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ABSTRACT
The ability of political institutions, actors, and theorists to understand and engage the ‘populist’ challenge may very well be a matter of survival for liberal democracy. Political theory has spanned the range of approaches to this challenge: from chastising, to disciplining, to glorifying. This paper aims at disentangling the economic and social grievances of many populist constituents from the nationalistic and xenophobic rhetoric that often accompanies them, and suggests that Judith Shklar’s rearticulation of liberalism embraces the first while rejecting the second. I argue that three aspects of Shklar’s work make her liberalism different and potentially more responsive to the pleas of populist voters. First, her approach to politics and political theory centres on experiences of injustice, humiliation, fear, and cruelty, which she sees as enabled by strong, existing asymmetries of power. Second, Shklar was extremely attentive to the affective dimension of politics. Third, she was not consumed by matters of justification, but more interested in advocating for and from the margins in order to bring about a more inclusive political agon. Yet Shklar was also critical of populist dreams of cultural homogeneity and strong leadership, resisting citizenship as a privilege to be wielded against minorities or discriminated groups.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper have been presented to annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Philosophy and Social Science Colloquium in Prague, and the conference on ‘The International Thought of Judith Shklar’ at the University of St. Andrews in October 2019. I thank participants to those meetings for helpful feedback, especially Simone Chambers, Bill Scheuerman, and Bernard Yack. Michael Illuzzi, Massimo Morelli, and Christof Royer commented on the paper much to my advantage.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Mudde, “The Problem with Populism.”
2 Laclau, On Populist Reason; Mouffe, “The Limits of John Rawls’s Pluralism”; Grattan, Populism’s Power; Comaroff, “Populism and Late Liberalism.”
3 Müller, What Is Populism?; Ferrara, “Can Political Liberalism Help Us Rescue”; Scheuerman, “Judith Shklar as Legal Theorist”; Urbinati, “Political Theory of Populism.”
4 Müller, What Is Populism?; Ferrara, “Can Political Liberalism Help Us Rescue”; Scheuerman, “Judith Shklar as Legal Theorist”; Wolkenstein, “What Can We Hold against Populism?”; Müller, “The People Must Be Extracted.”
5 Müller, What Is Populism?, 99.
6 Wolkenstein, “Populism, Liberal Democracy”.
7 Margalit, “Economic Insecurity”; Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship.”
8 Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century.
9 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 29. Earlier, in Ordinary Vices Shklar had given a slightly different definition of cruelty as “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear” (Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 8). For my purposes, the important thing is the asymmetry of power that defines cruelty, which is consistent through the two definitions.
10 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 31.
11 Ibid., 27.
12 Ibid., 21 emphasis added.
13 Ibid., 28.
14 Shklar, “Rights in the Liberal Tradition.”
15 Shklar, Montesquieu; Scheuerman, “Judith Shklar as Legal Theorist.”
16 She was fascinated by Rousseau’s attempt to find a solution to humanity’s self-destructiveness by way of trust in a figure of authority, whether that be the great legislator, Emile’s tutor, or M. Wolmar, but it was a trust that she, as a liberal, did not share. The best we could hope for in this task was soundly constructed institutions regulated by the rule of law (Shklar, “Rousseau’s Images of Authority”; “The Liberalism of Fear.”)
17 Scheuerman, “Judith Shklar as Legal Theorist,” 2; Müller, What Is Populism? 66.
18 Shklar, Legalism.
19 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 10.
20 Ibid., 17–22 and passim.
21 Benhabib, “Judith Shklar’s Dystopic Liberalism.”
22 see Shklar and Hoffmann, Political Thought and Political Thinkers; Shklar, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Equality”; Men and Citizens; Montesquieu; Shklar et al., Redeeming American Political Thought.
23 Shklar, Legalism; Ordinary Vices; The Faces of Injustice; American Citizenship.
24 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”; Ordinary Vices; The Faces of Injustice.
25 Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 22.
26 Ibid., 87.
27 Ibid., 136.
28 Rosenblum, “The Democracy of Everyday Life.”
29 Shklar, American Citizenship, 63.
30 Rosenblum, “The Democracy of Everyday Life,” 29–30.
31 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, 43.
