiles to the laws of their countries of residence (Hess, 2019). However, Shklar largely abstains from drawing systematic conclusions. I suggest that the theme of loyalty conflicts forms the most important red thread through Shklar's reflections (also see Klosko, 2020, p. 362; Trimcev, 2020). While rule following most of the time comes down to not much more than habitual obedience, it is conflicting loyalties that have led and still lead us to reflect upon our obligation to obey the law—and upon its limits. In what follows, I will carve out this “grammar” behind Shklar's history of ideas. While Shklar's lectures follow an overall chronological narrative, the first lecture is a prolepsis, taking her audience forward into the twentieth century. Shklar portrays the vitae parallelae of Ernst von Weizsäcker and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, asking: “Why did one obey and the other resist Hitler?” (Shklar, 2019, p. 15). Her comparison is motivated by the observation that Bonhoeffer and Weizsäcker had similar backgrounds: both came from families of “highranking academics and officials,” both were Protestants, both considered themselves patriots, and “both thought that Hitler and the Nazis were a disaster for Germany” (Shklar, 2019, p. 15). Nevertheless, only Bonhoeffer decided to resist. What distinguishes Weizsäcker and Bonhoeffer for Shklar is the interplay between their different loyalties. Shklar defines loyalty as a “deeply affective and not primarily rational […] attachment to a certain group” (Shklar, 1993/1998a, p. 41; see also Shklar, 2019, p. 19). In the case of Weizsäcker, his loyalties to the nation, his social class, and the government institutions he worked for proved mutually stabilizing and directly translated into obligations (Shklar, 2019, p. 19). His overlapping loyalties rendered the possibility of resistance a blind spot. In comparison, Shklar claims Bonhoeffer was exposed to a loyalty conflict: his patriotism was challenged by his membership in the Confessional church, which refused to comply with the Nazi's Gleichschaltung of the Protestant church. Unlike other members of the Confessional church, Bonhoeffer understood his opposition also as a form of political resistance. In Shklar's view, this was a consequence of a loyalty conflict that led Bonhoeffer to adopt an ethical stance that prioritized “civil morality” over “personal purity” (Shklar, 2019, p. 23)—not being a bad citizen became more important than not being a bad man. Here, Shklar's interpretation of Bonhoeffer is markedly shaped by her reflections in Faces of Injustice. Those who aim above all at not being “bad men” will seek to perform only “good deeds”; but to keep one's personal conscience clean, passivity may be the more probable response to dilemmas. In contrast, those who try most of all to not be “bad citizens” will be careful not to be “passively unjust,” that is, to simply look away when those around us are treated unjustly (Shklar, 1990, p. 41). In Bonhoeffer's case, that even involved “lying and plotting several assassinations” (Shklar, 2019, p. 23). Making distinctions between “us” and “them” difficult, conflicting loyalties heighten an individual's sensitivity to injustices and leave one with nothing but one's civic conscience. This, Shklar suggests, is how Bonhoeffer accounted for his resistance. This opening comparison shapes the narrative that Shklar subsequently offers—a narrative of the alternating disappearance and reappearance of ideas of resistance and obligation. In Christian political thought, Shklar examines a doctrine she calls “suffering the secular sword.” In this doctrine of Augustinian origin, important for Martin Luther as well as for North American Puritans, loyalty to one's faith is rendered compatible with a ruler's demand for obedience because political rule is interpreted as a divine ordeal that believers need to endure: “Christians were called to obey […] any ruler, not because princes have anything valuable to contribute to human life, but because they are a punishment visited upon humanity, which deserves whatever evils occur because of original sin” (Shklar, 2019, p. 61). This argument synchronizes potentially conflictive loyalties and renders plausible unconditional obedience. Arguments for either resistance or obligation become improbable, and rule following appears as a matter of habitual obedience. In a later lecture, Shklar ascribes a similar effectiveness to the medieval doctrine of “the two bodies of the king,” which makes resistance difficult even when confronted with the rule of a tyrant (Shklar, 2019, pp. 82–93). But in Shklar's narrative, there is also a crucial secular context for the closing down of the argumentative space for ideas of resistance and obligation: the age of ideologies in the nineteenth century. While its political polarization offers numerous occasions for loyalty conflicts, its vision of history “made the question of obligation seem either irrelevant or insignificant” (Shklar, 2019, p. 125): where the state's rationale is progress, “[t]o ask ‘Why should I obey?’ […] means that you do not understand the demands of history” (Shklar, 2019, p. 126). Their powerful future horizon puts the loyalties created by ideologies hors-concours; hence, questions of political obligation become unintelligible. Arguments for resistance appear where new spaces for loyalty conflicts reopen, for instance where the church acquires political power. Whom should the people follow in case of political tensions—the church or the ruler? In the example of the archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett, Shklar shows how this conflict leads into the formulation of conditions under which just rulers are to be distinguished from tyrants (Shklar, 2019, pp. 70–81). This allows identification, still from a Christian perspective, of the limits on the duty to obey. In a key lecture titled “Tyranny,” Shklar (2019, p. 95) traces a “radicalization” of arguments about disobedience through a move from religious to solely political patterns of justification. The upshot of Shklar's long historical perspective is that ideas of political obligation, disobedience, and resistance are intrinsically connected. We can only expect arguments about political obligation where resistance or disobedience are in the realm of the thinkable and sayable. Therefore, any theoretical account of one of the concepts should be equally able to theorize the other two concepts. And, for Shklar, the interaction between heterogenous loyalties is the necessary link. Shklar's lectures on obligation attribute a key role to nineteenth-century Anglo-American political thought, where she interests herself in how a “deeply inward Protestantism” (Shklar, 2019, p. 137) develops the notion of a secularized and politicized conscience. It is here that her then audience and now readership enters “our own intellectual world” (Shklar, 2019, p. 129). Even though the notions of resistance and obligation remain intrinsically linked, this world's conceptual map gets more complicated. Where potentially tyrannical single rulers are replaced with more democratic regimes, the question of political obligation becomes ambiguous: it points to both the vertical relation between the individual and the political institutions and the horizontal relation between citizens (Shklar, 2019, p. 134).4 The sociology and moral psychology of loyalty conflicts remains crucial to the way Shklar approaches both these levels. I concentrate on horizontal obligations and its implications for Shklar's view of civil disobedience here, leaving the question of vertical obligations for the next section. I cannot be free or feel free as long as my fellow citizens or human beings are being enslaved, abused, oppressed. And I must do something to liberate them from the oppression they endure so that I may not become involuntarily a passive bystander or even a beneficiary of their misery. My positive freedom depends on their liberation. (Shklar, 2019, p. 137) The reader of her lectures on obligation encounters this argument twice: the first time in her presentation of British idealist Thomas Hill Green, from which the above quotation is taken, and the second time in her account of Henry David Thoreau. In the interpretation of Shklar's lectures suggested here, Green stands for a positive justification of this argument, while Thoreau exemplifies a negative justification, which Shklar adapts and further develops. The resonance between her readings of Green and Thoreau is notable, and it stands in some tension to Shklar's description of civil disobedience and the dual notion of freedom as genuinely American phenomena (Shklar, 2019, pp. 183–184). While I cannot resolve this tension here, it might provide an opening for those who are interested in transposing her arguments to other contexts. Shklar's interpretation of Green starts from his notion of rights. A critic of natural-right doctrines, Green assumed that rights did not have a presocial character, but an inherently sociable one. Rights, 1986 held, originated in social interaction in which individuals recognized each other as striving for a common good. Ideally, political institutions were to systematize these relations and actively secure the conditions for their development, also by protecting against economic conditions that would harm them. In their genuine sociability, rights were “moral claims for self-development but extended the concerns of liberal theory by the equal emphasis on the development of others” (Freeden, 1991, p. 21). In an excerpt from Green's Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, Shklar highlighted that this sociable conception of rights made their value for the individual dependent on the value of the rights of one's fellows; therefore “to act as a citizen […] may involve disobeying in order to secure the citizenship of others” (Shklar, n.d.