Word: shklar
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...familials to a political tradition, we are not lectured but read to by a cast of literary and philosophical characters. Shklar simply asks us to think critically, "relentlessly" even, about the 'you and us' that makes up our liberalism...
...looks at oneself inevitably has a bearing on which of 'us' one plugs into the equation. Montaigne, the skeptical hero of this book, was the most hesitant of pluggers-in; a true plodder. But it is to him that Shklar turns. It is in our wrongdoings--essentially in our response to what we are--that Shklar finds the right clues to the answer we call government; to the question of what we ought...
...Putting Cruelty First," the title of Chapter One, provides us with Shklar's point of departure. Cruelty, the mother of Shklar's analysis, nurses some more ordinary foibles--hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy. But in a discussion of politics and character, we must begin with the worst. "What we hate," Montaigne said of cruelty, "we take seriously...
...seriousness of Shklar's proposition hinges on its familiarity. Stripping cruelty of religion's septimum of sinning and politics' pretension to social harmony, Shklar puts it on the reading table, in the streets: empirical and everpresent. Brutality, Shklar before Machiavelli; known to faithless and holy alike...
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...