Liberalism Of Fear Research Articles

Furcht vor Verletzungen. Anmerkungen zu Judith Shklars ‚Liberalismus der Furcht‘

Abstract In the reflections of Judith Shklar’s ‘Liberalism of fear’ we find the stimulating insight that a theory of freedom can find its main issue in the injury of the human individual. This concept also provides an opening to thinking of the political in general. I would like to elucidate this approach in my essay following the theory of ‘negative freedom’ in the thought of Isaiah Berlin. The reflections of Shklar make for an impressively consistent contribution to theoretical foundation of freedom. While a thorough comprehension evidences a lack of a socio-philosophical basis, it is necessary if we are to find a theory of freedom grounded in a deeply differentiated social and political practice.

The liberalism of fear

The research compiled is formulated into a critique of a dated yet highly sophisticated political ideology that is perpetuating inequality in the lives of ordinary people, prevailing over the fates of Western citizens, and of those abroad in developing countries. The arguments contained herein target liberal principles via the involuntary acceptance of unrestrained capitalist structures that frame the current Western socioeconomic paradigm. Overall, the current framework of domestic laws in the West is found to be unable to justify liberal democratic interventions in developing nations.
 
 Keywords: liberalism; individual rights; imperialism; security; capitalism; personhood; Maritime Law; collectivism

The knowledge of suffering: On Judith Shklar’s ‘Putting Cruelty First’

Judith Shklar’s dictum, ‘the worst evil of cruelty’, is well known. What this means for her political theory and how such theory is construed are rarely explored. This article maintains that Shklar’s turn towards cruelty/suffering has a specific role in the development of her political argument. It allows her both to curb her long-standing skepticism, and to use it creatively. This is because suffering must be examined from the perspectives of history and philosophy, which produce two sets of knowledge, each limiting the overbearing tendencies of the other. The way Shklar uses the tension between history and philosophy for progressive purposes, and her idea that politics can mediate between history and philosophy, makes her a very contemporary theorist, similar to those who critically engage foundationalism without wanting to dispose of it completely. Approaching Shklar’s ‘Putting Cruelty First’ through her engagement with history and philosophy, and making use of the concepts of ‘realism’ (Bernard Williams) and ‘weak ontology’ (Stephen White) to do so are a more productive route to understanding her dictum than the usual one of examining it through the prism of her ‘liberalism of fear’.

Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and political realism

In light of recent interest among political theorists in the idea of political realism, Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear has come to be associated with anti-Rawlsian thought. This paper seeks to show that, on the contrary, Shklar’s specific formulation of political realism, unlike more recent variations, was not motivated by a critique of Rawls. This paper will address three concerns: first, it will show what exactly Shklar’s initial realism was responding to; second, it will consider the implications of this realism for thinking about liberal democracies; third, it will attempt, briefly, in light of this, to make sense of her relationship with Rawls and, in turn, through a comparison with Bernard Williams’s thought, her relationship to anti-Rawlsian political realism.

HOPE AND MEMORY IN THE THOUGHT OF JUDITH SHKLAR

Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article “The Liberalism of Fear” (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklar—as anti-totalitarian émigré thinker, or normative liberal theorist—are flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism.

Securitization and the liberalism of fear

This article seeks to extend securitization theory conceptually and, to a lesser degree, empirically by further developing the relationship between securitization and the politics of fear. Drawing on Shklar’s notion of the liberalism of fear, it argues that instead of looking at the ways in which fear can facilitate processes of securitization and the extension of security logics throughout society, the liberalism of fear allows us to see how fear can operate in ways that can actually inhibit processes of securitization. This strategy might accurately be termed ‘the securitization of securitization’, and the liberalism of fear calls attention to how the fear of fear can in a specific sense be seen as a desecuritizing resource – a countervailing logic against processes of intensification within both ‘normal’ and ‘security’ politics.

Taking reasonable pluralism seriously: an internal critique of political liberalism

The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed by the later Rawls. I show that he cannot offer us good grounds for the rational hope that citizens will assign political values priority over non-political values in cases of conflict about political matters. I also suggest an alternative approach to justification in political philosophy (that is, a weak realist, Williams-inspired account) that better respects the later Rawls’s concern with non-comprehensiveness and pluralism than either his own view or more comprehensive approaches. Thus, if we take reasonable pluralism seriously, then we should adopt what Shklar aptly called ‘liberalism of fear’.

Anti-cosmopolitan liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the dilemma of national identity

ABSTRACT. The debate between contemporary cosmopolitans and advocates of nationalism is hardly new. Nevertheless, much of it is based on the erroneous assumption that cosmopolitanism should be seen as an outgrowth of liberalism, and that both should be considered as the complete conceptual opposites of nationalism. In this article I focus on two of the post-war Jewish anglophile intellectuals who took part in this debate during the Cold War years: the Oxonian liberal philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) and the Israeli historian Jacob L. Talmon (1916–80). I use their examples to argue that the dividing line between cosmopolitans and advocates of nationalism should not be regarded as signifying the distinction between liberals and anti-liberals; in fact, this debate also took place within the camp of the liberal thinkers themselves. I divide my discussion into three parts. Firstly, I examine Berlin's and Talmon's positions within the post-war anti-totalitarian discourse, which came to be known as ‘liberalism of fear’. Secondly, I show how a sense of Jewish identity, combined with deep Zionist convictions, induced both thinkers to divorce anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism – which they regarded as a hollow, illusionary ideal associated with impossible assimilationist yearnings – from the liberal idea. I conclude by suggesting that, although neither man had ever developed a systematic theoretical framework to deal with the complex interactions between ethno-nationalism, liberal individualism and multiculturalism, Berlin's vision of pluralism provides the foundations for building such a theory, in which liberalism and nationalism become complementary rather than conflicting notions.

