II. UTOPIA, HOPE AND PROPHECY

Shklar declared in “The Liberalism of Fear” that her idea of liberalism was “entirely nonutopian”.Footnote ¹⁵ But she did not condemn utopianism outright. Rather, she suggested that “we may well be able to get on without utopia, but not without the political energy required to think both critically and positively about the state we are in and how to improve it.”Footnote ¹⁶ The hope-oriented inclination that typically underpinned utopian theorizing was, she believed, a necessary part of political theory. Thus she thought in detail about what kind of politics hope motivates and took seriously the many forms of hopeful politics that catered to the needs of the “weak” and sought to improve the lives of politics’ losers.Footnote ¹⁷

It is this concern to take seriously political hope that best explains why Shklar did not condemn the normative liberalism and “realistic utopias” of Rawls and his followers. The unhistorical, abstract and systematic character of Rawls's thought may at first seem fundamentally at odds with Shklar's preferences. But she did not reject Rawls's work as “utopian”.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, despite liberal theorists’ forgetfulness of memory, Shklar condoned their work because it embodied the survival of optimism and exemplified a very specific kind of hope, of which she approved. Determined to distinguish between the prophetic hope of transformative politics and the realistic hope of reformist politics, her attitude to radical politics was also entirely distinct from the anti-utopian, anti-totalitarian thought of her forebears and contemporaries that dominated political theory in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The 1950s saw a flurry of anti-utopian publications. Many émigré thinkers, including Jacob Talmon, Leo Strauss and Karl Popper, claimed that the blueprint of a utopian society, that embodiment of the perfectionist tendency in political thought, was now proven to culminate in communist or fascist totalitarian terror.Footnote ¹⁹ It was in this context that Shklar published her first book, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957).Footnote ²⁰ Despite the title, this was not a book about utopias or an intervention in these debates. Rather, it marked her contribution to another post-war conversation about the status of political theory. After Utopia was an exploration of the historical roots of the post-war ideological vacuum epitomized by the prevalence of what she called the “unhappy consciousness” (first described by Hegel, and shared by existentialists, Christian fatalists and conservative liberals alike).Footnote ²¹ Shklar argued that what made the twentieth-century version of this phenomenon radically distinct from the romantic pessimism of the nineteenth century was that these narratives of loss were no longer “challenged by any serious rival political philosophies”.Footnote ²² She ascribed this intellectual void to the post-war inability to reflect on justice, which she believed to be the true subject of political philosophy: “it demands at least an ounce of utopianism even to consider justice, and this utopianism . . . is absent today.”Footnote ²³ Until we can recover hope, in some form or another, traditional political theory is obsolete. Optimism—the source of the radical political imagination and all political planning—had been destroyed by the war. Without it, there could be no future-oriented political thought, and thus, ultimately, no political thought at all.

As Shklar herself acknowledged, she clearly “shared in the spirit of the age to the extent of being neither able nor willing to build an original theory of politics.”Footnote ²⁴ In an early review, Sheldon Wolin placed After Utopia alongside other contemporary accounts of declining political faith, mostly propagated by émigré philosophers. Her account, he wrote, belonged to the same genre as that of Strauss.Footnote ²⁵ Decades later, Shklar responded to such claims and argued that her position had been even more severe than that taken by Strauss when he claimed that political philosophy had become a “pitiable rump”.Footnote ²⁶ “He was being comparatively optimistic,” she wrote. “At least he thought something remained.”Footnote ²⁷ In contrast also to Berlin, who declared that “so long as rational curiosity exists . . . political theory will not wholly perish from the earth,” Shklar's position might seem to have been one of absolute pessimism.Footnote ²⁸

But in fact Shklar's discussion of the death of political theory evidenced a different set of concerns. She was very specific about what it was she thought was dead. It was “not that political theory is dead, as has often been claimed, but that so much of it consists of an incantation of clichés which seem to have no relation to social experiences whose character is more sensed than expressed”.Footnote ²⁹ This was because classicism, the language of political theory, had become irrelevant. Shklar did not mourn the passing of a great tradition. This tradition, she suggested, had actually been dead for a very long time—since the end of classical political theory with Rousseau. What we were now mourning was the passing of the “Age of Ideology”—the period in which political theory acted as a guide to political action.Footnote ³⁰ It was not at all clear, Shklar suggested, that we should aim at the revival of this latter form.Footnote ³¹ While thinkers such as Strauss and Hannah Arendt referred to a “crisis” of political philosophy that was constituent of the larger “crisis of modernity”, Shklar heralded no such event.Footnote ³² She did not observe the end of a tradition culminating in moral catastrophe. In fact, in Legalism: Laws, Morals and Political Trials (1964) she attacked Strauss on precisely these grounds. She objected to the search for a “tradition of civility” and “political truth” that he believed was demanded by the so-called crisis: his marriage of nostalgic lamentation with a belief in universal truth she found abhorrent.Footnote ³³ She believed that “the formal concepts of traditional thought no longer serve any descriptive or prescriptive purpose in a social world that has for decades defied the inherited categories of political theory.”Footnote ³⁴ Rejecting the metaphysical implications of Strauss's idea of crisis, she preferred to believe that the regeneration of hope was within the realm of human possibility—not beyond it. Where Strauss's account implied that philosophical and political renewal were only possible through a return to the distant past, Shklar instead looked to the realities of the present and the future in her immediate, American, surroundings.