-d, p. 6). Indeed, Green's lectures stressed that enslaved persons possessed sociable rights that entitled them to a “right to citizenship—to a recognized equality of freedom with any and every one with whom [they] have to do” (Green, 1986, p. 109). Green concluded that the institutional misrecognition of this fact could justify disobedience to the state.5 The negative freedom of the enslaved person thus turned into a yardstick for the citizen's positive freedom of self-development. In her lecture, Shklar pays ample attention to the ideas and arguments from which Green derived his idea of self-development. Importantly, he held to a notion of an “eternal consciousness […] whose progressive replication in individuals was the condition of their knowledge of the world and of right conduct” (Harris & Morrow, 1986, p. 3). Shklar stressed the Protestant roots of this idea: “God is identical with the self of every human being, to the extent that the self realizes its moral possibilities […] Every time we make a moral choice, for better or for worse, we see God in ourselves” (Shklar, 2019, p. 131). The notion of eternal consciousness thus provides Green's fusion of positive and negative freedom with a positive justification. And this is what distinguishes him from Thoreau, who has been aptly called the “silent hero” of On Political Obligation (Scheuerman, 2019b, p. 5; Heins, 2019). To assess Shklar's portrait of Thoreau in her lectures on obligation, it is helpful to contrast it with the Thoreau she presented to her students in her earlier courses on American Political Thought or Modern Political Ideologies.6 Defining Thoreau as a “romantic poet” (Shklar, n.d.-b, p. 1), Shklar presented his appeal to conscience as the mark of a self-centered individualism that prized creativity above everything. This romantic Thoreau longed to be “the hero of his own drama” (Shklar, n.d.-b, p. 2), leading him to invest all his energies into the “development of one's unique personality” (Shklar, n.d.-a, p. 5). Even his siding with the abolitionist cause, Shklar, wrote in these early lectures, was motivated primarily by the need to set up a scene for his heroic self-display (Shklar, n.d.-b, p. 4). Thoreau's romantic individualism went along with an anarchist call for unconditional disobedience. What distinguished his anarchism in Shklar's earlier reading was that the rejection of all external rules was not motivated by the attempt to act in a morally responsible way, but by their obstruction of creative self-development: “To accept public obligations is to doom oneself to a life of mediocrity, not of irresponsibility” (Shklar, n.d.-a, p. 5). Therefore, Shklar qualified Thoreau's self-absorbed anarchic politics as “overtly apolitical” (Shklar, n.d.-b, p. 1). Shklar did concede that “in its way [Thoreau's] is a democratic heroism since it is the state of mind[,] not the deed that counts” (Shklar, n.d.-b, p. 1). However, within her earlier lectures, Thoreau's political thought could display democratic facets only at the cost of incoherence, because Shklar's presentation markedly followed the interpretative grid of her account of the anti-democratic impetus of romantic individualism in After Utopia. The portrayal of Thoreau's heroism strongly recalled her admonishment that the romantic ethics of the hero or genius was always based on “the belief in the absolute inequality of men” (Shklar, 1957/1969, p. 84, also see p. 102). Furthermore, behind the remark that Thoreau's anarchic stance was not about responsibility, but about self-distinction, we may see Shklar's verdict that “the anarchism of the unpolitical […] wants to escape from social consciousness altogether” (Shklar, 1957/1969, p. 102). In contrast, Shklar's later texts shift to a more democratic reading, which accentuates the “democratic inhibitions” she had already discovered in the romanticism of Thoreau's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (Shklar, 1998c). This shift in perspective markedly resonates with the Thoreau interpretation put forward by her doctoral student Nancy Rosenblum in the 1980s. Rosenblum argued that while Thoreau's texts displayed many characteristics of the European-style “romantic soul,” there was yet another, very original formulation of a “radical” (Rosenblum, 1981) or “heroic” individualism (Rosenblum, 1987, pp. 103–124), which is a valuable resource for liberal democracy. Rosenblum (1981, p. 83) concluded that Thoreau's conscience was not an escape from the social, but an inherently “social conscience,” a point Jack Turner (2016) has recently