Fear and Freedom

This article identifies a distinct strand of 20th-century liberal thought that was exemplified by Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron and, to a lesser extent, Karl Popper. I offer a stylized account of their common ideas and shared political sensibility, and argue that their primarily negative liberalism was a variety of what Judith Shklar called the `liberalism of fear' — which put the imperative to avoid cruelty and atrocity first. All three founded their liberalism on a `politics of knowledge' that was directed primarily against Marxist philosophies of history and less against the idea of bureaucratic planning, as, in contrast, was the case with Friedrich von Hayek's thought. Moreover, all three subscribed to more or less explicit versions of value pluralism, and claimed that, in the circumstances of modernity, Weber's `clash of values' was exacerbated and required a particularly prudential approach to politics; this prudential management of value conflicts in turn was best entrusted to cultivated bureaucratic elites. All shared an image of a tolerant and humane society — essentially an idealized version of Britain — but said perhaps too little on the question how societies without the appropriate traditions of moderation and compromise were to be liberalized.

The ‘War on Terror’, the Liberalism of Fear, and the Love of Peace in St Augustine's City of God

The ‘War on Terror’, the Liberalism of Fear, and the Love of Peace in St Augustine's <i>City of God</i>

Avoiding The Unavoidable? Judith Shklar’s Unwilling Search For An Overlapping Consensus

No less an authority than John Rawls identified Judith Shklar as a ‘political’ liberal. However, though their respective conceptions of political liberalism are similar in a number of important respects, Shklar emphasizes that her vision differs notably from that of Rawls. In particular, she explicitly eschews Rawls’s focus on establishing and sustaining an overlapping consensus, arguing that his belief in the possibility of securing such a consensus is naive and, indeed, dangerous insofar as it embodies an obvious disregard for the painful lessons of history and thereby not only allows but invites the occurrence of new cruelties and horrors. Obviously, such an approach would seem to diverge dramatically from that promoted by Rawls and many other political liberals. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Shklar’s arguments and determine the validity of her claims regarding the differences between her conception and that of Rawls and, in so doing, assess the extent to which Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’ can be said to represent a meaningfully distinctive model of political liberalism.

Liberals and Pluralists: Charles Taylor vs John Gray

Charles Taylor and John Gray offer competing liberal responses to the contemporary challenge of pluralism. Gray's morally minimal ‘modus vivendi liberalism’ aims at peaceful coexistence between plural ways of life. It is, in Judith Shklar's phrase, a ‘liberalism of fear’ that is skeptical of attempts to harmonize clashing values. In contrast, Taylor's ‘hermeneutic liberalism’ is based on dialogical engagement with difference and holds out the possibility that incompatible values and traditions can be reconciled without oppression or distortion. Although Taylor's theory is superior to Gray's because it recognizes that dialogue is crucial for respecting pluralism, both theories fail to fully articulate the ethical ideal of citizenship that they imply. Citizens who are able to dialogically engage with pluralism must be cultivated through liberal education to possess certain ethical traits, and this requirement inevitably limits the range of pluralism liberal societies can accommodate. The theoretical overemphasis on pluralism in recent liberal theory serves to obscure this point.

Cesare Beccaria and the Cruelty of Liberalism

In this paper I outline and criticize Judith Shklar’s and Richard Rorty’s ‘liberalism of fear’. Both political thinkers believe liberalism to be characterized by a fundamental opposition to cruelty , which they regard as the least liberal of the features that may distinguish any given human community. In order to demonstrate the limits of the Shklar–Rorty thesis, I make use, in the first place, of John Kekes’s critique of liberalism as to show that liberalism allows for cruelty in so far as it grants wider margins of agency to the members of the community. In the second place, I make use of Cesare Beccaria’s reflections on the cruelty implied by liberalism assuch, in so far as this political doctrine endorses the institutions of penal justice and private property.

The Liberalism of Fear and the Counterrevolutionary Project

Much of Catherine Lu's response resonates in tone and substance with my article. Like me, Lu speaks in the language of moral psychology and relies heavily on the later work of that preeminent moral psychologist among liberal theorists, Judith Shklar. She agrees, moreover, with both Shklar and me that victimhood (and the fear it produces) is morally damaging more often than not, and that the recent literature on human rights, which focuses on the relation of victim and perpetrator, tends to let the beneficiaries of systemic injustice off the hook. Lu and I, thus, share much common ground that other respondents might have contested, and I am grateful that her perceptive criticisms focus on points within my argument that I am pleased to elaborate.

The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and the “Liberalism of Fear”

The attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have incalculable consequences for domestic politics and world affairs. Reliable predictions about these consequences are impossible. However, it may be worthwhile, even at this early point, to reflect on what these acts of violence reveal about the adequacy of our theories of world politics. In what respects have our assumptions and our analytical models helped us to understand these events and responses to them? And in what ways have we been misled by our theories?

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

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