Thus Shklar's account of the decline of political theory was not merely a product of the “Weimar conversation”.Footnote ³⁵ Although she shared in the general pessimism of the post-war era, Shklar was less concerned with the death of “the tradition” and more interested in the prospective fate of American political theory at a time of intellectual specialization.Footnote ³⁶ Despite her criticisms of aspects of behaviouralism, she did not, like many political theorists, condemn political science outright: indeed, Shklar saw “the harangues against science that are so regularly and ritualistically delivered by literary men” as “a form of self-pity”.Footnote ³⁷ In this openness to developments in legal theory and political science, the impact of Carl Friedrich, her teacher and mentor at Harvard, is most visible.Footnote ³⁸ Throughout his long career at Harvard (1926–84), Friedrich attempted to synthesize normative, empirical and historical approaches to political studies. This attempt at an interdisciplinary approach was exemplified in Nomos, the Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, which he edited for eight years from its inception in 1958. These aspects of Friedrich's thought—as well as his defense of constitutionalism—find expression in Shklar's early willingness to combine traditional histories of political thought with assessments of contemporary developments in political science and legal theory.Footnote ³⁹ Like Friedrich, Shklar rejected political theories that isolated and prioritized a normative sphere of politics; by ignoring empirical politics, law and history, such theories failed to capture the realities of political experience in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁰

Shklar's early writings were in many ways in tune with the “end-of-ideology” outlook that dominated American academic culture more broadly and was espoused by modernization theorists and consensus historians alike.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, Shklar departed from this anti-ideological Cold War stance in a number of ways: first, in her more complex account of the meaning of ideology, outlined below; and second, in her not uncritical response to American exceptionalism and social science. She claimed that the ideas of liberal consensus propagated by behavioural science rested on an “image of a political world so bland and so harmonious” that it was far from realistic.Footnote ⁴² Unlike intellectuals such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, she did not invest her hope in America as a liberal bastion of freedom.Footnote ⁴³ Shklar may not have observed a crisis of modernity, but nor did she see in 1950s America the glorious triumph of modernization or democracy.

What is striking about Shklar's discussion of radical hope in her early works is her unwillingness to commit to a binary opposition between utopian and anti-utopian thought. She was determined to show that there had historically been no such great divide. In “The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia” (1965), she outlined for the first time a history of utopian thought that would frame her future discussions of radical political theory. She traced three discrete periods of thought: the age of classical utopias, the age of ideology and the contemporary “post-ideological state of mind”.Footnote ⁴⁴ This tripartite description challenged the moralizing binary categories of anti-utopian thinkers.

Shklar argued that the classical utopia was “in no sense a declaration of historical hopefulness—quite the contrary”.Footnote ⁴⁵ Utopias on the model of Thomas More's were not hope-inspired, future-oriented political programmes, but radically critical lamentations for a world that would never be. They represented “the timeless ‘ought’ that never ‘is’.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Widespread in Europe before the French Revolution, classical utopian thought embodied the sense of tragedy Shklar saw echoed in later theorists of European decline such as Arendt.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such thinkers were acutely aware of the “contrast between the possible and the probable”, to which “was added the sad confrontation between a crude and dissolute Europe and the virtue and unity of classical antiquity.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The classical utopia was, then, part of the history of melancholy: “the author of a utopia plays with perfection because it is impossible and therefore positively invites the passive acceptance of the imperfections of the world as it is.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Implicit here is the notion that underpinned Shklar's analysis of hopeful politics: to have hope we need the possibility of realizing that hope. Classical utopias thus belonged to the party of memory. After 1789, such lamentations no longer had a place in political thinking; they gave way to philosophies of history and progress. The “Age of Ideology” undid utopia: hope replaced memory. The imaginary societies born of early socialism were, by contrast, hopeful summons to action, blueprints of what society would one day be. And so “the end of utopian literature did not mark the end of hope; on the contrary, it coincided with the birth of historical optimism.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By returning utopia to its traditional meaning, Shklar subverted the association of hope and utopia. Such a move destabilized the anti-utopian stance offered by anti-totalitarian thinkers and shows the singularity of Shklar's approach to utopia compared to those émigré thinkers with whom she is so often confused.

Shklar did not believe that utopias were necessarily followed by terror.Footnote ⁵¹ She rejected the fanatical aspects of anti-totalitarian thought in the work of “conservative liberals” who, like Popper and Talmon, saw totalitarianism around every corner and “the dream of total control” in every utopia.Footnote ⁵² Shklar certainly shared the asperity of anti-totalitarian thinkers towards deterministic philosophies of history, but she never subscribed to Popper's argument that such philosophies of history were inherently totalitarian.Footnote ⁵³ Rather, her critique of grand theories of history was based on her suspicion of all thinkers who claim to systematize moral and political life.Footnote ⁵⁴ Shklar saw Popper's thought as guilty of the very same theoretical grandeur that he condemned. She rejected his implicit critique of the reformist impulse—an impulse he traced to “the malign influence of Plato and Hegel”.Footnote ⁵⁵ She did not see utopianism as necessarily dangerous, nor did her treatment of the “Age of Ideology” have much in common with the damning indictments of nineteenth-century thought that were so characteristic of Cold War theorizing. Against these—and Popper in particular—she argued that we must not be too bold in linking the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century to the philosophies of history that dominated the nineteenth, or blame the great philosophers for the crimes committed by their readers.Footnote ⁵⁶

