ARTICOLI / 5 / di Antonio Gómez Ramos
In the last leg of her long career as a political philosopher, Judith Shklar emphasized the imperative of ‘putting cruelty first’, as well as the ‘sense of injustice’ as the pair of emotions underpinning the idea of a liberalism of fear, allowing for a minimalist foundation of democracy. This article questions whether a single moral emotion such as the rejection of cruelty, i.e. considering cruelty the worst of vices, and its political counterpart of a ‘sense of injustice’, can suffice to develop a political theory. Revisiting Shklar’s late writings, from Liberalism of Fear to Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship, the article analyzes three key distinctions that are continuously at work in her thinking – cruelty and violence, injustice and misfortune, guilt and necessity – and shows that, although no political theory based on the freedom of individual should overlook Shklar’s renewal of liberal thinking, her self-limitation to the emotional “putting cruelty first” renders it inadequate for the foundation of a political theory.
