Liberalism Of Fear Research Articles

The Liberalism of Fear and Public Health Ethics

Abstract This article argues that the liberalism of fear provides a useful theoretical framework for public health ethics in two fronts. First, it helps reconcile the tension between public health interventions and liberal politics. Second, it reinforces the existing justifications for public health interventions in liberal political culture. The article discusses this in the context of political emotions in the COVID-19 pandemic. Fear plays a central role in the experiences of pandemic politics, and such fear is extended to the concern that post-pandemic government would normalize emergency politics and threaten the political culture of liberal democracy. The article proposes that the liberalism of fear provides a theoretical solution not only to alleviate such fear, but also to reconcile the long-established tension between liberal politics and public health intervention. This is particularly so if the liberalism of fear’s characteristic of political realism is taken into account. The article makes two points about this, and discusses their pragmatic implications in the case of compulsory vaccination.

Politics and suffering

AbstractPolitical philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high stakes carry most political decisions across the thresholds of the relevant deontological constraints. While the argument is substantive rather than exegetical, I engage in detail Judith Shklar's “Liberalism of Fear”. I share with Shklar her pessimistic starting point, but I also show how a focus on suffering (rather than cruelty and fear) is what plausibly follows from such a starting point. I then pursue the implications of this difference—they are theoretically profound, but perhaps less significant practically.

Cruel Intentions: Liberal Logics and Processes of International Criminalization

Abstract The prohibition and prosecution of core international crimes are understood as a liberal response to particularly cruel acts that shock the conscience of humanity. But what is the nature of this cruelty and how does it relate to liberalism? Rather than seeing liberalism as monolithic, we examine the different relationships between liberal logics and cruelty and how they manifest in processes of international criminalization. We develop a three-pronged typology of liberalism(s) based on their constitutive relationship to cruelty. The first logic expands upon Judith Shklar's theory of “Liberalism of Fear” that sees cruelty as detrimental to liberal society, foregrounding particularly acute forms of physical and affective cruelty in liberal politics and law; the second logic, “Racial Liberalism,” understands cruelty as a condition of possibility for the liberal order built on the exploitation of racialized others; and the third conceives of cruelty as produced by the market logic of trade-offs, referred to as “Sacrificial Liberalism.” Based on this framework, we examine two processes of international criminalization: the crime of genocide (widely considered to be the “crime of crimes” and thus an emblematic case of criminalized cruelty directed against collective identities) and the crime of aggression (which followed a more complicated criminalization trajectory). By tracing how different liberal logics interrelate, come into tension, and thus shape the processes of international criminalization, we not only illuminate the shifting legitimations and normative priorities of the liberal international order but also confront the normative value of criminalizing cruelty.

Judith N. Shklar on disobedience and obligation in a “society of strangers”

Judith N. Shklar on disobedience and obligation in a “society of strangers”

Dostoyevsky and the Defense of Compassion

Is cruelty a problem for politics? For Hannah Arendt, the answer was no. On her view, a compassionate response towards persons suffering cruelty is best avoided because compassion can only become political by transforming incommunicable individual pain into abstract suffering. At crucial moments in her argument in On Revolution, she cites the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky as an ally. However, I argue that Arendt misrepresents Dostoyevsky. Through a critical examination of his mature novels, I show how suffering is communicable and compassion is political for Dostoyevsky. By attending to this theme in his writings, I argue that Dostoyevsky sheds light on the problem of cruelty in a way that Arendt’s framework cannot. This suggests that he is more at home with theorists like Judith Shklar who “put cruelty first” than with Arendt, although in favoring compassion I argue that he departs from Shklar’s liberalism of fear and offers a more constructive, hopeful political vision.