Moreover, Shklar warned us to take care when using the term “ideology”. In the 1960s she analysed a variety of political theories under the umbrella of ideology—most notably in her studies of decisionism and legalism. She argued that we should be careful what we mean by ideology and not be too quick to celebrate its end, since ideology may not actually be dead: “only the “grand ‘isms’ were over . . . ideology in the simple sense of personal and group political preference” was, by and large, all that was left of political theory.Footnote ⁵⁷ She shared with many American academics the sense that the 1950s was a post-ideological age, dominated by “pragmatic politics in Europe and America”.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, she also departed from some of the implications of this position, suggesting that the common usage of the term ideology—as “a word of opprobrium encompassing all political dreams, whatever their nature”—failed to elucidate substantially our understanding of politics.Footnote ⁵⁹ Alert to the variety of possible meanings, Shklar did not equate ideology with totalitarianism. She claimed, with reference to Louis Hartz's American liberal consensus, that the term could also usefully explain other systems of thought.Footnote ⁶⁰ She also noted the importance of distinguishing between an ideology and its function within a political regime. In a 1959 article she gave an account of three different usages: ideology as “a mere matter of political preferences”; ideology in “its historicist, all-explaining form”; and “ideology in the more neutral sense, as a term in sociological discourse”.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1966 she suggested that as an analytical tool ideology had diminishing intellectual purchase, particularly with regard to the interpretation of the history of ideas. This was in part because of its determinist implications for thinking about historical causality and in part because of its psychological vagueness.Footnote ⁶² Her account of the post-ideological age thus contained both a non-pejorative assessment of contemporary ideologies and an acknowledgement of the moral and epistemological limitations of ideological analysis itself.

Shklar's account of the age of ideology has led many critics to a plausible but tenuous conflation of her treatment of utopia with that provided by Berlin. However, the differences between their accounts can shed light on a more general contrast between the thinkers. Berlin derived his critique of utopia from his commitment to pluralism. He believed that utopian thought was inherently monistic: there was “something radically wrong with the idea of a perfect society” precisely because it aims at an immutable “common good”.Footnote ⁶³ Shklar, by contrast, was not interested in the monism of utopias. Her suspicions of grand critiques with their all-encompassing claims also extended to pluralism and anti-utopianism. Instead, Shklar distinguished between past- and future-oriented conceptions. Her real battle—as would become clear in her later work—was against the cruelty implicit in perfectionism. She argued that “nothing but cruelty comes from those who seek perfection and forget the little good that lies directly within their powers.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For Shklar, all prophetic forms of thought—not simply utopian, perfectionist thought—could tend easily to cruelty. Indeed, she saw the transformative political thought that arrived with the French Revolution as far more problematic than the monistic classical utopias. Her challenge, then, was not to the strictly monistic form of utopia but to prophetic political thought in general.

In her later writings on utopias, Shklar abandoned her typology of hopeful politics—in part because she no longer positioned her account of utopia against the anti-utopian, anti-totalitarian background of the Cold War. By the 1980s, her utopias referred, above all, to the nineteenth-century American utopian experiments. Here, Shklar showed in far greater detail what she believed was problematic in utopian thought: in an essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, she explained that it was not the hopefulness of the utopian thinker in itself, but the certainty with which they delivered this hope and the extent to which cruelty is imbedded in the “perfecting temper”.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the perfectionist concentrates on his vision of an ideal future, he ignores the everyday realities that demand his attention and thus is cruel to those who surround him. Crucially, the utopian lacks historical memory: without recourse to memory the optimist forgets that transformative politics lead to acts of cruelty. Zealous utopians were ignorant of the lessons of the past and focused on the achievement of the ideal, future society to the extreme detriment of present, and possibly future, reality. Utopian thought tended to naivety in its plans for a better society and forgot that the ordinary sufferings of men will continue regardless of what kind of society they inhabit. Following Hawthorne, Shklar insisted that “however utopian a community thinks itself, it still must begin by building a prison and a graveyard”.Footnote ⁶⁶ What was dangerous in utopia was not the dream of a better society in itself, but the fervent belief that delivering that society was a certain possibility. Utopia and the drive to perfection, Shklar wrote, are often but “a will to power”.Footnote ⁶⁷

For Shklar, the success of John Rawls was to be found in his ability to eliminate from his thought all traces of precisely this kind of utopian zeal. In fact, Shklar's assessment of normative political theory is best understood in terms of her account of the rise and fall of hopeful politics in history. In the 1980s, she offered an update on the state of political theory—one that responded directly to the decline of political theory discourse of twenty years earlier: thanks to the rise of normative liberal theory, the post-war confusion had finally been mitigated by a renewal of political optimism. The politics of hope had, once again, mutated. “The publication of A Theory of Justice was a great event not only because of its intrinsic excellence but also because it freed many of its readers from a long, self-imposed philosophical silence”.Footnote ⁶⁸ Shklar had sought a way to rescue political hope from its utopian entanglement and restore it to reformist theory. In Rawls's work, this rescue mission found success. By rejecting determinist philosophies of history and instead constructing normative models, political theory “overcame its phase of cosmic excess”. Normative liberalism thus allowed political theory to survive the decline of ideology.Footnote ⁶⁹

Despite some criticism and chastisement, Shklar ultimately championed Rawlsian normative theory. To understand why, it is important to emphasize the distinction she drew between prophecy and hope. Shklar strove to leave behind the rejection of political hope that had dominated post-war émigré thought. To do this successfully, she had to sever the idea of hope from the notion of utopia. She therefore drew a stark contrast between utopian and normative theory. Forward-looking normative theories were examples of the kind of hopeful politics Shklar had previously claimed were extinct. They were nothing like past-oriented, nostalgic, classical utopias; nor were they anything like nineteenth-century blueprint utopias, which possessed hope in excess.Footnote ⁷⁰ Instead, they were the best examples of moderate reformist political theory. The normative model of the best state—exemplified by Rawls's A Theory of Justice, but with its roots in Aristotle's Politics—is perfectly possible (if difficult to achieve). These theories did not urge transformation but set standards: “The idea of a best form of government as a norm is not only not utopian but perfectly compatible with a very critical view of utopian theory.”Footnote ⁷¹ The reformist belief in progress does not inevitably terminate in paradise.

