Judith N. Shklar Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Judith Nisse Shklar (1928–1992), the first female president of the Amer ican Political Science Association (1989) and president of the Amer ican Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (1982), was a leading twentieth-century political theorist and faculty member in the Harvard University Department of Government. Author or editor of eleven books and numerous essays and reviews, Shklar played an important role in the reinvigoration of political theory during the second half of the twentieth century, and more particularly in the articulation of a skeptical version of liberal theory that she called the “liberalism of fear.”

Shklar was born in Riga, Latvia, on September 24, 1928, and her family relocated to Canada during World War II (1939–1945), traversing a circuitous route from Riga to Montreal by way of Sweden and Japan that Shklar recounted with grim humor in her autobiographical essay “A Life of Learning” (1996). She received her BA (1949) and MA (1950) degrees from McGill University and her PhD from Harvard (1955), where she taught from 1956 until her death in September 1992.

Shklar wrote that she became interested in political theory to help her make sense of the experiences of the twentieth century. Her work consistently sought a psychologically realistic and robust liberalism that could combat the human propensity for cruelty and vice that she had witnessed in Europe during the war years. Shklar’s liberalism of fear was shorn of abstract and ahistorical justifications such as natural rights or rational choice theory. Drawing especially on the thought of French intellectual Michel de Montaigne and French political philosopher Charles-Louis Montesquieu, her approach emphasized the prevention of cruelty rather than the securing of extensive schemes of individual rights. As she claimed in “A Life of Learning,” “skepticism, autonomy and legal security for the individual, freedom and the discipline of scientific inquiry . . . are our best hope for a less brutal and irrational world.” Such a quest, for Shklar, required not only a clear understanding of the attractions (psychological, moral, political) that cruelty had always held for humans, but also a commitment to historical memory and to listening to the experiences of those who had experienced victimization and injustice.

Shklar’s corpus addressed an impressive range of historical, philosophical, and political questions. In addition to articulating and defending her own brand of liberal theory and practice, she authored extensive treatments of Montesquieu, French political and social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and German philosopher Georg Hegel; a penetrating exploration of political and legal thinking that used the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials to reflect on the relationship between law, politics, and morals; a compelling revisitation of the conceptual and political foundations of injustice; and two volumes that take up questions of American citizenship, politics, and political thought.

Bibliography:

Shklar, Judith. Legalism: An Essay on Law, Morals, and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
“The Liberalism of Fear.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy Rosenblum, 1–38. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
“A Life of Learning.” In Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar, edited by Bernard Yack, 263–279. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Redeeming American Political Thought, edited by Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F.Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Yack, Bernard, ed. Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

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