How Great a Scholar Was Judith Shklar?

Gunther Heilbrunn

History, Americas

Utopian dreams that curdled into nightmares were a frequent theme and personal experience of Stalinism and Nazism infused Shklar's scholarship. She stands out for the wide range of her interests, literary and historical, enabling her to draw connections between authors separated by centuries and revolutions of thought.

Judith N. Shklar, On Political Obligation (Yale University Press, 2019), 264 pp., $45.00

THE SUDDEN death of Judith N. Sklar in 1992 at the age of sixty-three deprived American letters of a distinctive and imposing voice. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann in the Government department at Harvard once remarked, “she was by far the biggest star of the department.” Her most important contribution to political thought was the “liberalism of fear,” an imperative to put “cruelty first” as the vice to be identified and eradicated. An exile from Riga who arrived in America in 1940 on a boat from Japan as an eleven-year-old with her family, she wrote in a detached yet moving style of the challenges and rewards of living removed from home. Utopian dreams that curdled into nightmares were a frequent theme and personal experience of Stalinism and Nazism infused her scholarship. She stands out for the wide range of her interests, literary and historical, enabling her to draw connections between authors separated by centuries and revolutions of thought. In an essay in Daedalus, for example, Shklar discovered analogous structures of meaning in the Five Generations of Hesiod and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality.

Shklar’s writing was never less than clear and approachable, qualities readily apparent in On Political Obligation, a series of lectures that have been edited by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess. They explain that Shklar would herself not have published these lectures in their current form. A number of the talks are either missing or presented in truncated form. Shklar had also voiced reservations about the publication of lectures by colleagues, as the editors note, for erasing the distinction between teaching and writing.