The seven deadly sins of Christianity (pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth) represent the abysses of character, whereas Judith Shklar’s “ordinary vices” ― CRUELTY, HYPOCRISY, SNOBBERY, BETRAYAL, and MISANTHROPY ― are merely treacherous shoals, flawing our characters with mean-spiritedness and inhumanity. Shklar draws from a brilliant array of writers ― Montaigne, Hawthorne and Nietzsche on cruelty, Molière and Dickens on hypocrisy, Jane Austen on snobbery, Conrad and Faulkner on betrayal, Shakespeare and Montesquieu on misanthropy ― to reveal the nature and effects of the vices. She examines their destructive effects, the ambiguities of the moral problems they pose to the liberal ethos, and their implications for government and especially for liberalism as a difficult and challenging doctrine that demands a tolerance of contradiction, complexity, and understands the risks of freedom. Chapters:
- Putting Cruelty First
- Let Us Not be Hypocritical
- What Is Wrong with Snobbery
- The Ambiguities of Betrayal
- Misanthropy
- Bad Characters for Good Liberals ____ “Shklar sketched the character a "good liberal" would need, in terms of avoiding cruelty, snobbery, misanthropy, and betrayal (and also the self-righteousness that so often comes with fighting the good fight against vice); a dose of hypocrisy was tolerated and could even be useful. She noted that "Kant's character is profoundly negative"; so was hers, because "all our virtues are, in fact, avoidance of vices." It was her psychological insight that enabled her to understand both the power and the danger of utopias-the risk that visions of the good will lead to murderous human experiments-and it is that insight that made her focus on avoidance rather than on fulfillment: on evil rather than on good, on fear rather than on virtue ("because fear is the ultimately evil moral condition"), on injustice rather than on justice- because the sense of injustice corresponds to the universal experience of citizens (or exiles) and to the basic language of politics.” (Stanley Hoffmann)
Author
Judith Shklar was born as Judita Nisse in Riga, Latvia to Jewish parents. Because of persecution during World War II, her family fled Europe over Japan to the US and finally to Canada in 1941, when she was thirteen. She began her studies at McGill University at the age of 16, receiving bachelor of art and master of art degrees in 1949 and 1950, respectively. She later recalled that the entrance rules to McGill at the time required 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. She received her PhD degree from Harvard University in 1955. Her mentor was the famous political theorist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who, she later recalled, only ever offered her one compliment: "Well, this isn't the usual thesis, but then I did not expect it to be." Eventually she became his successor. Shklar joined the Harvard faculty in 1956, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department in 1971. During her first year in the job, the Department permitted her to stay at home with her first child while writing her first book. When it came time for her tenure decision, the Department dithered, so Shklar proposed a half-time appointment with effective tenure and the title of lecturer, partly because she had three children by then. In 1980, she was appointed to be the John Cowles Professor of Government. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann once remarked, “she was by far the biggest star of the department.” Hoffmann also called her "the most devastatingly intelligent person I ever knew here." During her career, Shklar served in various academic and professional capacities. For example, she was active in the committee that integrated the American Repertory Theater into the Harvard community. Throughout her life, Judith Shklar was known as "Dita." She and her husband, Gerald Shklar, had three children, David, Michael, and Ruth
