Between Utopia and Realism: The Political Thought of Judith N. Shklar

By Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess

From her position at Harvard University's Department of Government for over thirty-five years, Judith Shklar (1928-92) taught a long list of prominent political theorists and published prolifically in the domains of modern and American political thought. She was a highly original theorist of liberalism, possessing a broad and deep knowledge of intellectual history, which informed her writing in interesting and unusual ways. Her work emerged between the "end of ideology" discussions of the 1950s and the "end of history" debate of the early 1990s. Shklar contributed significantly to social and political thought by arguing for a new, more skeptical version of liberalism that brought political theory into close contact with real-life experience.

The essays collected in Between Utopia and Realism reflect on and refract Shklar's major preoccupations throughout a lifetime of thinking and demonstrate the ways in which her work illuminates contemporary debates across political theory, international relations, and law. Contributors address Shklar's critique of Cold War liberalism, interpretation of Montaigne and its connection to her genealogy of liberal morals, lectures on political obligation, focus on cruelty, and her late reflections on exile. Others consider her role as a legal theorist, her interest in literary tropes and psychological experience, and her famed skepticism.

Between Utopia and Realism showcases Shklar's approach to addressing the intractable problems of social life. Her finely honed political skepticism emphasized the importance of diagnosing problems over proffering excessively optimistic solutions. As this collection makes clear, her thought continues to be useful in addressing cruelty, limiting injustice, and combating the cynicism of the present moment.

Contributors: Samantha Ashenden, Hannes Bajohr, James Brown, Katrina Forrester, Volker M. Heins, Andreas Hess, Samuel Moyn, Thomas Osborne, William E. Scheuerman, Quentin Skinner, Philip Spencer, Tracy B. Strong, Kamila Stullerova, Bernard Yack.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296525

Book preview

Introduction

SAMANTHA ASHENDEN AND ANDREAS HESS

Judith N. Shklar (1928–92) was a formidable political thinker whose work defies traditional labels and whose legacy has been subtle but substantial. Her work emerged, as one observer has pointed out, between the end of ideology discussions of the 1950s and the end of history debate of the early 1990s. Shklar contributed significantly to European and American political thought by arguing for a new, more skeptical, and stripped-down version of liberalism bringing political theory and real-life experiences closer together. Her writing has recently been taken up across a wide range of discussions, from international relations to legal theory and literature. The aim of this collection is to further this new interest by providing critical reflection on Shklar’s thinking for our present. Between Utopia and Realism tracks the path she took through a range of issues and problems that, the authors claim, makes her work a vital contribution to and resource for contemporary debates.

Between Utopia and Realism

The title of this volume, Between Utopia and Realism, has been chosen because it captures something of the tenor of Shklar’s thinking, and also because it signals several of the ways in which her work can provide the basis for productive interventions in current discussions, from political theory to international politics and legal theory. Our task in this introduction is threefold: to locate her efforts between utopia and realism, to situate her work in its political and intellectual contexts, and to begin to open up how her contribution can help address some of the pressing concerns of the present by introducing the chapters collected here.

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Shklar’s first published book, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith, was a product of her reckoning with the decline of rational political optimism since the Enlightenment (1957: ix). In it, she surveys and seeks to criticize nineteenth-century Romanticism and Christian fatalism, and its modern inheritors like French and German existentialism, as the most extreme expressions of the decline in optimism. She does this, fully aware that the time is one in which one is neither able nor willing to build an original theory of politics (ix), but in an attempt to retrieve a glimmer of such optimism without which she argues political theory becomes impossible (ix). The agenda of this first book established an orientation in thinking that Shklar would maintain through her many different sites of scholarship over the next thirty-five years: close reading of political theories, legal disputes, and literary texts, with the aim of analyzing anew the premises, possibilities, and limits of late twentieth-century democratic life. However, though this early orientation is sustained, her subsequent assessment of the merits of After Utopia is telling for our attempt to locate her work.