Normative theorists often did not themselves make this sharp contrast between normative and utopian thought. Rawls famously described his just society as a “realistic utopia”.Footnote ⁷² Although by deploying the term “realistic” he gestured towards a disjuncture between normative liberalism and utopian thought, the use of “utopia” showed a willingness to connect his work with the utopian tradition. By contrast, Shklar's intention was to distinguish between different types of hopeful politics. For her, there existed a spectrum: from the excessively, dangerously hopeful to the simply reformist. She placed Rawls at one end of that spectrum so as to distance his thought from the excessive political hope that had dominated the age of ideology. By highlighting this distance, Shklar denied that all hopeful politics must be transformative.Footnote ⁷³ Jettisoning utopia had no bearing on political hope: despite all we know about mankind we can, nonetheless, still have hope. And so, despite its unhistorical nature, Shklar supported the normative liberal project. Where both the critics and proponents of normative liberalism have accused it of utopianism, for Shklar it was precisely the fact that it was not utopian, yet still remained hopeful, that made it worthwhile.

Shklar's relationship with utopian thought is thus far more complex than many of her readers suggest. She rejected the anti-totalitarian condemnation of utopia, which painted hope as dangerous, and the nostalgia that sometimes accompanied such a rejection; in her later thought she was able to accommodate herself to unhistorical normative theory because it contained hope without the vices of transformative politics. However, for Shklar, normative theory nonetheless neglected something crucial: memory. Without memory, hope—even the right kind of hope—could always become prophetic. Memory and history were the real shields against transformative politics.

III. MEMORY, NOSTALGIA AND SCEPTICISM

Shklar argued that history “shows us what men are by revealing to us what they once were”, and “teaches us our limitations and invites moderation”.Footnote ⁷⁴ She wrote no systematic philosophy of history and her engagement with historiographical debates was limited.Footnote ⁷⁵ But this did not keep her from criticizing unhistorical thinkers and imploring them to move beyond their forgetfulness of history so as to develop a moral psychology that would endow their understanding of politics with moral meaning. Without historical memory, she claimed, these theorists failed to grasp the cruelties that pervaded everyday political interaction.Footnote ⁷⁶ Shklar's central dispute with Rawls and normative liberal thought rested on this assumption. Even with his later turn to history, Rawls's work was still forgetful of history and overdetermined by hope.Footnote ⁷⁷ Shklar believed that emphasizing memory could remind normative theory of its recent past and the limits of the transhistorical standards on which it relied.

But to see Shklar simply as a champion of memory and, by implication, a conservative would be to ignore the fact that she advocated a very particular kind of memory. She strove to support the party of memory in a way that simultaneously accounted for hope. Wary of the implications of a preoccupation with the past and of the potential for memory to mutate into wistfulness and sentimentality, she argued that, first and foremost, history must pay close attention to the memory of cruelty. She was aware, however, that even histories of cruelty could culminate in disaffection and nostalgia. Her critique of the histories told by émigré thinkers rested on these implications. But if émigré histories were not the right kind of memory, the unhistorical nature of normative thought was not necessarily better. Shklar demanded that normative theory—as well as political science—recognize that it did not have to forget history in order to be democratic and optimistic. On the contrary, she thought that history could itself be hopeful. It could act as a sanguine adjunct to democratic thought just as political hope could provide a counterweight to memory.

The primary function of memory was to remind us of cruelty—about this Shklar was candid. The noble deeds of extraordinary individuals might as well be forgotten, for such deeds taught us little about the democratic realities of cruelty. Cruelty has forever underpinned human interaction and knowledge of this cruelty was vital to understanding collective life. The best histories of cruelty were genealogical in form. Thinkers like Nietzsche and Rousseau turned to genealogies of evil and creation myths so as to lay bare injustices. They had little use for historical facts and instead used tragic, sometimes fictional, genealogies as mnemonic devices to illuminate the recurrent failures of men.Footnote ⁷⁸ By exposing past and present simultaneously, they illuminated the transcendental nature and constancy of cruelty. Indeed, Nietzsche argued that memory itself was “cruelty self-inflicted”.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the process of remembering, “actuality is to be revealed, shown, and shown up by a review of its origins that does not delineate the causes, but the awful character of this aging world.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Such genealogical approaches to history, which treated cruelty as transcendent, suited Shklar: cruelty was the one aspect of morality that she would not historicize.

Shklar saw a modern counterpart to these approaches in what she called, borrowing Nietzsche's term, the “monumental history” of Arendt.Footnote ⁸¹ Arendt's history meant “to fortify us against a very actual and quite specific danger”. It was “a service to a reality that indulges in no illusions about the distant future, but reconciles us to a living past and teaches us to concentrate on the best conceivable present”.Footnote ⁸² Yet Arendt's storytelling also suffered from her obsession with totalitarianism. Her representation of the American Revolution and its legacy was skewed, crucially in her neglect of slavery. She considered history in a way that ultimately rendered historical fact superfluous.Footnote ⁸³ Shklar ascribed these flaws to Arendt's émigré experience. The story of exiles was one without a future, “only a past”.Footnote ⁸⁴ In her terms, Arendt's preoccupation with decline was unsurprising: as Shklar pointed out, “one does not forget Weimar easily.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This, Shklar could forgive. What she could not was the fact that Arendt's historical writing was marred by “an intense distaste for the present age and all that has contributed to it”.Footnote ⁸⁶

These, for Shklar, were the potential pitfalls of the disaffected mind, the side effect of too much memory: the descent from disaffection to the realm of prophecy and nostalgia was always imminent. Shklar may have shared the émigré concern to write histories of cruelty, but she could not fathom the nostalgic implications of extreme disaffection. Thinkers such as Arendt and Strauss focused too often on Nietzschean noble deeds alongside the memory of cruelty, glorifying a mythical, pre-lapsarian and typically Greek past at the expense of hope for the present. Shklar, by contrast, did not locate hope in the prospect of return to an imagined past, but very much in her contemporary American political context.

