On Political Obligation.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Gunther
• Position: Shklar's Lessons - Book review

Judith N. Shklar, On Political Obligation (Yale University Press, 2019), 264 pp., $45.00

The sudden death of Judith N. Sklar in 1992 at the age of sixty-three deprived American letters of a distinctive and imposing voice. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann in the Government department at Harvard once remarked, "she was by far the biggest star of the department." Her most important contribution to political thought was the "liberalism of fear," an imperative to put "cruelty first" as the vice to be identified and eradicated. An exile from Riga who arrived in America in 1940 on a boat from Japan as an eleven-year-old with her family, she wrote in a detached yet moving style of the challenges and rewards of living removed from home. Utopian dreams that curdled into nightmares were a frequent theme and personal experience of Stalinism and Nazism infused her scholarship. She stands out for the wide range of her interests, literary and historical, enabling her to draw connections between authors separated by centuries and revolutions of thought. In an essay in Daedalus, for example, Shklar discovered analogous structures of meaning in the Five Generations of Hesiod and Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality.

Shklar's writing was never less than clear and approachable, qualities readily apparent in On Political Obligation, a series of lectures that have been edited by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess. They explain that Shklar would herself not have published these lectures in their current form. A number of the talks are either missing or presented in truncated form. Shklar had also voiced reservations about the publication of lectures by colleagues, as the editors note, for erasing the distinction between teaching and writing.

But Shklar did have a book in mind on the theme of political obligation and the lectures provide a map to the lines she might have pursued. The editors themselves observe, "the lectures on political obligation provide the missing link between her last two books, The Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship, and the intention of writing a political theory from the vantage point of exile." If Shklar had a general theory of political obligation it is hovering at a distance. She focuses on particular authors and political figures whose works enter on the questions of "should I obey" and "what and how far can I legitimately obey." We get to hear, at a distance, the voice of an outstanding teacher grappling with the life and death issues that link ancient Athens with contemporary America. Throughout, Shklar was commendably forthright in addressing the big questions that many of her colleagues shunned. But the lectures, an early draft, to be sure, of a book that Shklar was unable to complete, suggest that her answers were not always wholly persuasive.

To highlight the complexities of moral engagement, Shklar delivered a lecture contrasting Ernst von Weizsacker, a high-ranking official in the German Foreign Office with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the renowned theologian who helped found the Confessing Church that opposed Nazism. Weizsacker, who sat out the war's end in a cozy Foreign Office post in the Vatican, was arraigned at Nuremberg (where he was defended by his son Richard who became a leading figure in postwar Germany, first as mayor of West Berlin, then as president of the Federal Republic) and sentenced to a seven-year prison term for abetting crimes against humanity, which was later commuted. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, had links to the July 20, 1944 conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, which led to his imprisonment and death at the hands of the vengeful Nazis.

Shklar draws on Weizsacker's postwar memoirs to limn the intricacies of his collaboration with a murderous regime; we get him as he understood or wished himself to be understood. He put on an outward show of loyalty by joining the NSDAP and the ss but his true fealty was to the Foreign Office, a redoubt imbued with traditions that harkened back to the pre-Nazi order. "[I]t was to preserve its traditional class and expert character that he wanted to stay there and serve it," Shklar remarks. It's a perfectly respectable observation except that it was, of course, Hitler who was calling the shots, as it were. She also points to a less interested source, Paul Seabury's classic The Wilhelmstrasse, to remark upon Weizsacker's palpable contempt for Joachim von Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman turned foreign minister. Still, Ribbentrop turned out to be "a lot shrewder" than his aristocratic underling. That shrewdness came to light in Ribbentrop's support for Weizsacker to become state secretary. He knew what he was about. "[T]his man will obey," he told Hitler. Obedience, in other words, was the moving principle of Weizsacker's career.

But this conflicts with Shklar's earlier diagnosis that Weizsacker's real loyalty was to his class and the traditions of the Foreign Office. In blending the memoir and Seabury, Shklar offers an intriguing but muddled narrative. She seems to take at face value Weizsacker's avowal that he loathed war even though "he applauded all of Hitler's aggressions, just not the way they were carried out." Of course, the aggressions were inseparable from the manner in which they were executed. Shklar suggests that he was not an opportunist because "[h]e did have a set of loyalties in place that reinforced his obligations to the state, even Hitler's Third Reich." The...