“The Liberalism of Fear” is fundamentally an essay about the boundaries of liberalism. Over the course of the mid- to late 20th century, liberalism became encumbered by considerable cultural baggage in Western politics. It had come to be associated with the progressive technocracy of a self-appointed best and brightest and the judicial enforcement of substantive policy outcomes; it was a school of thought that both claimed to represent the people and seemed to avoid the messy practice of democratic politics. In part for that reason, some thinkers on both the right and the left came to use it as an epithet, shorthand for a halfhearted and weak-kneed lack of conviction. Think of Robert Frost’s joke that a liberal is someone who won’t take his or her own side in an argument or — in the immediate past as Shklar was writing her essay — George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign disdaining liberalism as culturally elitist and effete.
In her essay, Shklar tries to recenter liberalism by insisting it is essentially a political, not a philosophical or legal, doctrine. Liberalism is concerned with freedom, but the substance of freedom is to be determined by the individuals seeking it for themselves, not the philosopher divining its nature from her office. By placing limits on liberalism, Shklar also wanted to give it more force, in the service of protecting people from undue power — state power, above all. She thought the philosophical and juridical liberalism of rights and justice associated with Immanuel Kant and Rawls, as well as the aspirational liberalism of self-development found in John Stuart Mill’s work, ultimately went astray because it distracted from the most urgent political task associated with freedom: restraining state violence. [...]
As such, Shklar’s attention was focused on the political actors most capable of organizing violence — the state’s military, paramilitary, intelligence, and police and law enforcement agencies. Shklar’s discussion of the potential cruelty and lawlessness of armed agents of the state helps illuminate contemporary issues such as overincarceration, police violence, the legacy of the use of torture since 9/11, and, particularly timely, the sweeping powers of immigration enforcement agencies. In the 1990s, this struck many critics as an excessively modest vision, one that gave up on morally valuable aspirations and ambitions. But by 2018 it should be clear that liberalism as Shklar understood it cannot be taken for granted — and if liberalism hopes to win more widespread support among the people it is meant to serve, defending it on Shklar’s more modest and democratic terms may be the solution. [...]
Gatta identifies themes that have been underappreciated in Shklar’s work: an orientation toward the well-being and the voices of the less powerful, a need for democratic participation and inclusion, a worry about economic power that is subordinate to the worry about state power but never absent. Gatta is right, for example, to highlight Shklar’s commitment to active, competitive politics and to note that her partial skepticism about democracy in “The Liberalism of Fear” is far from her only word on the matter: Liberalism, Shklar says, is “monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy — but it is a marriage of convenience.” Gatta shows that Shklar’s thought prescribes an open-ended democratic process to identify people who are subject to fear and cruelty, listen to their accounts of it, and think creatively about how to respond. In that way, Shklar’s failure to build a schematic political doctrine wasn’t an accident; in emphasizing fear and cruelty, she gave greater moral weight to interaction and communication than the stability offered by a political blueprint or a legal constitution.
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