Shklar is most often cited as a critic of mainstream liberal thought.
e.g. that of Hayek & Friedman? She would have needed to be an economist to succeed in that project. Perhaps, Rawls or Dworkin are meant. But, again, they fall down because of mistakes in their economic thinking.
During the Cold War in particular, liberalism served as an ideological weapon against the totalitarian threat of the former Soviet Union and its satellite states.
If so, it was wholly ineffective. The truth is, the US was perfectly happy to let Western Europe follow a 'mixed economy' model which, as Sir John Hicks pointed out, was more Socialist than Capitalist in that profit rates were implicitly set by the State. Moreover, Exchange Controls were ubiquitous even after the collapse of Bretton Woods, and financial markets played only a limited role in allocating investible funds.
In the 'developing' world, the US dropped any pretense of promoting Liberal Democracy. They preferred Dictators supported by the Army.
But Shklar was concerned about the stifling dimensions of this kind of Western intellectual defence mechanism:
One might say that Goldwater and Reagan (and Thatcher, a little later on) defended classical liberalism at a time when elites preferred 'Corporatism'. Indeed, the Tinbergen 'convergence hypothesis' (also endorsed by Galbraith) saw bureaucratic Communism becoming indistinguishable for bureaucratic Managerial 'Capitalism'.
it served merely to protect the status quo,
Nothing is protected by hot air.
and was very often a mere fig leaf for the accumulation of material wealth and for other, more problematic aspects of Western culture.
People are proud to get a shiny new car or TV set. Why buy a fig-leaf if you have a ginormous dong?
It didn’t ignite any critical reflection or assist any self-awareness of how the liberties of Western democracy had arrived at such a perceived high standing.
That 'critical reflection' was plentifully supplied by the Mont Pelerin Society. Goldwater & Reagan gassed on about it endlessly.
It was also silent about the fact that fascism had developed in countries that had been identified as pillars of Western civilisation.
No. It had developed amongst 'Huns' (Germans) and spics, dagos, wops, etc. WASP societies were immune to such beastliness.
In a talk to the American Political Science Association titled 'Redeeming American Science', Shklar said
What I plan to do in this talk is therefore quite ambitious, namely, redeem American political theory,
i.e. stuff stupid Professors gassed on about. Could the subject be 'redeemed'? Only if smart people entered the field and professional politicians were willing to pay them a lot of money for their advise.
in order to bring out both its intrinsic intellectual importance
Alchemy appears intrinsically important because we have lots of lead and would like to turn it into shiny shiny gold. Sadly, only charlatans or lunatics go in for Alchemy. Thus it has no intellectual importance.
and its significance for American political science.
There are plenty of smart people making lots of money as political consultants or analysts. What they do is increasingly scientific. Sadly, you need to be smart to go in for it.
Far from being demeaning and scientifically superfluous, I would like to show that we have much to gain from seeing our present work as a continuation of the history of political thought in America.
Let's pretend we are as smart and as important as Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Such an outlook would serve to integrate political theory into political science, where it belongs;
Shklar was saying 'we have been teaching nonsense all these years. Our theory is completely disconnected with anything scientific. But political analysts were using path breaking statistical and game theoretic methods during the same period. The whole theory of 'rent seeking' evolved in the Sixties. Interestingly, these ideas were equally relevant for Socialist countries- if not more so. By the Eighties, the 'reverse game theory' of mechanism design had become an indispensable policy tool. Meanwhile, Shklar & Co had been getting more and more hysterical.
and it would also offer mainstream political science the self-understanding that only a historically grounded analysis can give it'
This assumes that collective action problems are bedeviled by hysteresis. Yet the experience of the post-War years (during which there were very dramatic changes in the type of regime) showed that ergodicity prevails. The German 'Historical School' was shown to be useless. Harvard dropped the German language requirement for Econ PhDs and substituted a Math requirement by about 1960.
(American Political Theory) has been charged with an obsessive and unconscious commitment to a liberal faith that prevents it from asking profound and critical questions.
America developed its own indigenous critiques of (Whig) Liberalism. Indeed, America inspired Europe's 'Listian' policies. With the election of Andrew Jackson, populist policies enter the policy space. Later, America produced Henry George and 'Trust busting'. It was in America, not Europe that an issue like bimetallism could dominate politics. The provincial German pedant was wrong to be condescending towards the Americans.
