Shklar’s book Ordinary Vices (1984) had been largely inspired by Michel de Montaigne and Montesquieu. These two statesmen and political thinkers loomed large for her because they paid due attention to what needs to be avoided at all costs: cruelty, unnecessary suffering, brutal punishment and fear. Both French thinkers, having been experienced political animals, favoured a rather minimalist conception of politics, free from utopian ideals. Their aim and major purpose was to achieve a decent society marked by the absence of fear, not to work toward a political paradise.
Such insight, Shklar argued, provided a form of reasoning and advocated a kind of politics that eventually gave birth to a modern skeptical political tradition. She picked up this fine thread, woven through the history of modern political life, drew it out and articulated it with great clarity and force. The liberalism of fear never became a state, a government or a lasting condition one could simply rely upon. Rather, it was a delicate achievement, always in danger of disappearing or being obliterated by the powers that be. Shklar grasped that the cataclysms of the 20th century made necessary and urgent the promotion of a more skeptical liberalism, one that prioritised avoiding cruelty. As Shklar points out, in light of the extreme experiences of the previous century (and, arguably, those of this one too), ‘liberal democracy becomes more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankind’.
Shklar’s argument has particular bite in a disenchanted world of intractable value conflicts. Her focus on the summum malum and how to avoid it is negatively strong. It is capable of underwriting a universalism of a very particular sort. In other words, Shklar has a theory of the ‘bad’. She wagers that we might be able to know collectively what we want to avoid, without having to agree on a comprehensive life plan or account of the good. This negative universalism works in the service of sustaining political pluralism.
With the liberalism of fear, Shklar had found her own voice. She was portrayed by a number of admirers as an ‘American Montaigne’. This was high praise indeed; but maybe more to the point (and more modest) was Patrick Riley, a former student of Shklar’s, who commended Ordinary Vices for expressing ‘the summa of Shklarism’. She had provided a modern conceptual armoury based on ‘a fusion of psychological confidence and moral skepticism’.
Quite a few critics complained that Shklar’s barebones liberalism was mainly a minimalism or even reductionism. Nothing could be further from the truth, as her consecutive writings and public statements show.