In a pair of essays entitled The Political Theory of Utopia (1998d [1965]) and What Is the Use of Utopia? (1998i), in which she refers to her first book, Shklar states, I did quite well out of pessimism. I now realize that in many ways I was wrong (186–87). Utopia and transformative political ideas are still the focus of her attention in these later texts, but Shklar now judges that she was wrong to think that political theory depended on hope, or to put it differently, on future-oriented ideologies (187): All the ideologies served to retard political thinking. Their decline now has left political theory without any clear orientation and so with a sense of uneasiness (172). Against those who harbor desires for a transformative politics in the present, and for whom utopia is therefore still a useful mode of thinking, Shklar prefers either the skepticism of writers such as Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, or the critical models with which to judge actuality proffered by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas (1998i: 188–89). To those who would hold on to radical transformative agendas, Shklar insists on the need to think critically and positively about the state we are in and how to improve it (190). In this, she judges, utopian thinking is an expression of nostalgia … the least adequate response of all to these discomforts (1998d [1965]: 173). This is so, not least because utopia is premised on the idea of social concord and true knowledge. Shklar continues: This is politically planned happiness that only the abolition of conflict among individuals and groups can produce. Such peace is, moreover, possible only because utopia is an expression of a perceived universal truth. For truth is one, and only error is multiple (177). Thus, in utopia, there cannot, by definition, be any room for eccentricity (165).

This room for eccentricity, or concern for pluralism, is at the heart of much of Shklar’s work, whether one looks to her arguments against the assumptions of unity built into the natural law tradition in Legalism, the concern with cruelty in Ordinary Vices, her determination to think about injustice as something other than the mirror image of justice in The Faces of Injustice, or her arguments for standing and a positive conception of liberty in the book American Citizenship. But perhaps the best way into this is through her essay The Liberalism of Fear (1998c [1989]). The text is organized toward retrieving liberalism as a political doctrine with only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom (3).

The liberalism of fear is entirely nonutopian (8). In fact, against the system-building efforts of her contemporaries, she develops a realistic politics oriented by reference to the summum malum: rather than strive for utopia, we should recognize humans as sentient beings (14) capable of experiencing fear; we should put cruelty first (19). The liberalism of fear is thus focused on attempting to create a political order capable of preventing the worst abuses of government. In short, it is a politics that concentrates on damage control (9). With this negative argument, Shklar yokes liberalism firmly to the rule of law as the prime instrument to restrain governments (18) and to democracy, because without enough equality of power to protect and assert one’s rights, freedom is but a hope (19).

Shklar’s orientation in thinking about politics has much to offer. In a moment when the West seems to be drifting apart and post–World War II transatlantic relations are changing, it is more important than ever to stress commonalities and differences within the Atlantic political theory tradition. Shklar’s approach to political theory as a body of work addressing the intractable problems of human social and political life, and her emphasis on diagnosing those problems rather than seeking utopian solutions—in short, her political skepticism—is a way of tackling the cynicism of the present in favor of a more robust approach to limiting injustice and addressing cruelty.

The chapters presented here under the title Between Utopia and Realism aim to reflect on and refract Shklar’s major preoccupations through a life of thinking, and to show how her contributions illuminate contemporary debates across political theory, international relations, and law. She was an indomitable thinker, and, in a period when many of her academic colleagues built systems that apparently enabled them to escape the difficulties of the modern predicament, she had a tendency to focus exactly on those difficulties. This makes her work of enduring value to attempts to think through how it is possible to think and live after utopia.

Situating Shklar

During her lifetime, Shklar published eight books, some of them modern classics, such as Ordinary Vices and The Faces of Injustice, as well as numerous essays and reviews. Through both her teaching and publications she influenced entire generations of students and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Bruce Ackerman, Seyla Benhabib, Isaiah Berlin, John Dunn, Amy Gutmann, Albert O. Hirschman, Stanley Hoffmann, Stephen Holmes, Isaac Kramnick, John Rawls, Nancy Rosenblum, Quentin Skinner, Dennis F. Thompson, and Michael Walzer are just a few among a long list of prominent academics and intellectuals who over the course of Shklar’s life appeared in her orbit. Such exchanges were fruitful on both sides. These academic acquaintances, some of whom would become close friends, profited from her as much as she did from them, although that would not always manifest itself publicly but often in the form of private letters or other forms of communication such as the regular coffee or tea breaks with, among others, John Rawls at Harvard. In addition to this inner circle of colleagues and friends, there was of course a much wider circle of scholars and academics with whom Shklar was in discussion in the republic of letters. We think here particularly of those exchanges in which specific themes and controversies are the subject of conversation. In Shklar’s case, this could range from the discussion of details of individual political philosophies such as those of Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, to the discussion of paradigms, theories, and concepts, some more traditional such as utopian thought, legal theory, the republican and liberal imaginations, virtues and vices, the use of literature in political theory, questions of justice and injustice, citizenship, exile and obligation, and other tropes of modern moral and political reasoning. A very high citation count that would make any scholar envious, as well as numerous other references, demonstrate her lasting legacy and impact. Shklar’s influence extended far beyond the local constituencies of normal professional contact because she served the American Political Science Association, one of the largest professional academic associations with thousands of members, first as vice president and later as president. Last but not least, there were former students, many of whom did not remain inside the university system but instead came to occupy other important professional roles and positions as lawyers and attorneys, teachers, NGO activists and representatives, and CEOs.

