Wikipedia Deep Dive

Judith N. Shklar

11 min read

The Philosopher Who Put Cruelty First

What is the worst thing one person can do to another? For most of the history of Western philosophy, the standard answers involved violations of divine law, betrayals of truth, or failures of reason. Judith Shklar had a different answer. Cruelty. Physical, deliberate, systematic cruelty—the kind that governments are uniquely positioned to inflict on ordinary people who have no recourse against power.

This was not an abstract philosophical position for Shklar. She knew what cruelty looked like.

Born Judita Nisse in Riga, Latvia, in 1928, she was thirteen years old when her Jewish family fled Europe as the Nazi war machine swept across the continent. Their escape route took them through Japan and across the Pacific to North America, finally settling in Canada in 1941. By the time she was sixteen, she was studying at McGill University—but even there, the architecture of discrimination was plain to see. The entrance requirements at McGill demanded 750 points for Jewish applicants. For everyone else, 600 points would do.

These experiences shaped everything that followed.

A Career of Firsts

Shklar completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at McGill by 1950, then earned her doctorate from Radcliffe College—the women's coordinate institution to Harvard—in 1955. Her mentor was Carl Joachim Friedrich, a towering figure in political theory. Friedrich was not one for effusive praise. The only compliment he ever offered his exceptional student was characteristically backhanded: "Well, this isn't the usual thesis, but then I did not expect it to be."

She would eventually succeed him.

In 1956, Shklar joined the Harvard faculty. Fifteen years later, in 1971, she became the first woman ever to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department. The path there was anything but smooth. When her tenure decision came up, the department hesitated and dithered. Shklar, pragmatic as ever, proposed her own solution: a half-time appointment with effective tenure and the more modest title of lecturer. She had three children by then and understood the realities of academic life for women in that era.

By 1980, any such compromises were behind her. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government, one of the most prestigious chairs at Harvard. Her colleague Stanley Hoffmann, himself a distinguished scholar, offered what may be the most concise assessment of her standing: "She was by far the biggest star of the department." He also called her "the most devastatingly intelligent person I ever knew here."

The adverb is telling. Devastatingly.

What Sets Shklar Apart

Most political philosophers spend their careers theorizing about justice. What would a just society look like? What principles should govern the distribution of rights and resources? These are noble questions, and thinkers from Plato to John Rawls have devoted their lives to answering them.

Shklar thought they were asking the wrong questions.

Or rather, she thought they were only asking half the questions. "Philosophy fails to give injustice its due," she argued. For centuries, philosophers had talked about justice while ignoring injustice, analyzed virtue while glossing over vice. This struck Shklar as a profound evasion—like trying to understand light without ever examining darkness.

Her work reversed the polarity. Instead of asking what makes societies good, she asked what makes them cruel. Instead of theorizing about ideal virtue, she catalogued ordinary vices: hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, misanthropy. Her 1984 book Ordinary Vices remains a landmark work precisely because it refused to look away from the uncomfortable realities of human behavior.

This was not pessimism for its own sake. It was a different foundation for thinking about politics.

The Liberalism of Fear

Shklar's most influential idea grew directly from her focus on cruelty. She called it "the liberalism of fear."

The phrase needs unpacking. Liberalism, in the political philosophy sense, refers to a tradition of thought that emphasizes individual rights, limited government, and personal freedom. It is not the same as the American colloquial use of "liberal" to mean left-leaning; in Shklar's usage, it encompasses a broad tradition running from John Locke through the American founders to contemporary defenders of constitutional democracy.

But why "of fear"?

Because Shklar believed that liberalism's deepest justification lay not in abstract principles about human dignity or natural rights, but in something more visceral: the recognition that power, when concentrated, becomes cruel. Governments that face no checks will abuse their citizens. Majorities that face no limits will oppress minorities. The strong, left unconstrained, will torment the weak.

This is not a hopeful foundation for politics. It is a fearful one—fear of cruelty, fear of abuse, fear of what happens when power goes unchecked. But Shklar argued this fear was precisely what made liberalism defensible. Not as an optimistic vision of human perfectibility, but as a realistic response to human brutality.

"Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of his or her life as is compatible with the like freedom of every adult."

That was how Shklar defined liberalism's core commitment. Notice the emphasis: decisions made "without fear." Freedom, for Shklar, was not primarily about self-actualization or the pursuit of happiness. It was about protection—about creating conditions where ordinary people could live without terror of those more powerful than themselves.

Rights as Shields, Not Swords

This perspective led Shklar to think about rights differently than many of her contemporaries.

In much political philosophy, rights are treated as near-sacred moral claims—things to which human beings are entitled simply by virtue of being human. The language tends toward the absolute: inalienable rights, fundamental freedoms, inviolable dignities.

Shklar took a more instrumental view. Rights, in her telling, are less like divine entitlements and more like licenses—practical tools that citizens need in order to protect themselves from abuse. This may sound like a demotion of rights from their lofty philosophical pedestal. In some ways, it is. But Shklar would argue that this humbler conception is actually more protective of real human beings in the real world.

Why? Because it keeps the focus where it belongs: on the vulnerable, the powerless, the ordinary person facing the machinery of state authority. Rights matter not because they express beautiful truths about human nature, but because without them, governments crush people.

