Humankind cannot bear very much uncertainty; to our dying day, we are all afraid of the dark. And so we perceive the world selectively, exaggerating the significance of particular things, downplaying others, and ignoring most of what bombards our senses, all so that we might be convinced, from now until bedtime, that we understand ourselves and our environment. We do this even in the best of times—in fact, without this selective ignorance, there would be no “best of times,” just the pervading fear of what comes next. Imagine, then, a situation where to this basic existential fear of the unknown is added the uncertainty of living without the law’s protection. Where you are subject to the latest despotic decree directed toward “your kind,” or to the whim of the police officer with his truncheon, or to the clerk behind her desk deciding whether to issue you a passport. And where they, too, are terrified by the whims of those above them.
Imagine, further, that the regime sees all this—sees the power of fear and learns how to treat it as a commodity that can be stockpiled and spent as needed. Such a regime could attain its ends by making only a small number of opponents suffer physically while leaving the rest in psychological torment, wondering if or when the blow will fall. Their fear is not of blind fate but of consciously directed power. Making his subjects aware that they live at his discretion, rubbing their faces in the fact that he owns their destiny, is a form of torture the modern tyrant seems to relish. It is the distillation of fear itself.
For Judith Nisse Shklar (1928–1992) this fear of being in another’s arbitrary power is the ur-human experience that modern liberalism was developed to stave off. Not to guarantee the exercise of our God-given individual rights. Not so that human cultural and moral capacities might develop fully. Not to make our societies more wealthy or egalitarian. There are schools of political thought that focus on these and other secondary qualities of liberal societies, complaining, with justice, when they are lacking. Yet such concerns can render us historically shortsighted and morally obtuse if they cause us to forget that the pursuit of the summum bonum is a luxury available only to those who have been freed from the summum malum of political fear. Liberalism, properly understood, is the political science of putting first things first.
Max Weber once described himself as being religiös unmusikalisch—religiously unmusical. Judith Shklar was, to an eminent degree, historically musical. Born in 1928 in Riga, Latvia, she fled with her Jewish family to Sweden in 1939 to escape advancing Russian armies. One year later, to escape the Germans, they crossed the Soviet Union by the Trans-Siberian Railroad, hoping to reach Canada by way of Japan. As fortune would have it, all visas from Japan were canceled by the US government while the ship was en route, causing it to be intercepted and its passengers to be put in a detention center in Seattle. There, the story goes, the Nisse family was discovered by Hadassah volunteers come to aid the Asian detainees. The women informed a local rabbi, who in turn made their plight known to a local newspaper, which published an article that got them released and sent on their way to Canada. These “adventures,” Shklar once drily remarked, “left me with an abiding taste for black humor.”
There is nothing humorous about her famous essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” which she published in 1989, three years before her untimely death. Shklar’s intellectual style here, as in her life, is that of a counterpuncher. In her eyes the best arguments for liberalism were historical ones exposing the bad faith and naiveté of antiliberals on the left and the right. Her first book, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957), was a penetrating and at times withering examination of Romantic critics of the liberal Enlightenment, down to Catholic and existentialist thinkers of the postwar period. In “The Liberalism of Fear” she brought those criticisms to bear on more recent critics, including some left-leaning ones with whom she was personally quite close, such as John Rawls and Michael Walzer.
Right-leaning antiliberalism is a far more potent force now than it was three decades ago. In the 1980s there were still fruitful discussions to be had with conservative and neoconservative critics of liberal public policies and the ongoing revolution in social mores. But the basic principles of liberal democracy—the primacy of individual freedom, limited constitutional government, the public-private distinction, the rule of law, the impersonality of public offices, toleration—were never thrown into question by either side. In this fundamental sense, we were all liberals then.
No longer. Today, reactionaries on every continent pride themselves on a belligerent illiberalism, vaunting the muscles in their heads that have never been used. The parallels with the European interwar period do not need to be exaggerated to stir memories. So much seems familiar: Catholic integralists proclaiming the priority of God’s law over man’s, heads of state brandishing nationalist identitarianism like a talisman. Even futuristic fantasies of a purifying apocalypse preparing the ascent of a technocratic ruling elite now circulate in Silicon Valley as they did in 1930s Europe. Oswald Spengler’s cultural pessimism, Carl Schmitt’s authoritarian decisionism, Ernst Jünger’s “storms of steel” bravado—all these notions chime again like ancient bells. Their reissued books sell briskly.
