Shklar on Fear

Abstract: I provide a basic reading of Judith Shklar’s notion of liberalism and how it relates politically to fear.

The complex relation between the aesthetic and the political we find in Burke recedes by the 20th century (with its own unprecedented institutional atrocities) in favor of a direct and sustained attack on fear’s role in liberal politics. For Judith Shklar, fear, and the cruelty from which it derives, tears asunder social unity, degrades the autonomous subject, and prevents the exercise of human freedom. Shklar begins her essay The Liberalism of Fear by addressing the “overuse” of the term “liberalism” through the introduction of her own definition. Liberalism, for Shklar, aims exclusively to “secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom.” Shklar further refines this to mean the capacity to “make as many effective decisions without fear…as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult.” (Lib. 3) Liberalism’s continued significance is grounded in this response it takes to fear, and Shklar’s ultimate aim is to develop this definition against the backcloth of the continued relevance fear holds in human affairs.

The centrality of cruelty for Shklar’s theory cannot be overstated, and acts as an almost existential framing of the problem of liberalism. Shklar defines cruelty as “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.” (Lib. 11) In particular Shklar is concerned not with moments of individual, fleeting cruelty, but with sustained forms of “public” oppression and denial. As Shklar notes, “public cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power, and it is almost always built into the system of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their essential functions.” (Lib. 11) Cruelty, in this way, is institutional and governmental, perpetrated by those “agents of the modern state who “have unique resources of physical might and persuasion at their disposal.” (Lib. 3) While Shklar believes that “to be alive is to be afraid,” some of this fear is directed to useful and expedient ends. It is “systematic fear,” however, which constitutes “the condition that makes freedom impossible, and it is aroused by the expectation of institutionalized cruelty as by nothing else.” (Lib. 11) Fear paralyzes, robing an individual of his/her autonomy and mitigating his/her capacity to engage the public realm viz. the rights of citizens or the expression of freedom; cruelty perpetrated by an institutional body is especially terrible, given the enormity of its resources and the breadth of its capacity to inflict terror.

Shklar essentially seeks to set liberalism on proper foundations, and it is cruelty and fear that she opts to associate most fundamentally with liberalism’s purpose and aims.[i] Shklar limit’s liberalism’s theoretical breadth to a “political doctrine,” and insists that it offers no prescriptions toward a “way of life.” Beyond this basic orientation toward the amelioration of cruelty, Shklar is insistent on decoupling liberalism from utopian visions.[ii] To this end, Shklar decouples liberalism’s foundation from scientism, rights- and freedom-based forms of ideology in an effort to carve out the space for the true task of liberal theory: a vigilance against institutionalized fear. Shklar is particularly keen on decoupling liberalism from it specious origins in authoritarianism; “Hobbes,” Shklar argues, “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.” (Lib. 6)

Shklar’s treatment of Hobbes is important, as it spells out the principle task liberalism must set for itself. For Shklar, liberalism must draw a line as to what will be permitted and what won’t. This is far more than coming to a general and collective definition of what constitutes “cruelty,” but rather the delineation and protection of the private from the public sphere. Cruelty, as Hobbes’ authoritarianism makes clear, constitutes an intrusion of the public into the private.[iii] Shklar promotes a principally negative form of liberty (though Shklar explicitly differentiates her version from Berlin’s)—the line liberalism draws is a hardline, set in stone. It may be narrowed, but never widened.

Shklar calls for a prohibition on fear entirely, which requires the persistent vigilance of citizens. Liberalism’s engagement with fear highlight’s Shklar’s indebtedness to Locke, as it is primarily a limited government that emerges in the wake.[iv] The limitations imposed on the government require, in turn, constant repair and management. For Shklar, “We say ‘never again,’ but somewhere someone is being tortured right now, and acute fear has again become the most common form of social control….There is always much to be afraid of.” (Lib. 9) Shklar here inaugurates something of a tragic politics of fear. The potential of fear is ever-present and ubiquitous, and as such the prohibition of fear requires a highly-responsible individual who is able to address fear as it actually exists and thus combat cruelty in all its institutionalized forms. For Shklar, “To foster well-informed and self-directed adults must be the aim of every effort to educate the citizens of a liberal society.” (Lib. 15) The liberal doctrine maximizes the exercise of human freedom against the backcloth of an ever-present potential of cruelty and fear, and draws its continued relevance from this orientation.

Though Shklar never explores the problem, and though she would no doubt deny it, there is a teleological quality to Shklar’s argument. Though Shklar wants to avoid imbuing liberalism with a positive political program, the endemic nature of fear in human life seems to necessitate liberalism as the most effectual and legitimate response. If cruelty is a given condition of our political life—a natural, nearly existential condition—then liberalism’s response to its amelioration seems equally naturalized. The final question, then, is not whether liberalism’s basis is best founded on a response to fear and cruelty, but whether liberalism is itself the best response to this most oppressive and damaging of human experiences.

[i] As Shklar argues, “What liberalism requires is the possibility of making the evil of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its political practices and prescriptions. The only exception to the rule of avoidance is the prevention of greater cruelties.” Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” p. 12

[ii]  “Intellectual modesty does not imply that the liberalism of fear has no content, only that it is entirely nonutopian.” Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” p. 8

[iii] “The limits of coercion begin, though they do not end, with a prohibition upon invading the private realm…” See Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” p. 6:

[iv] Shklar argues: “No form of liberalism has any business telling the citizenry to pursue happiness….Liberalism must restrict itself to politics and to proposals to restrain potential abusers of power in order to life the burden of ear and favor from the should of adult women and men, who can then conduct their lives in accordance with their own beliefs and preferences…” Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” p. 13