Incapable of envisaging alternatives, American political thought is said to be mired in the legacy of John Locke and a mindless optimism.
This may be said by ignorant immigrants teaching nonsense. It isn't true.
The fact that there have always been many lively controversies, moreover, does nothing to dispel this bland uniformity,
if that is what you are determined to see, that is what you will see.
because all parties are at some level said to be liberal.
What Americans object to is politicians being very liberal with their money.
In any event our petty intellectual squabbles
e.g. the squabble which led to the Civil War?
are mere shadowboxing compared to the real thing, the kind of ideological combat that feudalism and class war generated in Europe.
The last peasant uprising in Germany was crushed in 1525. By contrast, the Americans had a Revolution in 1776. They kicked out Mad King George's booted Hessians. Still, the fact is, they had originally petitioned the King to protect their rights as loyal subjects and English freemen. The King considered the petition to be disingenuous- which it probably was. Still, had he a better appreciation of the military situation, he might have taken a more conciliatory course.
Be that as it may, the truth is, Europe was more conservative and traditional than America. Ideology mattered little. Being occupied by a vast Army altered the type of regime- but for most people it was just a case of repeating this slogan rather than that slogan or tugging your forelock to this Lord rather than that Lord.
Shklar admits that American political thought isn't boring and repetitive. What she doesn't get is that America did the innovating. Europe played catch up.
On close examination American political theory is not, in fact, just our own; for it has not been hermetically sealed off from European thought.
It was populated by migrants from Europe. But its political system is sui generis.
Isolating it in order to illuminate its peculiarities is bound to reduce it to charmless uniformity. We do have special political traits; but from Locke to Social Darwinism, from the negative to the positive state, from Montesquieu to the Chicago School of political sociology, the controversies and the agreements have been shared, even if not shared identically by both sides of the big puddle.
It is fair to say that after the Second World War, Western Europe imitated America. Thus, when my father was born, he was a British subject. I am a British citizen. We now have a Supreme Court, just like the US, and have got rid of hereditary membership of the House of Lords. I suppose, if Trump wants to take over from King Charles, Sir Keir Starmer will have to accommodate him.
One should not overlook the local circumstances that give a special color to American political ideas, but there is no reason at all to treat them either in quarantine or contemptuously.
You can take the girl out of Europe but you can't take European arrogance out of the girl. Who in their right mind would treat the most powerful country in the world with 'contempt'?
At least four obvious political phenomena have contributed to distinguishing American political thought from its cultural neighbors:
Its closest cultural neighbors are Canada and the British West Indies.
the early and painless acceptance of white adult male suffrage,
Some States- Vermont, Kentucky etc. did get it in the late eighteenth century but this became the rule only around 1856 which was the same time as South Australia got it. Canada was somewhat laggard in this respect.
federalism,
Canada has it
judicial review,
India has it.
and most deeply, the prevalence of chattel slavery
in some states not others. Thus it can't be a distinguishing feature of American politics.
long after it had disappeared in the rest of the European world.
Serfdom was abolished at about the same time as slavery was abolished in the US.
Not racism-which is universal-but slavery in a modern constitutional state is truly unique.
The US has dual sovereignty. Is there a right to secession? The South thought so. It turned out they were wrong.
Monarchical States may have a Constitution. Spain didn't have slavery in its own country but permitted it in Puerto Rico till about 1880.
Until the Civil War amendments America was neither a liberal nor a democratic country, whatever its citizens might have believed.
No. It was both. It's just that African Americans and the First Nations were not accorded equal treatment under the law. But the fact that a thing is rationed, does not mean it doesn't exist.
Yet it did have in place a set of institutions that were capable of becoming so and to an unequaled degree.
This could be said of any country. Any set of institutions can be improved.
This country had embarked upon two experiments simultaneously:
just like the UK or France or Canada or India
one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
Democracy was an experiment. Tyranny pre-existed the Revolution. Having studied and taught worthless shite, Shklar was unable to write a single sentence which wasn't false or foolish or both false and foolish.