32 Shklar, After Utopia the Decline of Political Faith, 158.
33 Ibid., 89–90 and 259.
34 On the distinctive anti-paternalistic streak in Shklar’s thought see Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century.
35 Shklar, After Utopia the Decline of Political Faith.
36 Shklar, Legalism, vii–viii.
37 Shklar, Legalism, 4–5.
38 Wolkenstein, “Populism, Liberal Democracy”; White and Ypi, “On Partisan Political Justification.”
39 Moyn, “Judith Shklar versus the International Criminal Court.”
40 Shklar, Legalism, 6.
41 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 26.
42 Shklar, “A Life of Learning.”
43 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice.
44 Yack, “Putting Injustice First,” 1103.
45 Ibid., 1104–105 and passim.
46 Shklar consistently defended, in private correspondence, the right of people she disagreed with to express their views (see most representatively the Letter to N. Polsby, of the University of California Berkeley, from 19 December 1972, Harvard University Archives, Shklar Correspondence 1959–1973, Box 1). We do not find in Shklar’s writings an explicit concern for policing the public sphere through formal procedures for the exclusion of certain forms of speech. Obviously, however, the concern for permanent minorities and, later, for cruelty, suggests the need to vigorously confront positions that entail harm or persecution.
47 Even those among theorists who have questioned the procedures of justification, wishing for the inclusion of more contestatory modes of it (White and Ypi, “On Partisan Political Justification”; Wolkenstein, “What Can We Hold against Populism?”) have retained the language of justification, for in their eyes abandoning it amounts to abandoning normative byte for theoretical arguments. In other words, even in a contestatory setting, what is said and how it is said ought to respond to certain criteria, lest the product of deliberation fall outside the purview of what is right and acceptable. This of course is bound to constrain the extent to which certain claims are allowed into the agon.
48 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice.
49 Rawls, A Theory of Justice.
50 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, 1.
51 Ibid., 3.
52 On injustice in Shklar see Yack, “Injustice and the Victim’s Voice”; “Active and Passive Injustice”; “Putting Injustice First”; “Political Liberalism”; and Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century.
53 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, 7–8.
54 Ibid., 9–14.
55 Shklar greatly admired Jean Starobinski’s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction (Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau), and I am using obstruction here in the same sense he did in his book.
56 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, 5.
57 Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship.”
58 Yet she concludes sharply, in that essay: “someone has been and must be dislocated at every moment. Why not those most able to bear social alteration?” (Shklar, “A Life of Learning,” 20). What I am suggesting in these two concluding sections is that within a metapolitical framework not privileging one set of disappointed expectations over another, she made the political choice and took on the political commitment, which she regarded as controversial and not “universally right” and justified, to privilege in consideration the disappointed expectations of more marginalized groups.
59 In other words, the resolution to the dilemmas and the tensions is ultimately political, not theoretical.
60 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, 11.
61 Ibid., 14.
62 Ibid.
63 Wolkenstein, “Populism, Liberal Democracy,” 3.
64 The prefix “meta” is not altogether appropriate, since I believe that agnosticism about foundations is actually itself a profoundly political stance, but I find it expedient to distinguish between these two levels for the sake of distinguishing between a more theoretical and a more political stance.
65 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, 8, 98, 116.
66 Shklar, American Citizenship.
67 Ibid., 1.
68 Ibid., 2.
69 Ibid., 1–3.
70 On “wielding victimhood” and President Trump’s ability to “offer victimhood to people who have the least claim to it” see Daily Show with Trevor Noah (2018).
71 Shklar, American Citizenship, 5.
72 Liliana Segre, who was deported to Auschwitz as a child, survived, and is devoting the last years of her life to bearing witness to that horror, also carefully distinguishes between the destruction of one’s own citizenry and the current barbaric treatment of migrants by the “civilised” world. Yet, her reconstruction of her experiences emphatically includes the time when she successfully entered Switzerland with her father passing under a wired fence, only to be sent back by a Swiss guard because, according to him, Italian Jews did not have legitimate grounds for asylum. Liliana Segre, guest at Che Tempo che fa (2018).
73 Shklar, American Citizenship, 14 and 28–29.
74 Ibid., 15.
75 On citizenship as privilege/entitlement, see Carens, “Aliens and Citizens”; and Shachar (Citation2009).