Judith N. Shklar

Judith Nisse Shklar (September 24, 1928 – September 17, 1992) was a philosopher and political theorist who studied the history of political thought, notably that of the Enlightenment period. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1980. Quotes It is, however, not only undignified to idealize political victims; it is also very dangerous. One of our political actualities is that the victims of political torture and injustice are often no better than their tormentors. They are only waiting to change places with the latter. Of course, if one puts cruelty first this makes no difference. It does not matter whether the victim of torture is a decent man or a villain. No one deserves to be subjected to the appalling instruments of cruelty. Ordinary Vices (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984) "A Life of Learning" (1989) "A Life of Learning", Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, American Council of Learned Societies (April 6, 1989) Any hierarchical and competitive society, such as Harvard, is likely to generate a lot of gossip about who is up and who is down. It puts the lower layers in touch with those above them, and it is an avenue for malice and envy to travel up and down the scale. When I became sufficiently successful to be noticed, I inevitably became the subject of gossip, and oddly I find it extremely objectionable. I detest being verbally served for dinner by academic hostesses, so to speak, and I particularly resent it when my husband and children are made into objects of invasive curiosity and entertainment by them. The male colleague who cannot argue with a female colleague without losing his temper like an adolescent boy screaming at his mother, and the many men who cannot really carry on a serious professional conversation with a woman, are just as tiresome as those who bad-mouth us overtly. For me, personally, the new era for women has not been an unmixed blessing. It is not particularly flattering to be constantly exhibited as the "first" woman to have done this or that, just like a prize pig at a country fair. The idea of joining a movement and submitting to a collective belief system strikes me as a betrayal of intellectual values. I certainly prefer frank and independent students to ingratiating and flattering ones... And I fear that the students who so readily attach themselves to idols lose their education along with their independence. Apart from the early establishment of representative democracy and the persistence of slavery, which do give it a special character, American political thought is just an integral part of modern history as a whole. I took it as my starting point that the willful infliction of pain is an unconditional evil and tried to develop a liberal theory of politics from that ground up. Quotes about Shklar Shklar’s was a liberalism motivated not by a summum bonum, an ultimate good, but by a summum malum, an ultimate evil, something to be avoided: namely, cruelty and the fear it inspires. Liberalism’s emphasis on restraint, she argued, should be motivated by the distinctive political evil of living in fear of state violence and cruelty. This was how liberalism could ensure it remained anti-statist in the right way: focused on the most dangerous branches and uses of state power, without giving up on state authority to restrain private cruelty as well. Jacob T. Levy. "Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar? Meet the American philosopher who showed that Western politics could only move forward by first taking a step backward."[REVIEW] Foreign policy (2018) External links Category:Jews from the United States Category:Jewish atheists Category:Jewish feminists Category:Political scientists from the United States Category:Philosophers from the United States Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:University of Cambridge faculty Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society Category:Women scientists from the United States Category:1928 births Category:1992 deaths Category:Women born in the 1920s Category:Women from Latvia