Despite the range of her contacts and the breadth of her influence, there is something peculiar about the reception of Shklar and her work. Because Shklar was very much an antisystems and antifoundational thinker—a fox in other words—her work is rarely seen in its entirety. During her lifetime just two long review essays were published; one was rather perceptive although not uncritical, entitled The Misfortune Teller by Martha Nussbaum (1990), the other one rather dismissive and polemical by Jean Elshtain (1985) and provocatively titled Ordinary Scholarship.

Other reviews dealt with individual works and specific aspects of her thinking, basically following Shklar’s major published books such as her treatment of individual political thinkers (Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu), or her more theme-and-problem-based writing such as her analysis of the nature and fate of modern utopian thought, legalism, vices in the context of liberal and republican thought, injustice, or modern citizenship. Some paid more attention than others to not just detail but also the broader thematic context—for example, Sheldon Wolin’s long review essay that discussed After Utopia in the larger context of the time (1960), L. Lloyd Weinreb’s discussion of Legalism (1964), George Kateb’s and Zbigniew A. Pelczynski’s reviews of Shklar’s Hegel book Freedom and Independence (Kateb 1978; Pelczynski 1977), Johnson Wright’s appreciation of Shklar in an essay that also made use of Shklar’s Montesquieu book (2007), Patrick Riley on Ordinary Vices (1985), Nannerl O. Keohane’s, Gerald L. Neuman’s, and Jeffrey Murphy’s different assessments of The Faces of Injustice (Keohane 1991; Neuman 1992; Murphy 1991), and Benjamin Barber’s, Stephen L. Carter’s, and Bernard Yack’s reviews of American Citizenship (Barber 1993; Carter 1992; Yack 1991).

More comprehensive accounts appeared only posthumously, first a few weeks after Shklar’s death in a memorial brochure that included a number of important contributions by her closest academic colleagues and friends, including Stanley Hoffmann, John Rawls, Dennis Thompson, Harvey Mansfield, Amy Gutmann, Mark Lilla, Benjamin Barber, and Steven Graubard, most but by no means all known to Shklar through Harvard or by being linked to one of the East Coast universities (all in Memorial Tributes to Judith Nisse Shklar 1992). The publication of the two posthumous 1998 essay collections, Political Thought and Political Thinkers and Redeeming American Political Thought, provided the occasion for reviewing Shklar’s work, this time in the light of a lifetime of scholarship and achievement. With the distance of some years from her death, the perspective on and overall assessment of Shklar’s contribution changed considerably. This is detectable in such essays as Jonathan Allen’s Liberalism for Grown-ups (1998), Peter Berkowitz’s Fear and Thinking (1998), Mark Lilla’s Very Much a Fox (1998), James Miller’s Pyrrhonic Liberalism (2000), and Kerry H. Whiteside’s Justice Uncertain (1999). To that we might add the collection of essays dedicated to Shklar’s memory, Liberalism Without Illusions, edited by Bernard Yack (Yack 1996).

After 2010 and with a new generation of scholars working in a number of disciplines across both the social sciences and the humanities, Shklar’s work has been appreciated anew. This is most visible perhaps in the translation of a number of her books into German, Spanish, and French, and in the publication of special journal issues dedicated to her thought, such as the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Especially in Germany, Hannes Bajohr’s translations of Shklar’s books and essays have been well received and reviewed in almost every quality daily and weekly paper. Kamila Stullerova’s essays (2013a, 2013b) placed Shklar firmly in European discussions of politics and international relations, while Katrina Forrester’s two essays on Shklar had a similar impact on the Anglo-American discussion about memory, liberalism, and political realism (2011, 2012). There is other evidence of new appraisals of Shklar as well, such as Andreas Hess’s monograph The Political Theory of Judith Shklar: Exile from Exile (2014) and other essays by the same author (Hess 2018; Ashenden and Hess 2016). An edition of Judith Shklar’s previously unpublished lectures, On Political Obligation, edited by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, has been published (Shklar 2019).