Perhaps surprisingly, thinkers like Arendt who “lamented the loss of some lost public space” and were, in Shklar's terms, largely responsible for the modern revival of “the dream of the polis”, were not the worst culprits when it came to writing nostalgic history.Footnote ⁸⁷ Instead, her fiercest critique was aimed at communitarian thought. The kind of nostalgia generated by hopeful communitarians was far more dangerous than the often anodyne nostalgia of the anti-totalitarian imagination. Encouraged by erroneous accounts of history, hopeful communitarian thought could very rapidly deteriorate into a distinctive form of nostalgia that refused history's most important lessons. In a review of Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, Shklar argued that Taylor not only forgot cruelty, but also underestimated evil:Footnote ⁸⁸

Shklar criticized Taylor's prioritization of empathy above causal explanation, and argued that he imputed “intuitions to us that are not grounded in any effort to describe or analyze the most prevalent actual opinions and conduct of Europeans in our horrible century”.Footnote ⁹⁰ Not only, then, did he neglect the realities of cruelty and evil, but he failed to register the actualities of ordinary people. He existed, she wrote, in “the moral world of those who fear scepticism more than evil: he prioritized hope over memory at a dramatic cost.”Footnote ⁹¹

How could thinkers avoid this dangerous fate? In her endeavour to formulate an approach to history that addressed the memory of cruelty without turning to nostalgic jeremiads, Shklar used context as a weapon against forgetfulness.Footnote ⁹² Not only does a contextual approach to the history of ideas show the motivational complexities of human life; it also successfully conveys the ordinary cruelties of human interaction. It is never entirely clear precisely why Shklar thought that a historical outlook necessarily entailed an enhanced sensitivity to cruelty, but her broadly realist historical epistemology twinned with her belief in the ubiquity of cruelty was sufficient for her to claim a direct link between the historical awareness of cruelty and ethical insight. Given this emphasis on history's ethical lessons, Shklar's praise for contextualism was more moral than epistemological. She was also far more interested in political contexts than in intellectual ones. She believed that contextual histories of ideas risked antiquarianism, failing as they often did “to make the past become present”.Footnote ⁹³ It was the imaginative force and longevity of past thinkers and the moral advantages of a historical perspective that Shklar cared about: what was important was that histories of political thought fulfilled the tasks of memory and did not fall into the trap of nostalgic forgetfulness of cruelty. It was on these grounds that Shklar objected to aspects of Berlin's approach to the history of ideas. She criticized the “upbeat tone” of Berlin's writings, arguing that his romanticized notions of belonging and loyalty entailed nostalgia.Footnote ⁹⁴ Contextual readings could buttress against this by highlighting the cruel and ironic implications of much political theory, implications which Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, like Taylor's, usually failed to convey.

Interpretations that conflate Shklar's thought with Berlin's miss her hostility to these aspects of his thought. They also fail to note that despite their shared mistrust of grand theories and all-encompassing systems, the scepticism that is attributed to both of them was far from identical. Indeed, Shklar's defining characteristic as a thinker was not her scepticism.Footnote ⁹⁵ Labelling Shklar a political sceptic may call to light her aversion to ideological politics, but it does not convey her political hopefulness—in particular, her optimism about “the democracy of everyday life”.Footnote ⁹⁶ Her disposition led her to take moral sceptical arguments seriously, but equally she was very willing to make strong moral claims. Indeed, the liberalism of fear was grounded in her idea of a negative universal moral standard—cruelty. By turning to such a standard she saved herself from the debilitating scepticism of Montaigne. For Shklar, unbridled scepticism was as problematic as unbridled hope. Deeply concerned with the problems and limits of scepticism, Shklar insisted that scepticism was only useful insofar as it was mitigated by history.

Dogmatic scepticism was traditionally incompatible with the study of history. Sceptics trusted only in empirical, scientific forms of knowledge. The sceptic who wanted to take history seriously was thus confronted with the dilemma of how to reconcile these two commitments. Shklar traced this dilemma to the Enlightenment, when “intense self-doubt” and excessive scepticism, epitomized in the thought of Rousseau and Voltaire, led to “a deadening sense of the limits of history.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Enlightenment anti-clericalism had entailed a rejection of the past and the repressive traditions it represented; meanwhile, trust in science had occasioned an insistence on the exclusive authority of empirical certainty.Footnote ⁹⁸ Without trust, history—a form of merely conjectural knowledge—seemed to have no use. The elevation of science had left scant intellectual space for a commitment to history.

It was in the thought of Jean d'Alembert that Shklar found a solution to the sceptical historian's dilemma. D'Alembert, Shklar argued, was willing to see history as intrinsically compatible with science. For him, the act of remembering played a significant role across the disciplines: history was the “organizer of human knowledge”.Footnote ⁹⁹ D'Alembert argued that history was the master of common sense, by which scepticism must be balanced.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In him, Shklar saw a calmer, more diffuse scepticism than that of Rousseau and Voltaire. His approach “allowed history to survive and grow in a scientific intellectual climate”. For Shklar, this was vital: without history, without the process of remembering and “retrieving from memory what has been stored up . . . there could be no human understanding”.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In these writings on the relationship of historians to science we can see Shklar trying to make sense of the dilemmas that faced modern political theorists. D'Alembert's ability to stave off the worst excesses of scepticism and the ensuing rejection of history for more certain, scientific disciplines should, she tentatively suggested, be taken as a model for twentieth-century theorists attempting to avoid a similar fate. In her 1990 presidential address as the first female head of the American Political Science Association, Shklar noted that the twentieth century had witnessed a similar rejection of history to that of the eighteenth: the interwar period and the behavioural revolution had seen political scientists reject historical knowledge in favour of a “scientific” approach.Footnote ¹⁰² In the attempt to democratize the study of politics, history had been rejected for statistics. And so, the formalism of modern political science threatened the precarious interaction of hope and memory. Shklar asserted that “only a historically grounded analysis” can offer mainstream political science “self-understanding”.Footnote ¹⁰³ Thinking historically about how things have come to be as they are—in this particular case, how the history of American thought has shaped modern American political science—was essential to understanding the present predicament. But Shklar also implied that political science in its most unhistorical form was necessarily blithe about human suffering. It was insensitive to “intangibles” and did not distinguish between what is measurable and what is possible.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Despite their democratic aims, political scientists’ excessive scepticism about history could easily render political science void of memory and, in turn, insensitive to injustice.

