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

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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 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

Shklar's liberalism belongs squarely within the tradition of protecting the rights of the individual and guarding vigilantly against governments' abuse of authority. But in her emphasis on fear, cruelty, and the ambiguous mixture of injustice and misfortune in ordinary life, she seeks a rather more nuanced and subtle framework of liberalism, one that is not reducible to strictly legal or constitutional definitions. In remarkable studies such as Ordinary Vices (1984) and Faces of Injustice (1994), she canvases the world of art, drama, and the novel to locate in the texture of ordinary life the emergence of a complex, liberal morality based in an awareness of cruelty and harm. Her discussions of vice and injustice move seamlessly between Montaigne and Molière, Kant and E. L. Doctorow, Jacksonian democratic reforms and the novels of Sinclair Lewis. Her ability to blend philosophical analysis with literary criticism foreshadows recent books on ethics like Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity, in its effort to assess the legacy of Kant in light of ancient Greek tragedy, or Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice, in its effort to read novels by Dickens and poems by Whitman as correctives to narrowly utilitarian doctrines of legal justice. Despite her status in the fields of political theory and intellectual history, Shklar has not received the same attention as these other philosophers within the fields of literary history and criticism, not even in those cases where the influence of liberalism on literary studies is under discussion. ³

The majority of commentators on Shklar focus on her interpretation of the canonical authorities of liberalism such as Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and Mill. But a small group of her readers has taken up her focus on literature's contribution to liberalism, the imaginative element that goes hand in hand with her politics, in Yack's panegyric phrase...