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ABSTRACT
Democratic politics constituted a challenging paradox for addressing international justice and injustice for Judith Shklar. It could be a primary source of redressing injustice in its capacity to mobilize international society against the worst kinds of cruelty suffered by international victims – refugees, exiles, immigrants, and victims of wars. Yet the link between democratic politics and nationalism also constituted a primary source of international injustice towards those, on either side of national borders, with whom democratic majorities did not identify and who became grist to the mill of democratic unity forged in entirely irrational hostility towards others. This was why Shklar strenuously criticised calls to highly participatory forms of democracy: the obverse of extreme democratic tightness was extreme hostility towards out-groups on either side of national borders. Shklar's aversion to nationalism had a status approaching her view of cruelty as the worst vice, for the irrational passions it unleashed were a great source precisely of that cruelty. A focus on international justice and injustice in Shklar's thought accordingly demands concertedexplorations of the part that domestic democratic politics, and especially democratic nationalism, plays in international politics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Hoffmann, “Thoughts on Fear in Global Society,” 1030.
2 Shklar, Legalism.
3 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear.”
4 Shklar, The Work of Michael Walzer, 377.
5 Shklar, “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile”; “The Bonds of Exile”.
6 Skinner, “The Last Academic Project,” 263.
7 Allen, “The Place of Negative Morality”; Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopolitanism”; “Human Wrongs”; Moyn, “Judith Shklar Versus the International Criminal Court”; “Judith Shklar on the Philosophy”; Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century; “Shklar Made Me Do It!”; Royer, “International Criminal Justice”; “The bête noire and the noble lie”; Stullerova, “Rethinking Human Rights”; “The Knowledge of Suffering”; “Embracing Ontological Doubt”; Cruelty and International Relations.
8 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice.
9 Misra, “Doubt and Commitment.”
10 Shklar, “Decisionism,” 14–15.
11 Hoffmann, “Judith Shklar as Political Thinker,” 176.
12 Sanford Levinson articulated Shklar’s attitude precisely in a book review, “Is Liberal Nationalism an Oxymoron?”
13 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 16.
14 Shklar, “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile,” 54.
15 Shklar’s own discussion of passive injustice occurred independently of her many discussions of the international and national injustices of nationalism. She discussed passive injustice in The Faces of Injustice (1990) in the context of democratic citizens failing to speak up in the face of individual citizens being subjected to everyday injustices.
16 Eakin, “Liberal, Harsh Denmark.”
17 Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, “The Case for Demoicracy in the European Union.”
18 Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation.”
19 Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community.
20 Anderson, Imagined Communities.
21 Shklar, “Injustice, Injury, and Inequality”; American Citizenship; “The Work of Michael Walzer”; “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile”; “The Bonds of Exile.”
22 Shklar, “The Work of Michael Walzer.”
23 Shklar, “Injustice, Injury, and Inequality.”
24 Skinner, “The Last Academic Project,” 255.
25 Ibid., 261.
26 Shklar, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Equality,” 17.
27 Misra, “Rousseau and the Dilemmas of Liberal Modernity.”
28 For a detailed account of how Rousseau speaks to liberal challenges, see Misra, “Rousseau and the Dilemmas”; Rousseau, “Emile,” 312.
29 Shklar, “Men and Citizens,” xi and 49.
30 For an account of this discussion, see Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century, and Misra, “Doubt and Commitment.”
31 Shklar, “American Citizenship.”
32 Shklar, Legalism.
33 Shklar, The Faces of Injustice.
34 Forrester, “Experience, Ideology, and the Politics of Psychology,” 144–55.
35 Shklar, Ordinary Vices.
36 Moyn, “Before – and Beyond.”
37 On the radicalism implicit in liberal cosmopolitanism, see Lu, “The One and Many Faces of Cosmopoliatnism,” and “Human Tragedy and Victimhood.”
38 For discussions of Shklar’s scepticism as the basis of her radicalism, see Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century, and Misra, “Doubt and Commitment.”
39 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear”, 4.
40 Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History,” 91.
41 Forrester, “Experience, ideology”; Moyn, “Before – and Beyond.”
42 Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” 16.
43 Mark Lilla wrote “She practiced what Leo Strauss in another context called reductio ad Hitlerum, and of this she was a master” (“Very Much a Fox”). “Reductio ad Hitlerum” is akin to accusing someone of playing the Nazi card. In this instance, it is used to accuse Shklar of reducing everything to a discussion about and comparison with Hitler and Nazism, thereby delegitimizing any given discussion.
44 Forrester, “Experience, Ideology.”
45 On Shklar’s contextulist universalism in a different aspect, see Bajohr, “The Sources of Liberal Normativity,” 170.
46 Shklar, After Utopia, 272.
47 Shklar, “What is the Use of Utopia?” 187.
48 Shklar, “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile,” 55.
49 Allen, “The Place of Negative Morality,” 349.