This new wave of interest, more than twenty-five years after Judith Shklar’s death, marks a shift toward a more systematic treatment of the themes arising from her work. The arguments of the contributions presented here build and expand on that more comprehensive epistemological and political interest. But before introducing the chapters of our various contributors, we briefly recall Shklar’s intellectual trajectory. Shklar was too young to belong to the group of German-speaking émigré scholars who had a major impact in American institutions of higher learning from the late 1930s and 1940s. At the same time she did not fully belong to the established university crowd. Being of Jewish background, stemming from Riga, and having escaped National Socialism and Stalinism as an adolescent via Sweden, she received her first university education in Canada before settling in the United States. While at Harvard she discovered that she was a particular kind of refugee and therefore somewhat of an outsider—an insight that stayed with her for the rest of her life and that had a decisive impact on the development of her political theory. As an exile from exile, Shklar would remain a lifelong skeptic concerning the limits and possibilities of politics.

Originally, Shklar’s interests leaned to the study of modern ideologies. For her thesis she opted for a topic that sounded very much like the work of Hannah Arendt in theme and scope. Shklar’s first book, After Utopia, was a revised version of her PhD dissertation (1957). Its stated aim was to assess the state of contemporary political theory and political philosophy after the extreme experiences of totalitarianism and the Second World War. Shklar observed a theoretical stasis and argued for a fresh start and an altogether more realistic attempt at political theoretical conceptualization. She saw a need for more realism in political theory at a time when an old-fashioned liberalism had become unsure of its moral basis, as well as increasingly defensive and conservative (viii). Her critical remarks were directed at Cold War liberals who continued to repeat the mantra that totalitarianism was a threat but who seemed unable to explain what liberal democracy and political theory could do to become more attractive and convincing, particularly in light of the ideological competition of Marxism in its various disguises.

Shklar’s second book, Legalism, appeared in 1964. Alongside the so-called Hart-Fuller debate of the late 1950s, which discussed the role of legal positivism in the context of the Nuremberg Trials, and the discussion surrounding Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, it seemed well placed. The trials provided an opportunity to discuss the relationship among law, morality, and politics. More specifically, Shklar argued not only that formalized justice should not be regarded as an end in itself but also that just procedures cannot create a democratic order on their own. Furthermore, the trials took place in a legal vacuum; there was no properly functioning system of international criminal law. In this context it was a sense of justice that turned out to be the main driving force behind the trials. This was very much against the notion of positive law that maintains the distinction between legal procedures and political aims and values such as justice. The main message of Legalism was that after the experience of totalitarianism it had become harder to suggest that legal procedures, justice, and politics were not linked at all.

Shklar’s next book, Men and Citizens, was on Rousseau (1969). The study of the Genevan philosopher was not as far removed from her earlier concerns and epistemological interests as it might appear on first sight. Engaging with Rousseau could not only lead to a critique of classical liberalism, but ex negativo his arguments touched on a number of themes that, according to Shklar, went to the very heart of a critical theory of liberalism—something that students who saw Rousseau only as an intellectual precursor to Marx seemed to have forgotten.

Shklar observed that for Rousseau utopia served primarily as a premise for criticism of both religious notions and contemporary society. For him utopia, an imaginary world, provided practical orientation; it educated the senses and guided judgment. Rousseau knew that a simple return to nature was impossible. His method consisted of the description of a civilizational drama, which had to be understood as a kind of repeated ur-condition, acted out time and again. However, while man was responsible for maintaining and prolonging the situation, he had arrived at this situation innocently. In order to fully reveal his human potential, for Rousseau, certain psychological capacities in man have to exist: the ability to make choices, the use of imagination, memory, the capacity for self-perfection, and the ability to feel pity at the sight of human suffering. The human mind appeared to be in a permanent struggle: on one side we find these positive psychological capacities, and on the other side social constraints. Together these give rise to a tension resulting in human suffering. Only deep introspection and insightful self-education, including searching for one’s freedom by physical travel, provided an escape. For Shklar, it was Rousseau’s organizing images that explained in large part his popularity and success. He had the advantage of having been a thinker who, unlike many modern academic theorists, was never confined to narrow specialisms. His language was thus far removed from abstraction and free from academic jargon.