History could act as a remedy to these inadequacies. The best social scientists did not see scepticism as a threat to history, but understood that “‘history’ taught political psychology”.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For John Adams, Shklar wrote, “history was the source of political information and wisdom”. He looked to history “with the disenchanted eye of the social scientist . . . to amass political examples so as to discover general political truths about recurrent political situations”.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In history we would find cures for social inequality; by seeing what had been done (or not) in the past to curtail injustices, we could find present solutions. Shklar's call to pay heed to historical memory should not therefore be interpreted as conservatism. History did not always tend towards nostalgia and a tragic pessimism that denied the possibility of hope; nor did history necessarily have to be forgotten so as to make room for certainty. The scientific mind could learn from history; through history, it could find political hope.

What set this approach to history even further apart from Shklar's account of émigré nostalgia was her willingness to look to America for examples. In the mid-1970s, when she first taught a course on American political thought, Shklar embarked on what she would later call her attempt to “redeem American political theory”.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Emigré thinkers had either ignored American writings in their accounts of the Western tradition, or had, like Arendt, idealized the American republic. Shklar wanted to show that American political thought was at once both intimately connected to European thought and exceptional: the historical contradictions of American society provided a unique crucible for political theorizing. This was not, however, the result of a liberal consensus. As she made clear in American Citizenship, responding to the work of her Harvard colleagues Samuel Huntington and Louis Hartz, “America has not marched single file down a single straight liberal highway as both the lamenters and the celebrators of its political life have claimed, either in despair or in complacency.” Castigating both lamentations and triumphalism, Shklar argued that the “tortuous development of American ideas of citizenship” must be taken seriously. This meant recognizing that American distinctiveness was built on the relationship of democracy to legalist American political culture and to slavery.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ She argued, in part against Arendt, that democratic citizenship was not born alongside the constitution, but rather was the result of decades of confrontation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ However, the singular character of American thought was due not only to these historical hypocrisies, but also—and here Shklar conceded to the “liberal consensus”—to its thoroughly entrenched democratic optimism.

Shklar sought to show that optimism about politics and history was characteristic of American thought from Jefferson through to his heirs in Rawlsian theory. She suggested that American democrats considered the relationship of hope to memory in a way that their European counterparts never did. Unlike past-oriented conceptions of democracy in which the polis “remained paradigmatic for all Western political organization”, American democracy was hopeful and forward-looking.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As a function of American political optimism, any American approach to history should also be optimistic: history must be severed from reverence for tradition. Jefferson's war against history did not stem from an Enlightenment scepticism about the state of the world, but rather from a deep-rooted optimism about the potential of political man. In their search for a politics of “perpetual newness”, Jefferson and his Jacksonian heirs shared an “impulse to invent a new history, rather than inherit one”. Shklar made clear that this was “not the same thing as abandoning the past altogether.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The authors of The Federalist also posited the creation of a new political theory that would be based “not on the sanctity of tradition, but on a political science that uses the experiences of the past merely as illustrations”.Footnote ¹¹² This approach showed history as an adjunct to a democratic theory of renewal. History became handmaiden to political science. Shklar thus demonstrated that American political science had its own tradition of taking history seriously. American political theorists need not look back to the polis or the “great tradition” to find examples, but could look to their own history to supplement democratic theories.

IV. CRUELTY, FEAR AND EVIL

If Shklar's specific notions of hope and memory set her apart from both her nostalgic, disaffected forebears and her overly optimistic contemporaries, so too did her emphasis on cruelty. What Shklar counselled above all was the need to take seriously the negative aspects of our moral character. Indeed, it is for this warning that she is most renowned. As Jonathan Allen has argued, Shklar provided an anatomy of evils, vices and injustice to complement our understandings of our positive political concepts: the good, the right, virtue and justice.Footnote ¹¹³ These concerns first surfaced in her early treatment of Rousseau, where she discussed cruelty in the context of his genealogy of vice.Footnote ¹¹⁴ They only came to dominate her thought, however, in response to the rise of normative theory and analytic political philosophy.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Her idea of “Putting Cruelty First” was first presented in 1981 and was developed in publications throughout the 1980s.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Shklar argued that normative liberal theory, lacking in historical memory, had forgotten injustice and neglected the plight of victims. It lacked an awareness of our nasty everyday realities. She was concerned to remind the new generation of liberals—Rawls's “small army of squabbling heirs”—that we cannot found a politics on a normative idea of justice alone, as “injustice lurks in the pursuit of justice”.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Even if the content of her alternative was sometimes somewhat hazy, Shklar made one thing quite clear: normative theory may have successfully recovered political hope, but it must not tip the balance too far away from the memory of cruelty.

