Word: shklar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Putting cruelty first, however, can kill a book--let alone the faith of the political theorist writing it. "Where next?" we might wonder--despairingly. Shklar doesn't give in so easily. Her book resembles a lesson in avoiding the answer of a Hamlet seeking suicide or a Hitler planning genocide. Weaving between the Scylla of simple answers and the Charibdis of complexity, she steers the hull (some would say the corpse) of liberalism along a cautious straight and narrow...
...what is a telling passage for us, Shklar writes...
...pretensions of public government and the private character of those who comprise it present as with a problem Shklar's challenge. Neither public nor private sphere is any less cruel; yet more is expected of the former. Any liberalism that pits itself against the fear implicit in cruelty's vices has a task set out for itself. Is its power awesome enough to rid us of those vices? Hardly. Yet Shklar insists that it may help keep us from the rot in ourselves that leads us to follow fearful political solutions...
...course, freedom is the more difficult alternative. It whimpers where fear bangs heavily and suffers from the delicacy of its ambiguities. Yet to those who fear the licence its freedom brings, Shklar (and Montgaigne) can only answer that there is no fear worse than the fear of fear...
...Shklar concedes that intolerable private vices may well unmask their public faces under liberalism, but argues that this poses less of a problem than any solution fear might dictate. She insists it's all within a liberal's range. Hypocrisy, hideous in its private forms, might well be necessary in a liberal democracy where politics is half persuasion, and the arts. It is the price we pay for social mobility, just as the exclusivity of cliques are the necessary outcome of a free society's overwhelming diversity. The message: better to be ambiguous in our freedom than fixed...