New perspectives on Judith Shklar

In my conversations with students, I often end up asking if they have heard of Judith Shklar. Almost none of them have; she is rarely taught in undergraduate philosophy or politics departments, but she becomes known to many of us once we are a little older and wiser. My own PhD supervisor recommended that I read Shklar in the first weeks of my doctorate, and she has continued to shape and challenge my work ever since.

Of course, Shklar has not been “ignored” or “forgotten,” but she has remained a niche interest. Most know her for her famous essay “The Liberalism of Fear” (1989) in which she argues in favor of a liberalism centered around a summum malum, rather than a positive doctrine of justice or civic virtue. She is certainly not as well-celebrated as the other great political theorists and philosophers of her time such as Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Michael Walzer, all of whom she considered friends. Only a handful of books are dedicated to engaging fully with her thought (Gatta, 2018; Hall, 2025; Hess, 2014), although many take inspiration from it (Bagg, 2024; Levy, 2000). Stanley Hoffman speculated that this lack of engagement may be because Shklar was more of a “fox” than a “hedgehog,” to use Berlin’s terminology; she was averse to world-building, skeptical of grand narratives, and sought mainly to protect the weak from the powerful. Perhaps because of this, much work on Shklar has been undertaken by her old colleagues, her students, and a patchwork of admirers.

In the last decade this has begun to shift, with Shklar’s political thought picking up some much-needed momentum. Recent work has focused on what people take to be her distinctively “negative” Shklarian method (Forrester, 2012; Luo, 2021); that she wanted us to “begin with what is to be avoided” (1985, p. 5). This thread runs through much of Shklar’s writing, from Legalism (1964) to her final Tanner Lectures on American Citizenship (1991a). Other work extends Shklar’s most famous essay (Douglass, 2023; Hall, 2022), or interprets the many lectures and notes that she left behind (Pickford, 2024; Scheuerman, 2021). Some focus on a Shklarian approach to cruelty and injustice (Fives, 2020; Royer, 2022; Stullerova, 2014).

This critical exchange continues this growing engagement with Shklar, ranging from discussions of how we might emotionally respond to her work, to provocations on how her negativism might ground a more radical politics. Each of the contributions offers a new way of thinking about Shklar and what she might offer us today.

Samuel Bagg’s contribution asks whether Shklar’s trademark negativism might be adopted to underpin a more radical politics. Although sometimes criticized for her conservativism, Bagg argues that a healthy dose of Shklarian negativism may be central to demanding something more from our politics. David Enoch’s contribution reflects on Shklar’s lack of uptake in analytical political philosophy. Considering his own engagement with Shklar’s work, Enoch discusses how she might influence our thinking in more abstract approaches to political thought, and how political philosophers should engage with political history. Shal Marriott’s contribution turns our attention to how Shklar draws out emotions in her readers. Marriott argues that emotions play a central role in politics for Shklar and that they, therefore, must also be foregrounded in how we interpret her thought. The final contribution, from Samuel Moyn, asks us to consider Shklar’s relationship with a political thinker that she, perhaps surprisingly, very rarely discussed: John Stuart Mill.

Above all, these interventions continue to push us to think with Shklar in new ways. In doing so, they contribute to the growing and necessary reflection on the work that Shklar left behind