By emphasizing this need for balance, Shklar was offering her fellow liberal theorists a history lesson. She was concerned to recover the concerns of the earlier anti-totalitarian generation so as to integrate into mainstream Rawlsian theory the lessons drawn from its recent past. In so doing, Shklar suggested that although liberal theory may have moved beyond the space it inhabited in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the preoccupation with political evil remained relevant. But what is most striking is that Shklar was not concerned simply to advocate a continuing preoccupation with the dangers of totalitarianism and evil. She also wanted to recover the lessons learned from thinking about extraordinary politics and apply them to ordinary politics. For it was ordinary cruelty—“the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter”—that Shklar thought should be the central subject of political theory.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The liberalism of fear, after all, “regards abuses of public powers in all regimes with equal trepidation.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Thinking about negative morality was not simply an enterprise born of a pessimistic disposition that illuminated the darker aspects of the human condition. By demonstrating what was wrong with liberal thinking about injustice and vice, Shklar sought to improve the ordinary experiences of individuals. The identification of cruelty could generate the kind of calls for rights that might breed reform. It was thus part of an active politics of improvement. Indeed, Shklar asserted that “the history and present function of rights is the expression of personal outrage at injustice and cruelty . . . The call for rights is a response to very real dangers in an irrational world.”Footnote ¹²⁰ She firmly advocated the belief that confronting these dangers could entail an actual story of improvement.

Shklar's quarrel with the overly legalistic and formalist strands of twentieth-century liberal thought can be traced back to the misgivings she outlined in Legalism. This text, born of a course Shklar taught on the history of modern legal theory, was an attempt to go beyond the “bizarre refusal [at Harvard] to think through the real meaning of the Second World War”.Footnote ¹²¹ Here she examined the International Tribunals at Nuremberg and explored the politics of ideological legalism. Legalism was also Shklar's intervention in the debates between H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller on legal positivism versus natural law.Footnote ¹²² She argued that both were forms of legalist ideology that, in claiming the autonomy of the law from politics, did “considerable violence to political actualities”.Footnote ¹²³ “Formalism, on the level of history, is . . . an effort to say ‘is’ about a legal system where ‘ought to be’ would be more appropriate.”Footnote ¹²⁴

In The Faces of Injustice (1990), Shklar confronted the formalist tendencies of what she called the “normal model of justice” in post-Rawlsian normative political philosophy on similar grounds. Shklar wrote, of 1950s legal theory and 1970s moral and political philosophy in the 1986 preface to the second edition of Legalism, that “a natural affinity between these two highly structured modes of social theorizing is undeniable”.Footnote ¹²⁵ In The Faces of Injustices she criticized the liberal elevation of justice as the sole political virtue: justice was a limited concept and an insufficient basis for liberalism. Such attempts to “free ourselves of affect” had resulted in abstract theorizing that offered a reductive account of human beings.Footnote ¹²⁶ In Seyla Benhabib's words, Shklar's “never quite explicit quarrel with Kantian liberalism, including the philosophy of Rawls, has its sources in her radically different view of human psychology.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In order to go beyond the normal model and develop a proper understanding of injustice that corresponded to “our daily experience of moral and political choice and conflict”, normative theory had to focus on the complexities of suffering.Footnote ¹²⁸ Accordingly, any overly legalistic or abstracted theory—and “rule-bound phenomenology”—could not deal adequately with the problems of politics.Footnote ¹²⁹ Instead, Shklar offered a supplementary account of injustice that focused on victims rather than on abstract principles, since “no theory of either justice or injustice can be complete if it does not take account of the subjective sense of injustice and the sentiments that make us cry out for revenge.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Shklar's preoccupation with victimhood is often seen only in the context of the Second World War. But it is important to distinguish her treatment of victimhood and exile from that of the émigré generation. Shklar did see herself as an exile and at the time of her death she was writing a book on the subject. However, it was only in her late works that she turned to describing herself in these terms, and this might be said to represent a departure and a somewhat more wistful stage in her thought.Footnote ¹³¹ Even in these works, however, she reflected that her status as a refugee bore little in common with the situation of most émigré thinkers.Footnote ¹³² She belonged, after all, to a different generation than the thinkers who have dominated accounts of the German intellectual migration. Moreover, she thought that the émigré understanding of exile was filtered through nostalgia—it was a condition of permanent longing for a destroyed past.Footnote ¹³³ Shklar's exile was a more universal condition, more applicable to everyday life and liberal politics than the anti-totalitarian conception. Exile could be quite ordinary, created by everyday misfortunes and injustices. Exiles were not only victims of the extraordinary totalitarian evils. Shklar believed that victimhood was mostly a consequence of chance: we are all potential victims just as we are also all potential torturers.Footnote ¹³⁴ And so we must do our best not to idealize victims or paint them as heroes:

It was the ordinary victims of political evil that Shklar addressed when she first formulated her “liberalism of permanent minorities” in Legalism; they were also the main protagonists of her moral psychology in Ordinary Vices.Footnote ¹³⁶ This distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary pervaded her treatments of exile and highlighted her commitment to defending the predicament of ordinary victims.

It is crucial to realize here that Shklar grappled with the “intractable” notion of victimhood in order to improve the lives of the most vulnerable members of society.Footnote ¹³⁷ Hers was an activist, realistic hope. Indeed, she wrote that “outrage against cruelty had much to do with practical reform for well over a hundred years, and it still does, even in the midst of the bloodbaths of our age.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Thus she situated her thought in a tradition of reform. It is worth emphasizing that this capacity to hope for improvement stemmed largely from the fact that her first concern was not how to deal with the events of Auschwitz or the Gulag, but how to confront injustice now that the atrocity of totalitarianism was, at least temporarily, over.

