Shklar’s ‘Liberalism of Permanent Minorities’ and the Pitfalls of American Democratic Thought

In a comment on the work of her friend Michael Walzer, Judith Shklar summarized their life-long disagreement as “a dialogue between an exile and a citizen.“ It is certainly not wrong to say that Shklar’s work as a political theorist was importantly shaped by her experience of flying national-socialist persecution from Riga to North America at the age of twelve. In this respect, Andreas Hess (2014) has suggested that every single of Shklar’s writings can be read as a continuous struggle with the experience of exile – to achieve „exile from exile”. However, the relation between the experience of flight, exile, and her liberal political theory cannot be reduced to a therapeutic dimension; it is of a much more complex nature, and in order to fully assess it, we have to look closely at the travels, mergers and collisions of different liberal traditions within Shklar’s oeuvre. This is also a fruitful path to better understand the normative stance of Shklar’s peculiar variant of liberalism. My thesis is that Shklar, an eternal sceptic of normative political theory, negotiates the normative reach of her „liberalism of fear“ in the moment where she starts to translate this minor strand of liberalism to the 20th century context of American political thinking. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, I explain the nature of Shklar’s skepticism, relating it in particular to universalist aspirations of liberal political theory. Second, I present her own liberal approach, the famous “liberalism of fear”. The paper detects an ambivalence between an anthropological and a more historical justification of the liberalism of fear, which also differ with regard to their universalizing potential. Third and finally, I turn to Shklar’s work on American political thought in her later years, and put forward some theses on the development of the liberalism of fear in this context. In her late works, she adopts a normative stance which I will reconstruct as „situated universalism“.