Historical memory, democratic citizenship, and political theory: Reconstructing a historical method in Judith Shklar’s writings
| Author | Simon Sihang Luo |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885120987762 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Historical memory,
democratic citizenship,
and political theory:
Reconstructing a
historical method in
Judith Shklar’s writings
Simon Sihang Luo
Department of Political Science, Indiana University
Bloomington, USA
Abstract
Judith Shklar has been invoked by contemporary realists as an example of how history
is a better source of political knowledge than abstract philosophy. This emphasis on
history challenges the predominant understanding of her political theory that stresses
the universality of fear of cruelty. This contrast between history and moral universalism
invites a serious investigation of Shklar’s historical method. This article takes up this
task by reconstructing a Shklarian historical method based on a tripartite relation
between historical memory, democratic citizenship, and historically minded political
theory. This reconstructed historical method challenges the boundaries of Shklar’s
liberalism and broadens the possibilities that her political theory can offer.
Keywords
Historical method, Judith Shklar, liberalism, liberalism of fear, realism
Corresponding author:
Simon Sihang Luo, Department of Political Science, Indiana University Bloomington, 334 WoodburnHall, 1100
E. 7th St., Bloomington, IN 47405-7110, USA.
Email: luos@iu.edu
European Journal of Political Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885120987762
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2023, Vol. 22(2) 324–345
The turn of the new century has seen renewed attention to the history, and the
fragility, of liberalism. As the much-discussed “end of history” heralded by Francis
Fukuyama has given way to what Alain Badiou has called The Rebirth of History:
Times of Riots and Uprisings, and as liberal democratic norms have been chal-
lenged by domestic populists and “foreign adversaries,” scholars and public intel-
lectuals have recognized that if liberalism is to move forward, its historical origins,
and challenges, need to be rethought.
The political theory of Judith Shklar is one important resource for such rethink-
ing. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that the turn of the 21st century has also
witnessed a proliferation of studies of Shklar’s political thought (Ashenden and
Hess, 2019; Forrester, 2012; Gatta, 2018; Hess, 2014) and applications of her
political theory to a range of pressing concerns (Abbey, 2016; Lu, 2000;
Stullerova, 2019). Two themes stand out in this literature. The first is moral cos-
mopolitanism. The audience of Shklar’s political theory is not limited to citizens of
modern liberal democracies. Shklar asks liberals to speak to the fear of political
cruelty, which she takes to be a psychological mechanism of the human mind
independent of any religious or cultural tradition. Shklar’s insistence on the
moral imperative of “putting cruelty first” can thus be extended, for example, to
discussions about preventing cruelty and defending human rights in international
political theory (Lu, 2000; Meister, 2002; Stullerova, 2019).
The second theme is Shklar’s historical realism and its relevance to the efforts of
contemporary realists to move beyond what William Galston calls “high liber-
alism”—abstract political philosophy exemplified by John Rawls’s neo-Kantian
account of justice as fairness—and bring political theory back down to earth
(Galston, 2010). Many realists target the allegedly ahistorical nature of abstract
political philosophy (Floyd and Stears, 2011), insisting that historical experience is
the ground of political theorizing, establishing its precedents and its problems, and
both enabling and constraining its possible solutions.
Shklar is frequently invoked in discussions about realism and history (Honig
and Stears, 2011; Sabl, 2011; Thaler, 2018). Shklar consciously reflects on her
position as a historically minded political theorist, placing her political theory in
the territory “between history and ethics” that is “less abstract than formal ethics
but more analytical than history” (Shklar, 1990: 16). For her, “[p]olitical theories
wholly removed from the controversies of their world become a banal and trivial
‘wisdom’ literature” (Shklar and Franklin, 1979: 549–550). Shklar’s attentiveness
to real politics in history, especially to the ordinary vices, the various manifesta-
tions of injustice, and the omnipresence of cruelty in everyday politics, seems to be
a fertile ground for realists to launch attacks on abstract political philosophy’s
alleged lack of consideration of these issues (Shklar, 1984, 1990).
Even though the realist approach to Shklar’s liberalism is not necessarily
intended as a challenge to the universalist approach, some have identified an
implicit tension between them in Shklar’s writing. Kamila Stullerova argues that
what emerges in these various uses of Shklar’s political theory is a dichotomy
between “two Shklars,” a universalist and a historicist (Stullerova, 2014: 24).
325Luo
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