User:Ie.hist/Judith N. Shklar

Shklar's thought centered on two main ideas: cruelty as the worst evil and the "liberalism of fear." She discusses the first idea in her essay "Putting Cruelty First," published in Daedalus (1982) and in Ordinary Vices (1984). Her second main idea, expounded in her essay "The Liberalism of Fear," is founded on the first idea and focuses on how governments are prone to abuse the "inevitable inequalities in power" that result from political organization.

Based on these core ideas, Shklar advocated constitutional democracy, which she saw as flawed but still the best form of government possible. A constitutional democracy, in Shklar's view, protects people from the abuses of the more powerful by restricting government and by dispersing power among a "multiplicity of politically active groups". Her concern for possible governmental abuse stemmed from her focus the ordinary citizens instead of institutions and elites. In her mind, it was a average person faced the brunt of institutional evil and injustice.

Shklar believed that "the original and only defensible meaning of liberalism" is that "every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of his or her life as is compatible with the like freedom of every adult." Shklar described rights less as absolute moral liberties and more as licenses which citizens must have in order to protect themselves against abuse.

Shklar was deeply interested in injustice and political evils, claiming that "philosophy fails to give injustice its due"; that is, most past philosophers have ignored injustice and talked only about justice, likewise ignoring vice and talking only about virtue. I nstead, Shklar's writing avoided justice and virtue and focused on evil, fear, or injustice. .Ordinary Vices and The Faces of Injustice articulate Shklar's attempts to fill this gap in philosophical thought, drawing heavily on literature as well as philosophy to argue that injustice and the "sense of injustice" are historically and culturally universal and are critical concepts for modern political and philosophical theory.