Dostoyevsky and the Defense of Compassion

• Author: Max Lykins
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211046579
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2022, Vol. 75(4) 1131–1142

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211046579

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Dostoyevsky and the Defense of

Compassion

Max Lykins

1



Abstract

Is cruelty a problem for politics? For Hannah Arendt, the answer was no. On her view, a compassionate response

towards persons suffering cruelty is best avoided because compassion can only become political by transforming in-

communicable individual pain into abstract suffering. At crucial moments in her argument in On Revolution, she cites the

great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky as an ally. However, I argue that Arendt misrepresents Dostoyevsky.

Through a critical examination of his mature novels, I show how suffering is communicable and compassion is political for

Dostoyevsky. By attending to this theme in his writings, I argue that Dostoyevsky sheds light on the problem of cruelty in

a way that Arendt’s framework cannot. This suggests that he is more at home with theorists like Judith Shklar who “put

cruelty f‌irst”than with Arendt, although in favoring compassion I argue that he departs from Shklar’s liberalism of fear

and offers a more constructive, hopeful political vision.

Keywords

cruelty, compassion, Dostoyevsky, Arendt

Introduction

Is cruelty a problem for politics? If so, how should we

react to it? The political theorist Judith Shklar famously

argued that cruelty was a political problem, and that its

ubiquity in the human experience justif‌ied liberalism. Her

“liberalism of fear”is grounded in a wariness for the

potential of state agents to inf‌lict cruelty on citizens,

especially marginalized populations (Shklar 1984,1–10).

On Shklar’s view, cruelty is an omnipresent human ex-

perience whose immediacy cuts across cultural, linguistic,

and geographic boundaries.

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The fear of suffering needs

no justif‌ication or extended ref‌lection, allowing liberals to

avoid relativism, imperialism, and disputed positive as-

sumptions of the good.

There is a long tradition of claiming that suffering is

inherently repulsive to humans. Adam Smith notes that

humans have a natural felt aversion to seeing suffering

(1,85–86). The Roman historian Tacitus observes that

“during times of misfortune there is softness in the human

soul”(Tacitus 2008, 4.68). The Greek historian Polybius’s

observations of Olympic boxing led him to posit that there

is a natural human inclination toward the underdog

(Polybius 1962, 27.9).

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These claims presuppose that suffering is communi-

cable. That is, suffering persons can give an account of

their pain and observers can recognize suffering and react

accordingly. Shklar argues that suffering prompts fear,

where the others suggest, slightly differently, that it

prompts compassion or sympathy. Either way, suffering

and its attendant emotions

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are politically salient because

it is possible to communicate about them. If this is true,

then cruelty is a political problem: by deliberately con-

travening a natural, other-regarding impulse, cruelty de-

stroys community and the possibility of politics.

Compassion—the aversion to an individual’s suffering

and the effort to relieve it—is, therefore, also politically

relevant, and even necessary for maintaining community.

However, if suffering is entirely private, then it cannot

be political and there is no need or obligation to react to it

specif‌ically. This is Hannah Arendt’s position, as laid out

in The Human Condition:

…the most intense feeling we know of…the experience of

great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and

1

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Max Lykins, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan,

5700 Haven Hall, Ann Arbor MI, 48109, USA.

Email: lykins@umich.edu