Judith N Shklar as theorist of political obligation
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119858156 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
Judith N Shklar
2021, Vol. 20(2) 366–376
! The Author(s) 2019
as theorist of
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119858156
political obligation
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William E Scheuerman
Indiana University, USA
Judith N Shklar, On Political Obligation, edited by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess. Yale
University Press: New Haven, CT, 2019; 234 pp. US $45, ISBN 978-0300-21499-4 (hardcover).
Abstract
The useful publication of Judith N Shklar’s final undergraduate lectures at Harvard
provides an opportunity to take a careful look at her reflections on political obligation,
a matter always of great interest to Shklar, and one to which she devoted a great deal of
energy in her final years. When read alongside her published writings and more formal
scholarly presentations from the same period, we can discern three core ideas Shklar
was struggling to formulate. First, she sought to defend individual moral conscience
against those writers (e.g. Hannah Arendt) who have expressed skepticism about its
role and typically circumscribed its political significance. Second, she targeted Michael
Walzer and other communitarian models of political obligation, faulting them for
obscuring fundamental differences between matters of personal loyalty and impersonal
obligations to the state. Third, she highlighted the narrow confines of recent liberal
accounts of political obligation, suggesting that the increasingly tired mainstream schol-
arly debate on the topic might be rejuvenated by exploring the complexities of political
exile. Each of Shklar’s observations remains pertinent to contemporary debates about
political obligation and civil disobedience.
Keywords
Civil disobedience, communitarianism, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, liberalism, Michael
Walzer, political obligation
Corresponding author:
William E Scheuerman, Indiana University, Woodburn Hall 210, 1100 E. Seventh St., Bloomington, IN Indiana
47405-7110, USA.
Email: wscheuer@indiana.edu
Scheuerman
367
Many today are eager to lasso the late Harvard political theorist, Judith N Shklar
(1928–1992) into their respective political and theoretical camps. For Anglophone
political realists looking for precursors closer to home and more respectable than
Machiavelli or Max Weber, Shklar serves as a convenient ally (Sabl, 2011). Critics
of John Rawls and so-called “high-liberalism” value her anti-utopianism and polit-
ical skepticism (Gatta, 2018; Misra, 2016). Legal scholars prefer her fierce
criticisms of “legalism” to ambitious liberal-legal internationalism (Moyn, 2013).
Historians constructing accounts of postwar “cold war liberalism” try to harness
Shklar to their scholarly cause as well (Craiutu, 2017; Mu¨ller, 2008). Even journal-
ists have recently revisited Shklar as they struggle to make sense of Donald Trump
and his xenophobic political appeals (Matthews, 2017).
Despite the burst of interest in Shklar, it is unlikely that anyone will succeed in
confining her legacy to a tidy intellectual or political box. The growing body of
systematic scholarly work on Shklar should remind us of what an extraordinarily
erudite as well as productively eclectic political thinker she was (Ashenden and
Hess, 2019; Bajohr, 2014; Benhabib, 2018; Forrester 2011, 2012; Hess, 2014;
Stullerova, 2014). We can never know with real certainty why a neglected political
thinker suddenly gains the spotlight, as Shklar arguably has in the last decade or
so. In her case, the usual explanatory difficulties are aggravated – and perhaps
partly explained – by her astonishingly wide-ranging interests: author of a series of
major works in the history of modern political thought (on Montesquieu,
Rousseau, and Hegel) and distinctive contributions to liberal theory, she could
converse just as knowledgeably about Cicero, Shakespeare, Hans Kelsen, or
Michael Walzer. A self-described “bookworm,” Shklar seemed to have read every-
thing – or at least this was the impression she made on colleagues and students
(including this writer). Of course, Shklar was always a liberal, and towards the end
of her career embraced the term “liberalism of fear” to characterize her position
(Shklar, 1998 [1989]). However, in part precisely because of its “bare-bones” cre-
dentials and bracketing of controversial philosophical questions, the liberalism of
fear’s contours have been susceptible since the first to legitimately variegated inter-
pretations.1 Not surprisingly perhaps, Shklar’s writings are again being mined by
an astonishing variety of scholars in pursuit of conflicting agendas.
Anyone still hoping to marry Shklar to a particular contemporary theoretical
camp or programmatic agenda will be frustrated by the volume at hand, a very
useful (though incomplete)2 collection of spring 1992 lectures on political obliga-
tion, based on the final undergraduate course she taught at Harvard. Retrieved
mostly from the university’s archives, and ably edited by Samantha Ashenden and
Andreas Hess, the lectures capture Shklar not the proto-realist or “cold war lib-
eral,” but instead wide-ranging, historically minded scholar who faithfully tapped
western political thought to shed light on timely questions. Given their large
undergraduate audience and unpolished contours, the lectures occasionally disap-
point. However, when considered alongside related published essays and more
formal scholarly talks from her final years, they suggest some potentially fruitful
insights about political obligation, a topic always of interest to Shklar, and one
368
European Journal of Political Theory 20(2)
that was increasingly crucial to her scholarly agenda. Before her unexpected death
in September 1992, Shklar was busily at work on a series of lectures (to be given at
Cambridge) on political exiles, a topic she hoped might fruitfully reopen the
increasingly stale academic exchange on political obligation. The undergraduate
lectures seem to have offered her a vehicle for thinking about what she might say
at Cambridge.
Ashenden and Hess have thoughtfully bookended the course lectures with a
1990 scholarly talk given at Berkeley, “Conscience and Liberty,” and also a smart,
previously published yet neglected 1988 piece, “Why Teach Political Theory?” The
Berkeley presentation anticipates many of the main claims made in the 1992 lec-
tures and functions as an excellent systematic introduction. For its part, “Why
Teach Political Theory?” reveals Shklar’s view of the nexus between teaching and
research; it also provides an implicit justification for the volume’s publication.
There Shklar pushes back against the usual tendency to draw a strict line between
research (i.e. one’s “own work”) and teaching, describing the latter “as much as
one’s own work as anything can be” (p. 215). On her view, attempts among polit-
ical theorists to draw a clear boundary between research and “mere” teaching are
pretentious and silly. Of course, writing and teaching are not identical, in part
because addressing “an indeterminate and anonymous audience of readers is very
different from talking to visible students” (p. 215). Another difference is that in
published scholarly work “one cannot take...
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