If Eliminating Fear of the State Is a Liberal Country’s First Job, America Is in Trouble

The rise of Trump would have spooked philosopher Judith Shklar who fled European fascism and communism

 
Different theories of liberalism imply different metrics for judging the health of a liberal polity depending on what each considers the polity’s central goal. For followers of John Locke, the 17th century English philosopher born at the height of Europe’s religious wars, the barometer would be peace and prosperity. For adherents of Kantianism, the system devised by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Lutheran by birth, the yardstick might be the voluntary commitment to morality among individuals left alone by the state to exercise their free will. And for fans of John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher who was born two years after Kant died in 1804, the test perhaps might be a society in which individuals follow their bliss given that Mill regarded self-actualization as the ultimate good.

But for Judith Shklar, peaceful prosperity, morality and self-actualization were all important but secondary concerns. A Jewish émigré who fled Latvia during World War II and became one of the most prominent political theorists of the 20th century, her central goal was much more modest. The health of a liberal society, she argued, could be measured by the steps it was—or wasn’t—taking to eliminate cruelty— both of the state against the people and the people against each other.

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