But why? Of all the innovations of the modern age that one might identify as a threat to the human good, why would liberalism, of all things, top the list? Judith Shklar took this question seriously. What she saw at work in reactionary rhetoric is a fallacy which presumes that since liberalism is a distinctly modern political idea—monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, theocracy, and tyranny all existed in antiquity—then liberalism must be responsible for every aspect of “modernity.” In Shklar’s view, what the earliest liberals conceived of as a narrowly political doctrine became in the polemics of the antimoderns a bacillus that infected every aspect of human conscious and social interaction, initiating a decline from which we have not recovered.
The irony in this charge does not escape Shklar, who points out the obvious historical fact that, however well developed its intellectual tradition, liberalism has hardly ever been given institutional form in the West, let alone in other parts of the world. In post-revolutionary France, politics were dominated by generals, competing revolutionary movements, and monarchists until the Third Republic, whose anti-liberal opponents were swept back into power by Vichy. Germany’s one post-unification experiment with liberalism was depth-charged by the Nazis. Spain, Portugal, and Greece only fully escaped the rule of dictators in the mid-1970s. The US, despite the liberal principles embodied in its constitution, could be considered a formally liberal polity only after the abolition of slavery and the enactment of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Great Britain alone among the major Western nations can claim to have had anything like a continuous tradition of liberal government since the nineteenth century. How, then, could such a weak political force have triggered a civilization’s decline?
It couldn’t have.
To point this out, though, is not enough. To defend liberalism in the current atmosphere one must also define it, or more precisely, delimit it. And not just to meet the challenges of the antiliberals. If they conflate liberalism with “modernity” in order to attack it, too many contemporary liberals and progressives make the mistake of associating it with “all good things.” They fall victim to a different fallacy: that if liberalism is good, then all good (political) things are liberal. There is a tendency—particularly in the US and Britain, where the socialist tradition has been far weaker than on the Continent—to speak as if the great progressive reforms of the twentieth century were nothing but logical elaborations and applications of purely liberal principles, rather than changes inspired by principles that complement but are not derived from liberal ones.
In “The Liberalism of Fear,” Judith Shklar set out to reclaim a narrow and defensible theory of liberalism by recovering its original problematic. On her rereading (and, at times, rewriting) of intellectual history, liberalism was and still should be a narrow political theory concerned with guaranteeing individual freedom. It does not presume a cosmology dictating man’s place in the universe, or a philosophy of the good life, or a path to individual and social salvation, or a path away from salvation. Nor does it harbor utopian ambitions of human “emancipation” writ large—quite the contrary.
Initially liberalism was developed as a response to the social breakdown caused by Europe’s religious wars, and its promoters insisted on religious toleration as a first principle—one grounded not in philosophy or theology but rather in a realistic view of human psychology and political history drawn from their own experiences. Their insistence on the distinction between public and private—wherever the line is drawn—arose from concern about concrete abuses of power and how to limit them with laws and institutions. Liberalism so conceived prizes above all the rule of law, placing it even above the principle of democracy. As Shklar put it in a truly memorable phrase, “liberalism is monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy—but it is a marriage of convenience.”
The same might be said of the doctrine’s relation to social reform. A liberalism of fear is the absolutely necessary condition of a decent society, the sine qua non, but it is not a sufficient one. Depending on time and place, on changes in human consciousness and material life, the ability of individuals to participate as full and equal citizens in a liberal republic will call for different things. Failure of governments to pursue those things is not a failure of liberalism; it is a failure of human charity and ambition. Nor is failure to achieve those ideals a failure of liberalism; some things prove impossible to achieve, and one must admit that. But one doesn’t know until one tries. A liberal foundation in the rule of law as a constraint on arbitrary power can and must be built upon, without threatening the foundation.
Shklar’s essay is far more timely today than it was upon its publication in the waning years of the Cold War, when liberal democracy appeared to be the only legitimate regime left standing. Today the knights of cruelty ride once again; they are brazen, and they have new apologists and champions. Thanks to the cursed blessings of the digital age, they are more closely connected in global intellectual, political, and even military networks than ever before.
Judith Shklar did not live to see these latest transformations, but none of them would have surprised her. Except perhaps the speed with which the sinister, grinning cruelty of liberalism’s new enemies has been adopted by a large portion of the American public, which chose a dim Caesar to sit at the pinnacle of institutional power. I have thought of her often over these past years as I have watched wrenching scenes of agents of the United States government not merely arresting illegal immigrants, which is lawful, but snatching them off the streets and sending them abroad without legal procedures, or entrapping them at government offices as they arrive to regularize their situations. Who among us will forget the screaming babies, the hysterical spouses splayed on the floor, zip tied, as they fought to keep their families together while menacing dogs growled? Who will forget the look of fear in their eyes and the cruel relish taken in their plight by the online mob? The summum malum, indeed, in red, white, and blue.