Shklar’s Men and Citizens contained a scarcely veiled self-criticism. In After Utopia she had pronounced modern political theory to be in deep crisis. With Rousseau, she showed that political theory, rightly conceived, might provide a way out. It connected the past to the present and, if studied and practiced carefully, could reveal a surplus meaning. Shklar had demonstrated that Rousseau had discussed all the ingredients that modern political theory was concerned with, in particular the theme of justice and the concomitant need to avoid extreme inequality. His philosophy could be used to show the continued relevance of modern republican ideas such as the formative experiences of individuals as expressed in virtues and vices, themes that remained important to liberal thought. Furthermore, an engagement with Rousseau’s philosophy would help us think about the appropriate body politic and those governmental structures that could guarantee freedom from fear and cruelty.

As with Rousseau, the preoccupation with Hegel derived from preparing and teaching a core course on the Enlightenment at Harvard. Freedom and Independence (Shklar 1976) was a critical analysis of Hegel’s phenomenology. For Shklar, Hegel not only integrated passion and reason but also was the first philosopher to consider the idea that the progress of human thought could be explained by systematically studying social interaction. The analysis of conflict between the individual and his social and natural environment, and how thought arose from that confrontation, remains Hegel’s greatest contribution. What emerges is, according to Shklar, a common concern for how the individual and his or her social environment are linked and how they interact. As to his speculations about how to solve the tensions and contradictions between the individual and his social context in modern society, however, Shklar was less sure.

Shklar’s own experience of the threat of totalitarianism and fear had made it difficult for her to pursue political theory in a business-as-usual fashion; for her, the time for great systems, ideas, and theorems was over. What was needed was to reflect about problems in a way that would pay its dues to the extreme experiences of the century but at the same time acknowledge that the world had not suddenly come to a halt. Shklar was most interested in those formative processes that used to be the theme of classical republican thought. However, she also realized that what was needed was to rethink the old themes of vices and virtues in the context of modern liberal democracy. Shklar’s declared aim was to bring political theory closer to the social and political realities of modern society by discussing modern vices not just in political contexts but in the social realm as well. This was not easy, particularly since the boundaries between the spheres were always shifting.

In Ordinary Vices Shklar argued that in contrast to other liberal conceptions that aim at a summum bonum, what she termed the modern and specifically American imprinted liberalism of fear refers only to a summum malum—cruelty (and, in response to cruelty, how to avoid suffering) (1984: 7–9). The other vices (hypocrisy, snobbery, arrogance, betrayal, and misanthropy) need to be ranked in relation to the first, cruelty. Looking at the various vices, nothing justified putting cruelty first more than the experiences of the twentieth century. As a consequence, liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind (4).

As Patrick Riley, a former student of Shklar’s, noted, Ordinary Vices was the summa of Shklarism, a fusion of psychological confidence and moral skepticism (qtd. in Memorial Tributes 1992: 102). Ordinary Vices had been inspired by Montaigne, but Montesquieu was never far from Shklar’s intellectual map. In a monograph for Oxford University Press’s Past Masters series, she took the opportunity to put forward her interpretation of Montesquieu, particularly her view that the French philosopher did not stress rights so much as a mental predisposition toward an early form of a liberalism of fear (Shklar 1987: 89). For Shklar, Montesquieu’s early liberalism of fear is the attempt to avoid, above all, cruelty, unnecessary suffering, and brutal punishment. He favored a rather minimalist conceptualization of liberalism free from utopian dimensions; its aim and major purpose was to achieve a decent society marked by the absence of fear.

Shklar describes Montesquieu not only as a mediator between Europe and America but also as a bridge between a traditional and a modern idea of constitutional government (111). Montesquieu was welcomed, especially by scholars who had long complained that the American-French exchange had often been neglected when studying the republican tradition. Shklar had rightly pointed out that Pocock’s reconstruction of the ‘Atlantic republican tradition’ had given us Hamlet without the Prince by somehow forgetting France (Wright 2007: 152). This was obviously something that Shklar’s interpretation of Montesquieu aimed to correct.

