Opportunities

This critical exchange gathers fresh readings on Judith Shklar to portray a thinker who reoriented political theory around the imperative to prevent cruelty rather than the quest to achieve virtue. It contours a compelling negative idealism, exploring how Shklar’s liberalism of fear enables an audacious convergence: radicals might learn from liberal caution, and liberals from radical clarity. Above all, the texts argue that political philosophy must turn an honest eye on the world’s ugliness and vulnerability, grounding normative imagination in what simply must be averted.

Shal Marriott writes: “Betrayal and misanthropy, like fear, are concepts which would lose their force if they were not associated with emotional experiences. Shklar is not putting forward a theory which requires that she settles how or what we feel or attempts to offer an account which indicates the appropriate levels of fear or betrayal are present in particular situations. What she identifies more concretely is the importance of how it is the sense of betrayal and distrust which defines and constitutes the vices and indeed what normalizes them. The vices are representations of felt experiences, and our interpretations of the emotions connected to those experiences.”

Germany’s postwar catechism of “Education after Auschwitz”—meant to inoculate against barbarism—now paradoxically forecloses moral reckoning with Gaza, as Staatsräson, or reason of state, elevates Israel’s security into untouchable dogma. Remembrance culture that once encouraged critical vigilance has ossified into a liturgy that stigmatizes dissent and turns Adorno’s universalist warning into a warrant for state violence. The memory of Auschwitz has been instrumentalized to absolve Israel’s actions, and that prevents seeing Gaza’s devastation as precisely the kind of catastrophe that memory was supposed to help guard against.

“Education after Auschwitz in Germany ultimately led to a particularistic rather than universalistic commitment to atrocity (‘barbarism’) prevention. It sidelined Roma and other people who were also exploited and murdered at Auschwitz; ‘never again Auschwitz’ did not apply to them, despite Adorno’s views. This choice has culminated in the Staatsräson, which in essence means that Germany only seeks to guarantee the permanent security of ‘the Jewish people’ (das jüdische Volk), as German politicians and journalists put it, whether located in Germany or in Israel—or, indeed, the world. …This particularistic rendering of Adorno has led to illiberal rhetoric that is hard to reconcile with an Adornian spirit.”

Apocalyptic discourse is less a literal forecast than a way of narrating the dissolution of our current lifeworld—one that, like other discourses about past worlds now gone, frames an irreversible shift in human existence. Scranton rejects romanticized calls to “rewild,” “decolonize,” or “become indigenous” as conceptually incoherent and materially impossible. He argues that confronting ecological collapse requires abandoning myths of renewal and instead reckoning with the end of our world as both a narrative and a material reality.

“My point is that as much as the end of the world is a fiction, it is also the end of a fiction, or rather the end of fiction as such: in the individual case, the narrative of a life; in a collective sense, the weave of narrative, concepts, metaphysics, and myth that gives shape and meaning to reality. The ‘end of the world’ signifies the conclusion of a story and in its determinateness indexes the empty possibility outside and beyond narrative. As much as the end of our world allows us to conceive of that world as a discrete whole, it also forces us to see it as a monad in the void—as one transient world among many. Thus we can hardly make sense of the idea of the end of the world without attending to all the other worlds that ended before our own.”