To avoid the temptation of understanding Shklar as having directed her thought at Hitler and Stalin alone, we should reflect on her choice of language. Shklar's focus was not “radical evil”, nor was it “terror”.Footnote ¹³⁹ She chose to found her conception of liberalism on fear and cruelty—not terror and evil.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This is a significant choice, the implications of which can be highlighted through a comparison with Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. Shklar may have praised some aspects of Arendt's writing, but she did not use Arendt's idea of radical evil as the springboard for her own ideas on cruelty.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Arendt analysed evil in a totalitarian framework. She saw something far worse than ordinary cruelty in totalitarianism: for her, “the ordinary vices, and the abuses they prompt, are not at the heart of totalitarianism: they do not even begin to make sense of the radical evil committed by such regimes”.Footnote ¹⁴² For Shklar, Arendt's were the musings of a mind obsessed with totalitarianism that neglected to see that in the aftermath of evil we must return to a normal polity. This might be a liberal democratic one if we are lucky, but even there, the state (and non-state actors, too) were capable of oppression and torture. Shklar focused on the ordinary cruelty that men suffer at the hands of liberal governments and reminded us not to be self-righteous: “Evidence of torture is hard to come by in the countries where it occurs regularly.”Footnote ¹⁴³ In every political community—liberal or otherwise—everyday cruelties abounded and it was against these that we had to guard. It was her unremitting emphasis on “putting cruelty first”, with regard to every government as well as every person, that characterized Shklar's thought. It also marked her departure from Friedrich's glorification of constitutionalism. Shklar's cruelty was not metaphysical but ordinary, political and potentially everywhere. She demanded that liberals be “aware of the prominence and pervasiveness of these horrors: to bear them constantly in mind, not brood obsessively about them.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Thinking only about extraordinary politics could, as we have seen, lead to disaffection and tragic melancholy; dealing with the ordinary allowed some hope.

That Shklar placed cruelty and not terror at the centre of her politics helps explain how she was able to take normative, liberal politics seriously. For those to whom political theory is primarily a way of coping with evil and terror, ideal theory appears as nothing more than an indulgent utopianism—or, worse still, a reformist but irrelevant abstraction: when the terror of the concentration camps is close at hand, a theory of justice has little to offer. As Raymond Geuss has argued, “what would one have to believe about the world to think that ‘What is the correct conception of justice?’ is the appropriate question to ask in the face of concentration camps, secret police, and the firebombing of cities?”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ But for Shklar, concerned as she was to protect ordinary people from ordinary political cruelty, a normative theory of justice did have something to contribute: it provided a regulative ideal. This did not mean that normative theory was perfect. If the ordinary vice of cruelty was as central as Shklar maintained, then normative theory would need to reconfigure its framing of politics. Instead of focusing on justice, the right and the good, it ought to focus on the democracy of everyday life and its ordinary vices. Shklar challenged normative theory to take these seriously—for whether or not we cared to acknowledge it, they formed the basis of politics: “to forget the mundane, the quotidian, is to forget liberal politics”.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

It is worth emphasizing that the liberalism of fear “saw menace in so many quarters”, not simply in the oppressive state and its agents.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Indeed, Shklar was particularly caustic in her treatment of any form of politics or association that she believed neglected the suffering of minorities. This was the kernel of her quarrel with the communitarian and romantic liberalism of Walzer and Taylor and also explains her discomfort with the longing for belonging that she ascribed to Berlin.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Political theories that put community first “carry with them the seed of exclusion or cruelty”.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This was true for any theory that rests on a belief in “shared cultural experience”, including any position that resembles a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus”.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Shklar was determined, with typical seriousness, to remind the champions of such ideas that “not everyone wants to belong to an ascriptive group . . . nor are all forms of association particularly conducive to human flourishing, even though voluntary and egalitarian. One ought not to forget the Peoples Temple [Jonestown] too quickly.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Where there was a drive to ground politics or law in such a consensus, there would undoubtedly exist weak individuals or groups that would become ostracized and excluded from that consensus. Such instances of cruelty might well be unavoidable; indeed, Shklar suggested that pluralism itself generated cruelty.Footnote ¹⁵² What liberalism must do is mitigate their worst effects.

Ultimately, it was this conception of liberalism as the mitigation of cruelty that Shklar defended against its communitarian critics during the 1980s. Rejecting ideas of human flourishing as too divorced from real experience, she searched for a more realistic hope. This led her to inject her earlier “barebones liberalism” with a defense of a “fear-inspired, negative, protesting notion of rights”.Footnote ¹⁵³ Rights, Shklar claimed, were not atomistic declarations of egoism, but political tools that were used to limit, and indeed originated in the fear of, cruelty. “Rights are demanded first and foremost out of fear of cruelty and injury from agents of governments, but also from private magnates . . . they are asserted against power abused . . . The assertion of rights has historically made sense only as a demand for political protection.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ To have political force, rights had to be tied to institutional purposes and procedures. They were “acts of intervention to protect the most feeble from abuses. Indeed, we call them rights, perhaps metaphorically because the word does express the fear of actual or threatened danger to all, but especially to the most feeble and helpless among us.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Shklar may have found it acutely difficult to commit to a consistent and systematic defense of her own political position, and she was painfully aware of the historical vagaries and limitations of political thinking. But when pushed to defend the liberalism of fear against its challengers—and in her lifelong support of Amnesty International—she was fiercely defiant.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ She was certain that despite their patent inadequacies, rights were the only weapons with which we could realistically hope to improve the lot of the weak.

Shklar was uncompromising in her beliefs about the implications and consequences of power and about the potential for cruelty that she saw as inherent in all political action. Her criticisms of others were often vitriolic and her assessment of the problems of politics severe. To think about politics but ignore cruelty was merely to offer “a substitute for political thinking and a means of tolerating the ideological vacuum.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ As she said herself, she cared “more about being honest than about finding the truth.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ And to be honest about politics we must avoid any mystification and obfuscation about the realities of cruelty and accept that “like torture and political oppression, pain is everybody's business.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ We must look closely and historically at the concepts and tools we have come to use in our political thinking. Above all, we must be serious and realistic about the hope of improving the lives of the weak, the excluded and the exiled. If we are clear about what matters then we can be clear about what it is sensible to hope for.