stressed by carving out its public and performative qualities. In the same interpretative vein, George Kateb attested to Thoreau's “acute sense of responsibility” (Kateb, 1992, p. 89; similarly Plotica, 2016). Around the same time, Shklar moves her interpretation in a similar direction. It is no longer the sentence “[t]hat government is best which governs not at all” (Thoreau, 1848/1996a) that serves as a headline to her interpretation, but Thoreau's exclamation: “[U]nlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government” (Thoreau, 1848/1996a, p. 2). Consequently, Shklar reprioritizes the different elements of her interpretation of Thoreau. In the 1992 lectures, Thoreau is above all an individualist, and his anarchism and romanticism become derivative features of his thinking. Unless we identify with the freedom of others, their right to negative freedom, to be allowed all the rights of citizens in a free society, even those who enjoy these rights are limited by being morally constrained, by being implicated in the oppression of others. Within each person, that sets up a moral struggle and a sense of inner oppression. (Shklar, 2019, p. 175) Similarly to Nancy Rosenblum (1981, p. 83), Shklar therefore stresses that Thoreau's is not so much a romantic and inward conscience, but an outward-looking conscience that “transforms relations with other[s] and self” (Shklar, n.d.-e, p. 7).7 Yet, different from Rosenblum she is not so much interested in Thoreauvian resources for liberal democracy in general, but focuses on the concept of freedom implied in his notion of conscience. Its political accomplishment consists in formulating a constitutive link between the notions of negative and positive freedom: “To refuse to pay them [taxes] was an assertion of both liberties at the same time” (Shklar, 1980/1998d, p. 123). I cannot see why Michael Walzer, for instance, says that a claim for “we” is inherently superior to one made in the name of “I.” We are just as often wrong, only more audible. Why is my conscience less relevant than a group ideology when I refuse to do what seems to me patently evil? If I have a duty to myself, then this is what that means. Is that a form of self-perfection? Perhaps it is, but whom am I supposed to perfect if not myself first of all? (Shklar, 2019, p. 7) And in a different version of her lecture, Shklar gives a further twist to this argument in which we recognize her “liberalism of fear”: “Compared to ideol[ogical] groups conc[sience] may have no better claim,” but its claim is “a lot less dangerous to society” (Shklar, n.d.-e, p. 11). This is the voice of a “diagnostic” political scientist (Shklar, 1979), who seeks above all to remedy pathologies, and has no illusions about ideal or perfectly healthy politics. I would suggest that if we evaluate conscience claims in politics in terms of their setting, we will recognize the voice of men and women who have been so completely isolated by the injustice they perceive around them that ties of loyalty and fidelity may be eroded along with political obligation. It is this situation that has in our century been called “internal exile,” and it is expressed in the pure conscience argument and justifies it. (Shklar, 1993/1998a, p. 53) For Shklar, Thoreau thus advances to a paradigmatic example of how perceptions of injustice interrupt the shortcut between one's loyalties and one's presumed political obligations. Instead, he makes the negative freedom of others the yardstick of his own degree of self-determination. Shklar expands her Thoreauvian insights in the following lecture on “Civil Disobedience in the 20th Century.” This is a difficult lecture to interpret. At first sight, Shklar's treatment of the subject appears “largely conventional” (Klosko, 2020, p. 363). She seems to subscribe to the orthodox liberal view of civil disobedience, with its focus on rights, its aiming at concrete policies and its well-known provisos. At a closer reading however, Shklar mentions alternative views, without however taking a clear stance.11 We cannot know how Shklar would have resolved these hesitations had she herself revised the lectures for publication. However, there is one modification of the classical liberal paradigm which she voices with confidence: acts of civil disobedience, Shklar objects, do not rely on a shared sense of justice, as Rawls (1971/1973, p. 365) had claimed. Rather, they rely on the sense of injustice (Shklar, 2019, p. 179), which shows itself in the “special kind of anger we feel when we are denied promised benefits and when we do not get what we believe to be our due. It is the betrayal that we experience when others disappoint expectations that they have created in us” (Shklar, 1990, p. 83). Official justice has a built-in paradox. The better it performs, the greater public consciousnes