This list of the characteristics of our political development is hardly complete (I would add our unique university establishments),
Canada simply isn't that different from the US. What makes America special is its large population, strong economy and kick-ass Military.
but it does point to features that have set American political institutions apart
There are no such features. Some countries have an 'Executive Presidency'. Others don't.
and have had a decisive impact upon its most reflective citizens.
Its more reflective citizens consider 'Political Theory' to be a waste of time. Hire a smart analyst to help your candidate get elected. Don't listen to stupid Professors who had to run away from Hitler or Stalin or whoever.
Of all aspects of this political culture none might seem more peculiarly local than political science,
in which case, the US would have hardly permitted German refugees to teach that shite.
in all its many manifestations and eclecticism. To be sure, political science is only one of the modern social sciences; but it is the one that has flourished most in America,
Tullock & the theory of rent seeking is very American. Why? It is empirical. It is practical. It can go hand in hand with 'mechanism design' to radically improve outcomes and raise total factor productivity.
where it has also lately become notably democratic.
No. It has become Statistical and Game theoretic. Those who understand how to use Big Data are changing the political climate as we speak.
At the deepest level all the social sciences are part of a process of intellectual democratization.
No. They appeared at the same time as State bureaucracies expanded. Consider the LSE. Haldane helps set it up along with Imperial College because the Government needed better accountants and actuaries as well as chemical engineers.
For only recently (in the last two centuries) has either the inclination or the political need to think seriously about the lives of ordinary people as intrinsically significant emerged at all.
Nonsense! The King had to think about 'ordinary people'. If they didn't have enough food to eat, they might slaughter his garrison and run riot. States came into existence to solve collective action problems. In poorer states, the ruling class has to closely monitor the conditions of the masses. Thus, as Marx noticed, the German Prince brought in a Yankee- like Count Rumsford- to find ways to feed his people more cheaply and make them more productive. The American Federal Government could rely on a 'spoils system' because
1) there was 'subsidiarity'- i.e. local communities solved their own collective action problems
2) there was a large entrepreneurial class which any White Male could become part of. Specific projects requiring Federal funding could be pushed through by a more or less corrupt political machinery.
The history, remote or contemporary, of great men and dramatic events has only very lately made a place for people who are absent from the annals of monumental history.
Nonsense! History is all about this King or that Emperor having his head chopped off because the poor weren't getting enough bread to eat.
These lives can never be more than statistics; but they have come to matter, partly because social scientists became convinced that they were important in and of themselves
No. Social Scientists realized that their discipline was applied Statistics with a bit of Game theory thrown in. If you weren't mathsy, you were merely masturbating. Admittedly, there was also some mathsy masturbation- e.g. Social Choice theory.
and partly because the many began to assert themselves as urban citizens, as voters, as strikers, and as members of increasingly diverse and lay-oriented religious denominations.
This happened everywhere. But any set of institutions- not necessarily democratic- can accommodate these changes or else do stupid shit with the result that the country becomes a 'failed state'.
All the social sciences are submerged biographies of the silent majority of humanity:
Nixon spoke of the 'silent majority'.
the peasant, the artisan, the immigrant, the slave, women,
most of whom had the capability innovate or become entrepreneurs. Good mechanism design promotes this possibility. It is the path to affluence.
and (in our case) that basic irreducible unit of representative politics, the voter. All of them, even as mere numbers, have surfaced in the human sciences as part of a long and slow democratization of values
Nonsense! Great Empires in the Egypt and Iraq and China and India had a class of bureaucrats. The first census in the world was conducted in 3800 BC. It also counted livestock and other resources.
in a period whose ideologies were often in every degree hostile to these aspirations.
Ideologies don't matter. What concentrates minds is the risk that starving mobs will kill and eat the rich.
This is the historical context that makes the fact-mindedness of the social sciences different from that of those ancient bureaucratic regimes that also liked to keep minute records about their subjects.
No. This is what makes them similar. It is a different matter that some people got paid a little money to teach worthless shite at Uni. The moment you graduate and start working, your boss tells you to forget everything the Professor said.
Some of the finest social scientists from Alexander Hamilton to Vilfredo Pareto have been utterly opposed to democracy.
They pointed out certain obvious dangers. The Classical Liberal solution was to have 'checks and balances'.
Others have been ardently democratic.
