Complacent and Conservative? Redeeming the Liberalism of Fear

Abstract

This article seeks to correct several prominent misreadings of Judith Shklar's liberalism of fear in recent scholarship. By exploring and developing overlooked elements of Shklar's thought, I argue that the liberalism of fear motivates a perspective on the political world that can spur more clear-eyed political reflection on concrete realities in order to improve the plight of the weak and the powerless. I illustrate that this fatally compromises the interpretative line recently defended by critics who position themselves to Shklar's left which regards the liberalism of fear as a stifling and complacent form of cold war liberalism.

Cruelty, Injustice, and the Liberalism of Fear

“…For helpful analysis that pushes back against the standard view that putting cruelty first “is almost inextricably linked” to the liberalism of fear and instead seeks to tease the two ideas apart, see Stullerova (2014, 23–27). In “The Liberalism of Fear,” Shklar claims that putting cruelty first is a first principle but not a sufficient condition for liberalism (LF, 11), and in a later lecture she stresses that the liberalism of fear extends beyond the fear of cruelty and seeks to restrain “all sources of avoidable fear,” while striving to empower individuals to become “self-reliant and active citizens, capable of defending their integrity” (Shklar 1992, 30–31; for further discussion, see Hall 2022, §3).…”

“…Dunn (1996, 45), for example, claims that the liberalism of fear served as the “axis for each of her two final and most passionately political books, The Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship ”, and Gatta (2018, 38) regards these two books as “the embodiment” of the liberalism of fear. More generally, Fives (2020, 22) takes the liberalism of fear to encompass Shklar’s approach in “her work from the start of the 1980s up to her untimely death in 1992”, and Stullerova (2019, 74) observes that the liberalism of fear is typically considered “emblematic of Shklar’s mature work, and rightly so.” Often when Shklar scholars turn to The Faces of Injustice , then, they do so to show how it can complement and deepen our understanding of the liberalism of fear (for other recent examples, see Hall 2022, §4; Kaufmann 2020, 589–93). There are some notable exceptions.…”

“…For the criticism that this is insufficient to justify treating cruelty as the summum malum , see Fives (2020, 66–69). For a more sympathetic account of Shklar’s justification of putting cruelty first, which relates this to her claims about the promotion of human dignity in “The Liberalism of Fear,” see Hall (2022, §2).…”