The liberalism of fear in China: Hu Ping and the uses of fear and memory in contemporary Chinese liberalism

ABSTRACT Contemporary political theorists have sought to invoke Judith N. Shklar's liberalism of fear in discussions about human rights across cultural and national boundaries. These discussions would benefit from thinking with Chinese liberal thinker and activist Hu Ping, who considered the liberalism of fear an accurate description of the rediscovery of liberalism in contemporary China after the post-Cultural Revolution. Hu's different uses of memories of the Cultural Revolution not only reflected Shklar's thesis in the liberalism of fear that liberals should speak to memories of cruelty to inspire a liberal politics of cruelty-prevention. They also demonstrated how social and political contexts shaped political needs, which, in turn, changed readings of the past and challenged important assumptions in Shklar's political theory. Hu's uses of memory and fear shed light on the limits of Shklar's approach, revealed the importance of confronting the question of courage in any applications of the liberalism of fear, and called for more nuanced discussions about the conditions upon which memories of cruelty could be considered a pro-liberal force.

Centrist utopianism in retreat: ideological fragmentation after the financial crisis

ABSTRACT This article explores utopian dimensions and reality problems in the intellectual production of leading Anglophone public intellectuals and policymaking institutions of Western capitalism. We argue that from the close of the 1990s, but especially in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, elite discourse has splintered into three core strands or moments: first, a post-hegemonic, punitive neoliberalism of austerity, which retreats from leadership and seeks to preserve extant power relations; second, a pragmatic neo-Keynesian turn, which frequently combines the language of enterprise and competition with advocacy of selective political and economic re-regulation towards a more socially justified capitalism; and third, the advance of a ‘liberalism of fear’, which evokes a number of threatening dystopian figures in populism, protectionism, the 1930s, extremism and totalitarianism. This splintering effect, we argue, is one of the key features of today’s wider ideological-utopian constellation, entwined with the growth of the new far right and with radicalization on the left. Drawing on a Gramscian analysis of crisis, we argue that the ideological incoherence of the dominant intellectual elite, and the denuded utopian dimensions of their discourse, are both symptomatic and productive of the present organic crisis of Western capitalism and its attendant crisis of intellectual and moral leadership.

On the Ethics of Truthfulness: An Interview with Professor Thomas Osborne

Professor Thomas Osborne (SPAIS, University of Bristol, author of Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and The Ethics of Truth (1998) and The Structure of Modern Cultural Theory (2008) visited Prague in mid-2018 and presented a paper On Montesquieu, Markets and the Liberalism of Fear. The interview was conducted online by Dr. Filip Vostal (CSTSS, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences) in autumn 2020.

Conflict in Political Liberalism: Judith Shklar\u2019s Liberalism of Fear

Realists and non-ideal theorists currently criticise Rawlsian mainstream liberalism for its inability to address injustice and political conflict, as a result of the subordination of political philosophy to moral theory (Bernard Williams), as well as an idealising and abstract methodology (Charles W. Mills). Seeing that liberalism emerged as a theory for the protection of the individual from conflict and injustice, these criticisms aim at the very core of liberalism as a theory of the political and therefore deserve close analysis. I will defend Judith N. Shklar’s liberalism of fear as an answer to these challenges. I will argue that the liberalism of fear maintains realism’s conflictual and inherently political thrust while also integrating a perspective on injustice. I will defend the claim that in contrast to the two aforementioned criticisms, the liberalism of fear develops its own normative standard from which political arrangements can be assessed. It does so by replacing the idealising approach to political philosophy with a non-utopian methodology, which opens a negative perspective on what is to be avoided in the political sphere, and how to detect and deal with injustice. Due to this standard, it is a liberal theory that is uniquely able to meet the realist and non-ideal challenge.

Republican Elements in the Liberalism of Fear

Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear is distinct from other liberalisms; it gains its unique imprint and quality through a long and consistent engagement with, and critical discussion of, republicanism. Her account of the contemporary relevance of notions of virtues and vices, justice and injustice, the questions of rights, representation, citizenship and democracy all point to older republican influences. However, Shklar also knew that unreconstructed republicanism and republican ideas of the virtuous life were no longer applicable to modern societal and political conditions. This becomes especially clear in her discussion of Rousseau and in her study Ordinary Vices. The irreducibly pluralist and individualist nature of modern democracy have made it inconceivable that we would all agree on what the virtuous life consists in. Shklar’s emphasis on positive liberty, critically directed against Isaiah Berlin’s argument that negative rights and negative liberty are at the heart of modern liberalism; her insistence on the need for a common spirit as distilled in her study of Montesquieu; the need for equality in terms of voting and earning as stressed in American Citizenship; and finally her discussion of the changing nature of both loyalty and political obligation in her last Harvard lectures, are all indicative of the republican elements that can be detected in her barebones liberalism.