Interestingly, almost all social scientists are opposed to death- at least when it comes to themselves. The failure of social scientists to abolish death is due to Neo-Liberal Patriarchy and the fact that dicks haven't been banned despite the fact that dicks are RAPING the Environment.
The democratization of values that is implicit in the social sciences in general is
like the Collectivization of farts. Society as a whole must take responsibility for the 'silent but deadly' one I just released.
entirely compatible with a great variety of political beliefs and theories, including some of the most destructive and cruel.
In other words, the thing is meaningless.
Nevertheless, I do want to argue that within a welter of diverse ideas the social sciences are fundamentally inclusive in their orientation
i.e. a drooling imbecile can get a PhD in Social Science. That's Inclusivity right there.
and that given the institutions of American government, a
democratic political science was eventually to be expected.
What was not expected, back in the Fifties, is that Sociology & Poli Sci would turn to shit.
To be fair, Shklar gives an okay account of late eighteenth and nineteenth century American political thought and ends with Dewey & Merriam. But, that's just when the story gets interesting. The Great Depression caused the Cowles Commission to use advanced mathematical techniques to understand and solve the new collective action problems (and opportunities) facing the nation. That's when Social Science become Sciencey rather than idealistic or historicist.
I hope that I have shown that its history has been a profound meditation upon our political experiences and our peculiar and often tragically flawed institutions.
That may have been true prior to the Great Depression. After the Wall Street crash, there was no time for 'profound meditation' or, if there was a bit of money for it, the task could be palmed off on refugee scholars.
I expect-indeed hope-that others will give different accounts. However, if one were to cast aspersions on American political theory,
You'd have to understand that guys like Tullock & Buchanan were doing it. Shklar wasn't. She was merely virtue signaling in a hysterical manner.
it should not be that it is Oedipally attached to liberalism
Oedipus killed his daddy and fucked his mummy. If that's attachment, we don't want it.
but that like the rest of the political classes of Europe and America, it failed to understand itself and lacked the imagination to project a plausibly better future.
No. It did the reverse. Rights become meaningful when analyzed as Hohfeldian Incidents. Link them to incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. Or, don't bother. There may be a cheaper Coasian solution. American and European 'political science' pictured a better world and helped create it by getting Public Finance and mechanism design right.
If we can learn to do better,
we aren't teaching worthless shite
it will be because democracy is itself dynamic.
Chinese Communism is more so.
The history of American political science is a part of its development,
No. It is a function of who would be willing to pay for it and whether they would notice if only cretins produced it.
which was neither painless nor uniform; but it has been an intellectual adventure of the first order.
It really hasn't. Quantum Mechanics is an intellectual adventure of the first order. A guy with room-temperature IQ can do Poli Sci. Did you know Modi has a Masters degree in 'entire Political Science'? Mamta has a Doctorate from 'East Georgia University'. Nobody cares. What can't be denied is that they are superb politicians- i.e. masters of 'the art of the possible', not some arcane theory.
As for 'American Political Theory'- what can we say about it in the age of Trump? Cruelty to migrants is celebrated. A climate of fear is celebrated. If oppression is what will make America great again, we can't have too much of it.
Shklar appeared a true prophet in the era of Clinton, Obama & even Joe Biden. It wasn't that long ago when political correctness or 'wokeism' ruled the roost.
The Aeon article I previously mentioned was written just 5 years ago. I suppose it was written before COVID took hold and suddenly the 'boomer' generation knew the meaning of real fear. Our liberties were taken away on a scale unprecedented in peace-time. Yet, most of us were touchingly grateful to the State for enforcing these restrictions.
In America... the fight between master and slave had not been just a Hegelian fantasy, it had been real.
No. It had been real in Haiti. In the US, the masters were simply too strong. Also, the White Southerner didn't really believe that the slave was hard working. He thought only fear of the whip kept him at his task.
The fight against slavery was a fight for ‘freedom itself’, it was ‘a way of political life’ and was very differently conceived than the mainly European distinction between positive and negative liberty of which Berlin had been so fond.
There was a fight over the right of secession which had an economic aspect. The South might have preferred to have free trade with the UK. The North wanted protection for its industries. The West wasn't happy with the North's financial domination but it needed capital to expand and populate the frontier.
Hannah Arendt was another of her targets.
