Cruelty, Injustice, and the Liberalism of Fear

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231169979
• Author: Robin Douglass
• Date: 01 October 2023

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231169979

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(5) 790 –813

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231169979

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Article

Cruelty, Injustice, and

the Liberalism of Fear

Robin Douglass1

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and

injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is

sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards

cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this

interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be

read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing

so, I show how her exploration of the faces of injustice—especially the

importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—

raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first.

Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available

remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too

much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice

as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and

undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-

inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar

outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct

strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of

law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear.

Keywords

Judith Shklar, cruelty, injustice, liberalism of fear, republicanism, citizenship

1Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, London, UK

Corresponding Author:

Robin Douglass, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, Bush House,

North-East Wing, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG, UK.

Email: robin.douglass@kcl.ac.uk

1169979PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231169979Political TheoryDouglass

research-article2023

Douglass 791

Judith N. Shklar’s most famous contribution to political theory is her account

of the liberalism of fear, at the heart of which is the idea of putting cruelty first.

This understanding of liberalism has been adopted by political theorists such

as Richard Rorty (1989, xv, 74, 146) and Bernard Williams (2005, 3, 52–61,

138), with others applying Shklar’s account to a wide range of theoretical

debates on topics including multiculturalism (Levy 2000), human rights and

victimhood in international politics (Lu 2002; Meister 2002; Stullerova 2013),

and even animal ethics (Abbey 2016). In 1989, the year “The Liberalism of

Fear” first appeared, Shklar also published an essay entitled “Giving Injustice

Its Due,” which was then expanded to form the first chapter of The Faces of

Injustice the following year.1 Shklar’s ideas on injustice have proved influen-

tial too, especially among those who have challenged the dominant (Rawlsian)

approach to theorizing justice by instead foregrounding real-world injustices

(e.g., Barnett 2017, 242–46; Bufacchi 2012, 2; Fricker 2007, vi–vii, 39–40;

Goodhart 2018, 27–29; Medina 2013, 12–13). For the most part, however,

political theorists who draw upon the liberalism of fear do not attend to

Shklar’s views on injustice, while those who follow Shklar in prioritizing

questions of injustice are less concerned with her views on cruelty. This is not

especially surprising. In her work on injustice, Shklar never mentions either

the liberalism of fear or the injunction to put cruelty first. Yet political theorists

interested in building upon what has aptly been called Shklar’s “negative

political theory” (Stullerova 2022, 720) would do well to ask whether putting

cruelty first and giving injustice its due are complementary aspects of her

thought, or whether they pull in different directions.

What, then, is the relationship between cruelty and injustice? This ques-

tion has received little attention from Shklar scholars. Some present her late

work on injustice (and American citizenship) as following straightforwardly

from her commitment to the liberalism of fear. Dunn (1996, 45), for example,

claims that the liberalism of fear served as the “axis for each of her two final

and most passionately political books, The Faces of Injustice and American

Citizenship”, and Gatta (2018, 38) regards these two books as “the embodi-

ment” of the liberalism of fear. More generally, Fives (2020, 22) takes the

liberalism of fear to encompass Shklar’s approach in “her work from the start

of the 1980s up to her untimely death in 1992”, and Stullerova (2019, 74)

observes that the liberalism of fear is typically considered “emblematic of

1. I use the following abbreviations for frequently cited works by Shklar:

FI = The Faces of Injustice (Shklar 1990); LF = “The Liberalism of Fear”

(Shklar [1989] 1998); OV = Ordinary Vices (Shklar 1984); PCF = “Putting

Cruelty First” (Shklar 1982).