Shklar also devoted a number of her essays to political theory’s methodological problems. Learning Without Knowing, for example, was the attempt to tackle two problems: that of surplus meaning and that of the type of knowledge that the humanities and social sciences produce (Shklar 1998b [1980]). When old ideas are interpreted in changing contexts, particularly in times of reform and democratization, this poses a challenge to which history and the history of ideas have to respond. According to Shklar, the sociologization of the history of ideas ran the risk of paying too much attention to quantitative detail. She also warned that specialization could narrow the mind (1998b [1980]). At the same time, one should not go to the other extreme by conflating values and intentions of the more radical kind with good history writing. Detachment from politics was part of the ethics of responsibility, as Weber, to whom Shklar referred, knew only too well (126). Shklar conceded that Weber’s ideal was hard to achieve. Social science practitioners will never gain the same level of security of knowing and knowledge that the sciences strive for (126). The demand for the production of useful knowledge in the humanities and social sciences was therefore loaded with risks and ambiguities. In such a situation Shklar recommended organized skepticism and self-control against prophets and gurus (128).

In another essay Shklar voiced her concern about some aspects of the interpretative turn in the social sciences (1998h [1986]). If intellectual influences, intentions of the writer, and specific historical constellations had no bearing on the actual texts in question, the texts themselves would be subject to a rather impoverished treatment. To see the reading of the text as something that is identical with human action blurs all boundaries between the different forms or appearances of existence (that is, any social action could simply be regarded as reading). Shklar suspected that the real motive behind such argumentation was not only to establish hermeneutics as a leading epistemological instrument in the modern social sciences and arts, but also to defend the intellectual hegemony and almost absolute position of the interpreter. The thus secularized, revamped idea of the hermeneutic circle serves nothing so much as the new absolute position of the decipherers themselves.

While Shklar’s trilogy on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu can be read as an attempt to make sense of modern European conceptualizations of liberty and its psychological preconditions, a preoccupation with American political theory and the American intellectual tradition meant not just touching on questions of liberty under new social and political circumstances but also taking transatlantic communication and exchanges into account. In this context Shklar remained skeptical of answers that seemed to her to be either too one-dimensional or too complacent, particularly when they appeared as grand narratives, be it in the form of American exceptionalism or in the form of a rather arrogant whig history of American liberalism.

Shklar differed from Arendt in her particular understanding of the novel environment in which Americans found themselves. There was not one monolithic way to come to terms with a new beginning. Shklar’s own interpretation threw a more sophisticated light on the beginnings of the republic than did Arendt’s. In 1990, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, Shklar delivered a groundbreaking presidential speech entitled Redeeming American Political Theory, in which she tried to situate the emergence and history of American political ideas in the context of real power struggles (Shklar 1998g). She insisted that political ideas and reflections were not limited to academic or scientific discourse but could also be encountered outside of academia, most prominently perhaps in the form of literature and in popular perceptions and accounts. The main thrust of her speech, however, was directed against the taken-for-granted assumptions of American exceptionalism and liberalism, and at the relevance of political theory for political science. According to Shklar, liberal exceptionalism was unable to deal adequately with the darker side of American history. The alternative that Shklar presented not only was much more plausible but also showed that political theory had practical and moral implications and at times—as in the case of Emerson, for example—broad educational impact.

Shklar had always been unhappy with political theories that did not pay attention to the specific historical contexts and constellations out of which ideas emerged. At the same time, she was aware that to abstract and universalize from specific historical situations would be equally problematic. A masterful example of a much more balanced discussion is her essay Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States (Shklar 1998f [1989]). Against Berlin’s notion of negative liberty Shklar stresses that at least in America rights emerged as means that would allow people "to realize goals against others (111–12, emphasis in the original). In America, insists Shklar, the fight between master and slave was not a Hegelian fantasy but real. For her, the fight against slavery was a fight for freedom itself; it was a way of political life" (112). The claiming of rights was an inseparable part of that struggle. As Shklar showed, the idea of rights was much more important in the history of American liberalism than the Europeans’ liberal distinction between positive and negative liberty.

In The Faces of Injustice (1990), which followed on from her deliberation on the limits of negative liberty, Shklar suggested a change of perspective: injustice might be better understood as something that is not just the negative counterpart to justice. Injustice must be studied as a phenomenon in its own right, as something that needs to be conceptualized in its own terms. This should be done independently of grand theory constructions in search of a summum bonum. With her critique, Shklar aimed at a defense of a bare-bones liberalism that was compassionate while at the same time remaining antisystemic in its conceptualization.