To be fair, Shklar's parents had taken her to Canada which never had slavery. Arendt was very happy to get to Jim Crow America.
Shklar admired Arendt, but felt that something was amiss in her work.
It was ignorant shite. It was Ayn Rand who made more money and who had a political impact.
Shklar agreed with what Arendt had to say about the unprecedented social and political conditions under which the American republic was first conceived:
There were no unprecedented conditions. Different territories have different economic interests. Would the King do a deal acceptable to the colonists? No. He was as mad as a hatter.
the notable success the Founding Fathers had in absorbing the revolutionary spirit and energy of the people,
meaningless shite. The people didn't want to pay taxes to King George. Also they wanted to expand to their West regardless of any treaties with the 'Injuns'. Because they were very good at fighting, they prevailed.
establishing the country’s political institutions, and finally the relative success and achievements of the American revolution when compared with the problems associated with the French revolution.
The Americans expelled the Loyalists once and for all. After that, they had dual sovereignty and each State could pretty much do as it liked. The French were synoecist- i.e. centralizing. The result was that they exchanged a King for an Emperor.
However, Shklar thought that Arendt’s account of America ‘exploded into wrongness’. Too much of the US and its history was missing from Arendt’s picture. For instance, the US had to fight a Civil War in order to secure the liberal promises of its revolution for African-American men, let alone women.
Hilarious! White dudes in 1776 were promising the world to darkies. Also, they demanded the banning of dicks- save such as are used for exclusively homosexual purposes.
Arendt had no real appreciation of post-Civil War history,
she didn't know modern German history. She had studied utter shite at Uni.
the complexities of Southern politics,
she knew well enough that darkies did the shitty jobs and couldn't vote in many of the States. She didn't care. She wanted to earn dollars and that is what she did.
or of the many dimensions of American race relations, which could not be addressed through a simple distinction between public and private life.
Nor could they be addressed by some more complex distinction. What mattered was things like Voter Registration and entering segregated diners. That took courage.
Shklar also differed from Arendt in her understanding of the environment in which Americans found themselves. Using an expression first coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she distinguished between the ‘party of hope’ and the ‘party of memory’. The former position was represented by Thomas Paine
Paine was a crank. He lost popularity by attacking organized religion and the contribution of George Washington.
and Thomas Jefferson, and referred to the rejection of and radical rupture with almost everything that related to European history; Paine and Jefferson not only insisted firmly on living in the present,
then they died. They should have insisted on living in a more vehement manner
but their attitudes also allowed them to nurture bright hopes for the future.
then they died. Sad.
John Adams, and to some extent James Madison, represented what Shklar called the party of memory: both suggested looking to the past in order to find out what had gone wrong with classical European republicanism.
Why not simply admit that Adams and Madison had different economic interests from Jefferson?
Adams and Madison shared a more pessimistic outlook than Jefferson and Paine, and Shklar thought this more robust. It allowed her to criticise both Arendt’s classicist republicanism and her uncritical defence of American exceptionalism, and also to give due credit to a skeptical tradition of American political thought.
A Canadian probably does know more about America than a German.
Again, these were echoes of her take on the peculiarly American interpretation of the liberalism of fear. Shklar’s position amounts to one that sees American liberalism as a rather delicate achievement.
It was swamped by Jacksonian populism long ago. The question was who would control the gigantic state apparatus created over the course of the Thirties and Forties. The answer was technocrats like McNamara till they shat the bed and first tax-payers and then, later on, share holders, rebelled.
Unlike Arendt’s treatment of the American political tradition, for which Mount Rushmore’s monumentalism is the obvious symbol,
Peter Norbeck was the Senator from South Dakota. He got federal funding to create a tourist attraction. It is said that President Coolidge enjoyed fishing there so much he signed off on the project.
Shklar arrived at a more sophisticated and vital understanding of America and its history – and how its arguments are still played out and matter in our time.
No. American politics is but the shadow thrown by economic forces. Shklar didn't understand Econ.
One might ask, where is the positive in all this? Shklar was no system builder, unlike her friend and colleague John Rawls.
He misunderstood Harsanyi's 'veil of ignorance' gedanken. Also, he had never heard of Insurance. If you could end up disabled and unable to work, you take out insurance or vote for a compulsory insurance scheme.