The View from Below

There is a consistent thread running through all of Shklar's work: she always looked at politics from the perspective of ordinary citizens rather than institutions or elites.

This might seem obvious, but it actually represents a significant departure from much political theory. Think about how we typically analyze political systems. We examine constitutions and their design. We study legislatures and how they function. We theorize about executive power and its proper limits. We debate the role of courts. All of this assumes a kind of institutional perspective—we are looking down at politics from the vantage point of its structures.

Shklar inverted this gaze. She asked: what does this system look like to someone at the bottom? To someone who might be arrested arbitrarily, or silenced by the powerful, or left without recourse when wronged? This is the "sense of injustice" she wrote about in The Faces of Injustice—the visceral, immediate experience of being treated unfairly by forces beyond one's control.

It is a perspective shaped by experience. When you have fled across continents to escape state-sanctioned murder, when you have encountered quota systems designed to exclude you, you do not need abstract theories to understand what unchecked power can do. You know.

Why Constitutional Democracy?

Given her dark view of human political potential, what kind of government did Shklar favor?

Constitutional democracy. But her endorsement came with characteristic qualifications. Constitutional democracy, in her view, was not good—it was merely less bad than the alternatives. It was the system best designed to limit the cruelties that power makes possible.

Two features mattered most to her. First, constitutional restrictions on government authority: limits on what even democratically elected majorities can do to individuals and minorities. Second, the dispersion of power among what she called "a multiplicity of politically active groups." No single faction, no single interest, no single branch of government should hold unchallenged sway.

This was liberalism without illusions. Not a starry-eyed faith in progress or human goodness, but a clear-eyed recognition that the best we can hope for is a system that makes systematic cruelty difficult to sustain.

A Life of Honors

Shklar's contributions earned recognition at the highest levels of academic life. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1970 and joined the American Philosophical Society in 1990. She served as president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy in 1982 and as vice president of the American Political Science Association in 1983.

Then, in 1989, she became the first woman ever elected president of the American Political Science Association. First woman tenured in Harvard's Government Department. First woman to lead the nation's preeminent political science organization. The pattern is hard to miss.

In between these milestones, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984—the so-called "genius grant"—and held visiting positions at Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale. The Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa awarded her its teaching prize in 1985, calling her "demanding, rewarding, forthright, fair, and reasonable, a model of intellectual and human qualities rarely combined."

Throughout her life, friends and colleagues knew her as "Dita." She and her husband Gerald had three children: David, Michael, and Ruth.

The Books That Endure

Shklar wrote across a remarkable range of topics, but certain works stand out.

After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith appeared in 1957, examining why political philosophy had lost confidence in the possibility of designing ideal societies. Legalism followed in 1964, analyzing the relationship between law and politics—particularly the fraught question of political trials. She wrote major studies of Rousseau and Hegel, placing her firmly in the tradition of historians of political thought.

But the works that cemented her reputation came later. Ordinary Vices in 1984. The Faces of Injustice in 1990. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion in 1991—her last book before her death in 1992, exploring what it truly means to belong to the American political community.

Her essay "The Liberalism of Fear" has become a touchstone for political theorists. Originally published in a 1989 collection, it has been reprinted, analyzed, debated, and cited countless times. Many consider it the definitive statement of a distinctly modern form of liberalism—one chastened by the horrors of the twentieth century, stripped of naïve optimism, yet still committed to protecting human beings from the worst that politics can inflict.

An Unlikely Pop Culture Moment

Decades after her death, Shklar's work found an unexpected audience through the American television series The Good Place. The show, which explored questions of ethics and moral philosophy through comedy, referenced Ordinary Vices as inspiration for thinking about a well-ordered afterlife society.

It is hard to know what Shklar would have made of this. She was not given to frivolity in her writing, though colleagues remembered her wit. Perhaps she would have appreciated the irony: a philosopher who spent her career analyzing human vice and political cruelty becoming a touchstone for a sitcom about the afterlife.

The Skeptical Liberal

Shklar died in September 1992, one week before what would have been her sixty-fourth birthday. The political landscape she analyzed—Cold War liberalism facing its ideological enemies—was already transforming. The Berlin Wall had fallen three years earlier. The Soviet Union had dissolved the previous year. A new world was emerging.

Yet her work has only grown in relevance. In an era of renewed anxiety about democratic backsliding, authoritarian populism, and the abuse of state power, her unflinching focus on cruelty and fear speaks to contemporary concerns. She reminds us that the case for liberal democracy does not rest on its ability to make us happy or virtuous or fulfilled. It rests on something more basic: its capacity to prevent governments from doing their worst.

Recent years have seen a revival of scholarly interest in her thought. Books analyzing her legacy have appeared from Palgrave, Routledge, and university presses. Foreign Policy has asked "Who's Afraid of Judith Shklar?"—a question that echoes her own focus on fear while paying tribute to her rising influence.

The liberalism she articulated was not comforting. It did not promise a shining city on a hill or a march of progress toward perfection. It promised only this: a political order designed to make systematic cruelty harder to achieve. Given what she had witnessed in her early life—and given what the twentieth century inflicted on millions—perhaps that was enough.

Perhaps that was everything.