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I.
INTRODUCTION
"To be alive is to be afraidâ[euro].1 In "The Liberalism of Fearâ[euro], the short article for which she was best known and whose title came to be seen as her catchphrase, Judith Shklar elaborated on her stark conception of liberal democracy based on the idea of "putting cruelty firstâ[euro]--a conception she described elsewhere as "more a recipe for survival than a project for the perfectibility of mankindâ[euro]. 2 A theorist of dystopic liberalism, a realist champion of the liberal state as a mere modus vivendi, a "liberal without illusionsâ[euro]: this is how Shklar is most often described.3 Born in Latvia in 1928, her thought is understood as embodying a characteristic émigré perspective, shaped by her flight from Nazism in 1939 and her preoccupation with the horrors of the twentieth century.4
Yet what makes Shklar a more expansive thinker than these descriptions allow is the simple fact that she was occupied with more than just fear. In fact, she spilt little ink on the content of the fear that she believed underpinned politics. Rather, throughout her forty-two years at Harvard, she made clear that she believed political theory to be based on hope--a claim that has been much commented on but rarely explored in depth. 5 The Kantian question "what can I hope for?â[euro] was very much at the centre of her thought. Hers was thus not a straightforward anti-utopian scepticism. On the contrary: her life was spent carefully exploring how to take political hope seriously. In a world where scepticism about human capacities seemed the only reasonable position, she looked closely at what to hope for. She was fascinated by the dynamic interaction of what she called, following Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "party of hopeâ[euro] and the "party of memoryâ[euro], and these two poles were a recurring trope in her thought. By memory, she did not mean simply the memory of the Holocaust, but also attentiveness to the past in general. Shklar certainly declared that her liberalism "may well be what Emerson called a party of memory rather than a party of hope.â[euro] 6 But as John Dunn has said, "the priority of memory (or fear) over hope which she commended was...