[“The Liberalism of Fear” by Judith N. Shklar (Harvard University Press, 2026; 80pp.)]
This essay is a welcome reissue of an essay originally published in 1989, along with a helpful foreword by the political theorist Mark Lilla. Judith Shklar taught in the government department at Harvard for several decades, and she was widely respected for her extraordinary erudition and her penetrating intellect. She did not suffer fools gladly; she considered Harvey Mansfield—her colleague in the department—as less than outstanding, and she once demolished a paper on Rousseau, one of her specialties, written by Cass Sunstein when he was a graduate student. Robert Nozick said to me about her, “She’s fierce!” She passed away in 1992.
Shklar’s path to Harvard was an unusual one. She was a Jewish refugee from Latvia, forced into exile by the Nazis, and this experience made her sensitive to cruelty and persecution. Although she is not a libertarian, she believes that individuals must be free to pursue their own lives and not live in fear of being killed or tortured, and she takes the state to be the main agent of these evil deeds. As she puts it:
Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult. That belief is the original and only defensible meaning of liberalism. It is a political notion, because the fear and favor that have always inhibited freedom are overwhelmingly generated by governments, both formal and informal. And while the sources of social oppression are indeed numerous, none has the deadly effect of those who, as the agents of the modern state, have unique resources of physical might and persuasion at their disposal.
She emphasizes that liberalism, thus construed, is strictly limited. Conservative critics of liberalism wrongly identify it with “modernity” and proceed on that basis to condemn liberalism for various aspects of the modern world they dislike, such as atheism, a revolt against tradition, and the never-ending pursuit of wealth. But this is a mistake. It confuses liberalism with other things that are not essential to it. One could have a liberal society that consisted of religious believers or of supporters of tradition, so long as the government did not persecute dissenters:
The convoluted genealogy of liberalism that insists on seeing its origins in a theory of absolutism is not in itself interesting. More common is a sort of free association of ideas that perceives a danger to traditional revealed religion in toleration and hence assumes that liberalism is of necessity atheistic, agnostic, relativistic, and nihilistic. This catalogue of accusations is worth mentioning, because it is commonplace and because it is easily and usefully refuted. The original mistake is the failure to distinguish psychological affinities from logical consequences. As a result, these critics cannot grasp that the liberalism of fear as a strictly political theory is not necessarily linked to any one religious or scientific doctrine, though it is psychologically more compatible with some rather than with others. It must reject only those political doctrines that do not recognize any difference between the spheres of the personal and the public.
Given her account of liberalism, it is no surprise that she rejects the view—held by Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss—that Hobbes was the founder of liberalism. According to this view, by favoring an all-powerful Leviathan, Hobbes broke with medieval tradition and paved the way for the unlimited pursuit of wealth characteristic of modern capitalism. As Shklar points out in a note, this analysis has affinities with Marxism, which one would not expect from Schmitt and Strauss. As she also notes, it also wrongly sees Locke, the supporter of toleration, as close to Hobbes. It is exactly this misidentification that makes her reject the analysis. No one who gave the state the power to determine the public profession of religion can be considered a liberal:
Hobbes is not the father of liberalism. No theory that gives public authorities the unconditional right to impose beliefs and even a vocabulary as they may see fit upon the citizenry can be described as even remotely liberal. Of all the cases made against liberalism, the most bizarre is that liberals are really indifferent, if not openly hostile, to personal freedom. This may follow from the peculiar identification of Leviathan as the very archetype of liberal philosophy, but it is a truly gross misrepresentation which simply assures that any social contract theory, however authoritarian its intentions, and any anti-Catholic polemic add up to liberalism.
I would have thought it obvious that the United States came closest to liberalism in the early years of the republic, when the government was one of limited powers. Shklar does not agree. She says:
Finally, let us not forget that the United States was not a liberal state until after the Civil War, and even then often in name only. In short, to speak of a liberal era is not to refer to anything that actually happened, except possibly by comparison to what came after 1914.
She doesn’t spell out what she has in mind, but I assume she means what Mark Lilla says in the foreword: “The United States, despite the liberal principles embodied in its constitution, could be considered a formally liberal polity only after the abolition of slavery and the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960’s.”
The political theorist Michael Walzer objected to Shklar’s account of liberalism that it had ethnocentric implications, in that it condemned traditional societies that rejected toleration. Wasn’t she imposing her own standards on cultures that rejected them? Shklar finds this objection unacceptably relativistic:
This liberal prescription for citizenship, it is now often argued, is both a very unhistorical and an ethnocentric view that makes quite unwarranted claims for universality. That it arose at a given time and place is, after all, inevitable, but the relativist now argues that the liberalism of fear would not be welcomed by most of those who live under their traditional customs, even if these are as cruel and oppressive as the Indian caste system. To judge inherited habits by standards that purport to be general, even though they are alien to a people, is said to be an arrogant imposition of false as well as partial principles. For there are no generally valid social prohibitions or rules, and the task of the social critic is at most to articulate socially immanent values. All this is not nearly as self-evident as the relativistic defenders of local customs would have us believe.
Shklar was a better political theorist than historian, but we can still learn from Dita, as her friends called her.