Thinking of the Shadow. Conceptions of Cruelty in the History of Western Thought

As regards thinking of the shadow, I can contribute to the present discussion qua intellectual historian who, together with the theologian Michael Trice, has reconstructed in recent years the understanding of a particular manifestation of the shadow in the long life of Western philosophy: cruelty. Between 1998, when I started investigating Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s liberalism of fear, and 2017, when I completed a volume of collected essays of mine to be published by Northwest Passage Books under the title Philosophy of Cruelty, I devoted considerable time and attention to retrieving, mapping and reflecting upon the conceptions of cruelty developed in the history of Western thought. What follows here is a concise overview of the five most common and/or most articulate conceptions that I have identified in the course of my studies, and repeats almost verbatim what I state in the aforementioned collection of essays of mine. Longer and more detailed analyses can be retrieved in my older publications on this subject. Please note also that my research is intentionally limited to explicit uses of the terms “cruelty” and “cruel” in the languages accessible to me. Extending it to cognates such as “violence” or “aggressiveness” would make the project unmanageable.

Os medos na política de segurança pública

resumo O artigo propõe retomar o debate sobre os medos, que não podem ser negados e continuam limitando a liberdade de ação dos indivíduos paralisados. Discute a doutrina liberal do que deve ser feito para impedir que a ação individual seja tolhida, especialmente no liberalismo do medo, doutrina política sobre a crueldade, imposição deliberada de dor física ou moral pelo mais forte sobre o fraco. Relativiza a visão do Estado como uma ameaça perene à liberdade dos cidadãos que devem se curvar à repressão, pois que há grupos organizados ou indivíduos fora do Estado, como na rede do Transnational Organized Crime (TOC), que intimidam ou matam pessoas em nome dos seus interesses individuais ou fins ideológicos coletivos. A saída mais usada é a de garantir que nenhum desses servidores do Estado possa intimidar alguém, a não ser pelo uso de procedimentos legais bem compreendidos e aceitos. A partir daí discute como a guerra às drogas afeta os combatentes servidores do Estado e cria reações e problemas psíquicos; os moradores das áreas urbanas mais violentas que, por causa dos traumas acumulados, fecham-se para a convivência e o associativismo; por fim, os moradores das cidades, mais afeitos à mídia e a ideologia fundamentalista religiosa.

The unnoticed monism of Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear

Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear, a political and philosophical standpoint that emerges in her mature work, has ostensibly two defining characteristics. It is a sceptical approach that puts cruelty first among the vices. For that reason, it is considered to be both set apart from mainstream liberalism, in particular the liberalism of J. S. Mill and John Rawls, but also an important source of influence for political realists and nonideal theorists. However, I argue here that, in putting cruelty first among the vices, Shklar also offers a value monist approach to political thought, one that she shares with Mill and Rawls as well. Each claims to have identified the general rule for the resolution of moral conflicts, although they disagree about what that rule is. Therefore, Shklar’s mature work combines scepticism with value monism. As such, it represents a radical departure from the value pluralist (and sceptical) approach to moral conflict evident in her early work. Her commentators have not noticed either her mature monism or the move away from her earlier value pluralism, and this is explained by a tendency to see her mature work as offering simply a sceptical alternative to mainstream liberalism.

The Politics of Cruelty

ABSTRACTThe authoritarian tendencies evident in the Trump campaign and administration are framed by the idea of a “politics of cruelty,“ drawing on Judith Shlkar’s idea of the ”liberalism of fear,” current research using authoritarianism theory, and arguments concerning the impact of the political theology of white Christian nationalism.