Shklar argued that in contrast to advocating distributive models, there always existed a skeptical tradition in political theory, which provided guidance and contained critical reflections in relation to injustice. For her, the skeptical tradition had the advantage that it regarded injustice not just as an absence of justice or just procedures but as occurring continuously within the framework of an established polity with an operative system of law, in normal times (Shklar 1990: 19). The skeptics knew this, hence their interest in discussing concrete cases and situations. In a way, skeptical philosophers such as Plato, Augustine, and Montaigne were first and foremost exemplary storytellers, not systems builders.

Shklar concluded that to give injustice its due demanded a different perspective and a distinct type of narrative. A good start would be to identify, recognize, and listen to victims of injustice. In effect, such a new critical approach could tell us more about the many faces of injustice than following the false hope of striving for an ever-more-perfect state of justice, including the idea of a perpetual amelioration of the laws.

In American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991), Shklar elaborated on some of the arguments from The Faces of Injustice by exploring the concepts of political and social rights. She was aware that political membership remained of primary importance as it constituted the referential framework for all other rights and demands, but she showed that to insist only on formal membership was to neglect the rich connotations of citizenship. Shklar’s argument suggested that political belonging (as expressed in voting) depends on earning. After all, one has to be part of a political community before the standing and status that derive from being able to provide for oneself can be acknowledged. However, this did not necessarily imply that the social world and earning one’s living have merely derivative functions; rather, Shklar suggested that there always existed a strong relationship between the two. With reference to American history, Shklar showed that citizenship would be an empty shell if deprived of these concrete social connotations.

Toward the end of her life, Shklar had come to realize that the theme of exile and emigration had the potential to throw an entirely new light on the history of obligation and loyalty. To be sure, Shklar had always felt that the story of exile sat uncomfortably with the ideal of belonging. In a discussion of Michael Walzer’s Interpretation and Social Criticism she had attacked Walzer’s model interpreter whose criticism supposedly worked differently because in contrast to the discoverer or inventor who either founded a religion or a paradigm (the prophet or discoverer), or functioned like a neutral and somewhat distant constitutional legislator (the inventor), the interpreter belonged to a community, could work from within, and was therefore less manipulative (Shklar 1998g: 378). For Shklar, Walzer’s argument was too group-or community-centered; it gave too much credit to, and had too much confidence in, the shared understanding and values that underlie community life. While Shklar did not exclude the possibility that such communities could exist, for her such a presupposition did not sit easily with the experiences of conflict or the pluralism of interests in modern representative democracies, nor did it give enough weight to individuals and their right to hold opinions as individuals.

For Shklar, the perspective of exile threw a different light on obligations. Exile, she noted, was a fundamental human experience that had been dealt with extensively in history and literature. However, surprisingly little had been said about it in terms of political theory—something that Shklar attempted to remedy (Shklar 1998a: 57). The exile perspective allowed her to explore various key questions for political thought—conditions for submission to rules, political obligation, and so on—from a different angle. It also implied a form of extreme decision-making, often engaging the entire personality (59).

According to Shklar, the fate of modern exiles showed some distinct features. As she points out, Athens and Rome, at least in their early democratic and republican periods, emphasized the public character and just procedures of their polities and demanded both obligation and loyalty to them. In contrast, many modern states have failed by turning state apparatuses into organizations where governmental illegality violates and disrupts civil society and the political process to the effect that political loyalty may survive but not obligation to obey the law (48). Shklar stressed that exiles, both those who left and those who went into internal exile and tried to maintain their clear private conscience, had absolutely no obligations to such a state, country, or government. The difference between classical and modern exiles was predominantly marked not by the effort to avoid civil war but by the fact that the modern experience is based on the individual’s critical judgment and the conscientious refusal to follow what is demanded of him or her if this is considered unjust. To put it differently, massive exit tests the legitimacy of the modern state (59).

Shklar was painfully aware that today’s emigrants and exiles face extremely challenging conditions. In many instances there is no host country to offer asylum. There often are no foreign exile communities and no country to escape to. Most of today’s refugees find themselves in pure limbo, a situation that evokes moral concern, even moral outrage. Those who are outraged and show solidarity find themselves in a solitary situation like that of Thoreau—that is, they cannot join a liberating force, nor is it