Judith Shklar
Other
Why Alberto Alemanno recommends Judith Shklar
“Because she built an entire political theory around “putting cruelty first” as the foundation of liberalism, and because she showed that defending ordinary citizens from arbitrary power - whether public or private - is the core democratic project, not some secondary concern after we’ve sorted out grand constitutional principles.”
Latvian-born American political philosopher (1928-1992), professor of government at Harvard from 1956 to 1992, the first woman to receive tenure in the department. Her 'liberalism of fear', set out in After Utopia (1957), Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice (1990), starts from the conviction that cruelty is the worst of all vices and that political life should be measured by its capacity to protect the weak from arbitrary power. A formative teacher of several generations of American
- Place
- Cambridge, United States
- Recommended by
- Alberto Alemanno
- Collections
- Arts & Culture · Co-Being · In Memoriam