She was highly critical of Rawls’s attempt to build a theory of justice with his 1971 book of that name.
But not for the right reason.
In her own, much shorter book The Faces of Injustice (1990), she suggested a change of perspective: injustice is not just the negative counterpart to justice. Instead, injustice must be studied as a phenomenon in its own right.
But if stupid people do the studying, the result will be stupidity. In any case, the theory of justice is the theory of justiciability which distinguishes cases where injustice has a remedy.
She maintained that to give injustice its due demands not only a different perspective but also a different type of narrative, one that helps to identify and recognise the many victims of injustice.
Shklar was teaching imbeciles. Her colleagues were cretins. She needed to identify and recognize the various types of horrendous epistemic self-abuse they had been subjected to. While at the LSE, I made it a point to approach Dr. Amartya Sen and condole with him for the repeated anal rape he must have suffered at the hands of various slum-dogs in Calcutta. Sadly, he did not appear grateful for my solicitude.
Such a new critical approach, she argued, could tell us more about the many faces of injustice
e.g. the face Amartya Sen makes when he is being buggered by a Dalmatian.
than following the false hope of striving for an ever-more perfect state of justice,
Shklar taught shit. She wasn't striving for anything.
including the idea of a perpetual amelioration of the laws.
Which is what actually happens. That's why judges and lawyers get paid lots of money.
Shklar’s political thought presents particular challenges to triumphalist and exceptionalist narratives.
Very true. Trump would shut the fuck up any time she was prowling around.
She detected that the legacy of slavery made America’s commitment to democracy often sound hollow.
American democracy meant it could keep slavery for longer than the British West Indies.
To her, discrimination remained a major scar that had not healed, despite all the rhetoric of equality and hard-fought-for improvements such as citizenship.
White lady liked virtue signaling. Black ladies weren't taken in. Every time she mentioned slavery or Jim Crow, they would ask how many of her Aunties were killed by Hitler.
Her position with regard to relations between Israel and Palestine was even more revealing. She never defended the hawks and hardliners in the conflict
which made them cry and cry
‒ and dared to say so in a letter that she circulated to colleagues and friends
i.e. useless cretins
after a visit to the region in 1987.
Did she support recognition of the Palestinian state in 1988? The fact is, the US had been quietly pushing Israel to return to the pre-67 borders even in the time of Nixon and the Rodgers Plan. That's why Kissinger was hated by the Israelis.
She reminded her American friends to remain realists, focusing on what could be achieved ‒ and defended. She did so by pointing out that ‘the Jews of Israel have achieved one of the aims of Zionism: they are no different, neither worse nor better, than the rest of mankind.
Sadly, they were better than their neighbors. Even economically, they began to rise in the Eighties thanks to Reagan's 'tough love'.
They are neither smarter, nor more virtuous than all the other nations.’
No. On average, they are smarter, have lower alcoholism, spousal abuse, etc.
Shklar’s intellectual formation is quintessentially that of
a person too stupid to do STEM subjects
an exile. Born Judith Nisse in 1928 into a mainly German-speaking Jewish family,
Jews had only been allowed to settle in Riga in 1841. Thus, this was an immigrant family living amongst an alien people.
her upbringing in Riga was not that of the typical Jewish shtetl of the region. Her father was a wealthy businessman, her mother a medic. Her education took place in a French lycée, an urban and secularised environment dominated by humanist subjects and language education.
In other words, her upbringing alienated her from the Latvian majority. But it also made it easier for her to assimilate to countries with a West European language and culture.
In 1939, her parents decided to heed the advice of family friends to escape to Sweden.
In one lucky move, the family managed to escape the totalitarian threat of both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. From Sweden, the Nisse family moved on, equipped with false papers, first through the Soviet Union to Vladivostok, then from Vladivostok to Japan, and finally from Japan via ship to Seattle. On arrival in the US, they were interned but, thanks to a rabbi who had spotted them among mainly Chinese and other internees of Asian origin, soon released.
In other words, her family was saved because of the color of their skin.
This odyssey demonstrated to the adolescent Judith that conditions existed in which, independent of how wealthy one’s parents were or how educated one was, no guardian angel would come to the rescue to guarantee safe passage and asylum.
It showed the reverse. Money was the guardian angel.