Contract Law and the Liberalism of Fear

Abstract Liberalism’s concern with human freedom seems related to contractual freedom and thus contract law. There are, however, many strands of liberal thought and which of them best justifies contract is a difficult question. In The Choice Theory of Contracts, Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller offer a vision of contract based on autonomy. Drawing on the work of Joseph Raz, they argue that extending autonomy should be the law’s primary concern, which requires that we extend the range of contractual choices available. While there is much to admire in their work, I argue that autonomy as conceived by Dagan and Heller cannot justify contract law. First, there are reasons to doubt the coherence of autonomy as an ideal. Second, given the pluralism of liberal societies, which, for example, often include substantial numbers of religious believers who reject core assumptions of autonomy theory, it is doubtful that such a theory can legitimate contract law. A more modest version of liberalism concerned primarily with protection against cruelty and providing a modus vivendi in pluralistic societies is more tenable. Such a vision of liberalism yields a more modest vision of contract law. Rather than making it into another means of realizing the dream of a more autonomous self, it is enough that contract law facilitates commerce and the marketplace. Markets in turn can serve an important — albeit limited — role in sustaining the peaceful cooperation and coexistence toward which a more realistic liberalism should aim.

Machiavelli and the liberalism of fear.

This article revisits the long-standing question of the relations between ethics and politics in Machiavelli’s work, assessing its relevance to the ‘liberalism of fear’ in particular in the work of Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and also John Dunn. The article considers ways in which Machiavelli has been a ‘negative’ resource for liberalism – for instance, as a presumed proponent of tyranny; but also ways in which even for the liberalism of fear he might be considered a ‘positive’ resource, above all around the issues of political necessity and prudential judgement.

Querying the Ethics of Data Collection as a Community of Research and Practice The Movement toward the “Liberalism of Fear” to Protect the Vulnerable

Querying the Ethics of Data Collection as a Community of Research and Practice The Movement toward the “Liberalism of Fear” to Protect the Vulnerable

Poets/Trump/Philosophers: Reflections on Richard Rorty’s Liberalism, Ten Years after His Death

Starting with a prescient 1998 quote on the impending decline of US liberal democracy into right-wing, strong-man-based demagogy, this paper outlines Richard Rorty’s political philosophy, which I believe can help us understand perplexing political trends in today’s political reality well beyond the US alone. Specifically, I tackle three key-terms encapsulating the thrust of Rorty’s political philosophy, i.e. “liberalism of fear”, “bourgeois” and “postmodernism”. Also, I address a contraposition that explains how Rorty would approach and attempt to defend liberal democracy from contemporary right-wing, strong-man-based degenerations, namely the priority of “poetry” over “philosophy”. Essentially, if one wishes to win in the political arena, she must be armed with the most effective rhetorical weaponry, however good, solid and well-argued her political views may be. Finally, some remarks are offered on the role that “philosophy” can still play within the same arena.

The power effects of human rights reforms in Turkey: enhanced surveillance and depoliticisation

While the perspective of ‘liberalism of fear’ assumes that human rights limit the despotic power of the state, this paper argues that human rights reforms promoted in the context of institution- and capacity-building programmes have had significant power effects by enhancing the disciplinary capacities of the Turkish state and blunting the transformative potential of rights claiming. The reforms increased state surveillance by rechanneling criminal justice processes towards producing evidence (such as telecommunications data, DNA collection, etc) rather than testimonies. Instead of limiting state power, these reforms enhanced the disciplinary mechanisms of social control. They depoliticised the problem of torture by constructing it as an occupational accident (as opposed to a state crime) that happens because of lack of police officer know-how or resources for the investigation of crime. Finally, reforms revamped the way police investigated crimes, rather than launching campaigns against torture and dismissing past wrongdoers in the police. The paper concludes that the neoliberal emphasis on the technicalisation of political problems has limited the democratic potential of human rights reforms.

From Scepticism to Liberalism? Bernard Williams, the Foundations of Liberalism and Political Realism

Bernard Williams was an ethical sceptic, but he was also a proponent of liberalism. To what extent can one finally be both? This article explores this question through a particular emphasis on Williams, but seeks to draw wider lessons regarding what ethical scepticism should and should not amount to. It shows how ethical scepticism can be reconciled with a commitment to what Williams, following Judith Shklar, called ‘the liberalism of fear’, which is revealed as an ecumenical outlook for different stripes of ethical sceptic. The article concludes by drawing some lessons for the recent ‘realist’ turn in political theory.