La comparación entre el pensamiento político de dos grandes liberales, Judith N. Shklar y Friedrich A. Hayek, además de constituir una empresa intelectual sumamente estimulante, resulta muy útil para comprender la evolución del pensamiento político liberal en el siglo XX. Shklar, cuyo reconocimiento internacional está creciendo sin cesar en los últimos años, escribe que el liberalismo se hace contra el totalitarismo como doctrina política que pone por encima de cualquier otro valor la libertad, principio también fundamental en la obra de (...) F. A. Hayek. Por eso, a pesar de que la profesora de Harvard pensaba que su liberalismo era muy diferente al del economista vienés creemos, sin embargo, que existen más semejanzas de las que se podrían deducir a primera vista. Entre otras cosas porque ambos pensadores experimentaron la fragilidad de la libertad y de la democracia en la época que les tocó vivir y decidieron dedicar su trabajo intelectual a estudiar las condiciones en las que se preserva la libertad personal. En ese sentido, en un mundo en el que la democracia liberal sufre de nuevo duros embates, su obra es también de gran actualidad. (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)

In recent literature on utopianism, in particular non-ideal and realist work, the distinction between scepticism and non-scepticism has been to the fore. The main concern of this article, in contra...

What do the victims of tyranny owe each other? In this paper, I examine whether they can be condemned for betraying their friends, and I do so through a novel interpretation of Judith Shklar’s political thought. Shklar is a widely acknowledged and significant influence on non-ideal theory and political realism. However, there is also a previously unnoticed transformation between her early and mature work, for although she remains a sceptic her approach to moral conflict changes from value pluralism to value (...) monism. In addition, it is only in her mature work, as a monist, she believes tyranny cancels obligations of justice. I argue here that Shklar’s monism fails, and this in turn has important implications for political realism and non-ideal theory. While attention has been focused on developing a sceptical critique of ideal theory, this interpretation of Shklar’s work illustrates that greater awareness is needed of the pitfalls of monist strands of scepticism. (shrink)

The useful publication of Judith N Shklar's final undergraduate lectures at Harvard provides an opportunity to take a careful look at her reflections on political obligation, a matter always of gre...

Political 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. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing so, I show how her exploration of the faces (...) of injustice—especially the importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first. Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear. (shrink)