It pushed her into a kind of refuge in books and made her sharpen her intellectual interests, in the first instance in classic and modern literature and later in political ideas.
Because she was too stupid to do STEM subjects.
It would be facile to draw a straight line between Shklar’s work at Harvard and her experience fleeing Riga followed by a harrowing journey into exile.
Latvia was a democracy in the inter-war period. The State monitored anti-Semitic activities and could provide a little protection to the Jewish community.
But it would also be a mistake to maintain that there is no relationship between her early experience and a life spent thinking deeply about the political problems of loyalty, obligation and belonging.
There were no such problems. North America had been good to her family. They were loyal and soon felt they belonged.
Toward the end of her life, Shklar undertook work on citizenship, exile and emigration to
play the Holocaust card and attract attention to herself
throw new light on the history of political obligation and loyalty.
No such light was needed. The thing was as plain as day.
She had always felt that the story of exile sat uncomfortably with the ideal of belonging.
She wasn't an exile. She was an immigrant. There may have been some Latvian Jews in America who booked their passage home after the place had been annexed by Stalin. They were exiles. Shklar wasn't. She didn't go to Latvia on a tourist visa.
As she pointed out in her last two essays and in some of the lectures given just a few months before her death in September 1992 (recently published as On Political Obligation), exile was a fundamental human experience
as opposed to a canine experience? But it isn't fundamental at all. Few are exiles. Migration, for economic reasons, is much more common.
that had captured the attention of historians, poets and novelists. Despite the depth and breadth of interest in exile, political theorists had had little to say on it – something that she attempted to remedy.
Exiles are often deeply involved in a type of politics which may bring about regime change in the home country. Some exiles gain command over immigrant communities with mischievous consequences. Mary Kaldor has studied this phenomenon.
The exile’s perspective allowed her to address aspects of some core problems of political thought, including conditions for submission to rules and political obligation, but from an original angle.
She wasn't an exile. It is not the case that she had to flee Canada. She moved to the US to advance her career.
Shklar was aware that today’s emigrants and exiles face conditions different from the ones that she and her family had faced fleeing from mid-20th century Europe.
No. Nothing much had changed.
In many instances, there is no host country to offer asylum.
The US was turning away boatloads of Jews. The places which would let you in tended to be shitholes. That is still true today.
There is often no country to escape to. Most of today’s refugees find themselves ‘in pure limbo’, a situation that evokes moral concern, even moral outrage.
It also evoked a shift to the Right in Europe & America. But Pakistan and Iran are now deporting Afghans in industrial quantities.
In turn, those who are outraged and show solidarity find themselves in a solitary situation akin to that faced by Henry David Thoreau:
No they don't. Thoreau wrote well. They don't.
they can neither join a liberating force nor is it always possible to identify fully with the many refugees due to the lack of detailed knowledge, physical distance, culture and lack of shared language.
Very true. If you claim to be a Somali woman, people expect you to speak Somali.
As Shklar rightly observes, there is no ‘we’ here. What exactly do obligation and loyalty refer to?
Virtue signaling and hypocrisy.
What are the responsibilities of humans to one another in such situations?
They must offer elderly Professors gratuitous rape counselling. Say 'I know you have been viciously raped by various dogs. Also, you were forced to eat cat poo by Chairman Miaow. I want you to know that we all empathize with you.'
Since her death, Shklar’s questions on exile have grown weightier, and her insights sharper.
Because, as a ghost, she is slightly less stupid.
For her, exclusionary practices
e.g. burying or cremating dead people instead of inviting them to dinner
often give birth to loyalties of dubious quality.
Not if you exclude those whose loyalty is dubious. Killing them, too, sends a strong signal.
One conclusion that offers itself from the modern experience is that cultural and national cohesion remain overrated ideas, prolonging and even causing the conditions in which injustices thrive.
Worse yet is the fact that dicks haven't been banned. Dicks cause RAPE!
Shklar was aware that citizenship might not be the solution to all problems
even if Trump gives US citizenship to everybody in the world, dicks will continue to exist.
but she was convinced that it remained an essential precondition not only for achieving a democratic and principally open country
Very true. Once 1.3 billion Muslims move into the US, they can vote for Sharia law.
but first and foremost for making possible the experience of individual liberty.
e.g. by killing kaffirs.
