Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century

The Skeptical Radicalism of Judith Shklar

Giunia Gatta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351205375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century offers an indispensable reexamination of the life, work, and interventions of a prominent liberal political theorist of the 20th century: Judith Shklar.

Drawing on published and unpublished sources including Shklar's correspondence, lecture notes, and other manuscripts, Giunia Gatta presents a fresh theoretical interpretation of Shklar's liberalism as philosophically and politically radical. Beginning with a thorough reconstruction of Shklar's life and her interest in political theory, Gatta turns her attention to examining the tension between Shklar's critique of the term "modernity" and her passion for Enlightenment thinkers, including Rousseau and Hegel. In the second part of the book, Gatta roots Shklar's liberalism of permanent minorities in her work in the history of political thought, and highlights this contribution as a fundamental recasting of liberalism as the political philosophy of outsiders. She makes a compelling argument for a liberalism of permanent minorities that refuses to stand on the ground of firm foundations and, instead, is oriented by complex understandings of cruelty and fear.

Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century is a much-needed reorientation of traditional liberal policies, allowing for a more meaningful intervention in many contemporary debates. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of political theory, the history of political thought and ideas, philosophy, international relations, and political science in general.

1 Stage-Setting

A Brief Biography of Judith Shklar

Childhood and Escape (1928–1944)

Dear Steve,

I cannot tell you how glad I was to hear from you and to receive those beautiful pictures of Riga. My memory of it is rather vague but I did remember some of the scenes. Most of all I was delighted by your account of the city and your thoughtfulness in sending me the photographs.¹

Judith Shklar did not like to talk about her life story. Few of her students knew its details, even though it was known that she had to flee Latvia as a child to escape Nazi persecution. Yet there is no trace of disappointment in this sober, yet moving thank you note to a former undergraduate student, warmly expressing gratitude for his kind gesture.

It is understandable that Shklar’s memories of Riga were blurred: Shklar only lived there for 11 years, from her birth until 1939. When she was born, on September 24, 1928, Latvia had been an independent state for a little more than eight years. Historically, the major influences on the territory of Latvia had been from the Germanic states and the Russian Empire. Lying between them, Latvia was a crossroads for major trading routes: Riga was founded in 1201 by German merchants and remained under German influence until the 16th century. After two centuries in which power was held in Latvia’s divided territory by Poland and Sweden, the land was part of the Russian empire until the late 18th century, though the property of most of the land remained in the hands of the German nobility. Latvia achieved statehood at the end of its war of independence in 1920, signing peace agreements with Germany on July 15 and with Russia on August 11 of that year. Latvia was born a democracy, but following independence authoritarianism established itself: when Karl Ulmanis, one of the most influential Latvian nationalists, led a coup d’état on May 15, 1934 Judith was almost six years old.

Her father, Aaron Nisse came from a family of prosperous Russian and Yiddish speaking farmers.² He had studied economics in St. Petersburg and had flourished in business, building a small fortune. He had long planned to leave Riga and move to Israel or the United States and for this reason he had assets in British and American banks. He had also purchased land and businesses in British Palestine. Agnes Nisse, Judith’s mother, came from a very wealthy, well-educated and influential German Jewish family from Riga, the Berners. Agnes had studied medicine in Switzerland, one of the few places in Europe where women could do so. During World War I, like all physicians, she had been drafted into the Tsarist army and served on the Russian-Prussian front, witnessing the self-wounding of Russian soldiers who were trying to abandon the war. In that period Aaron had also left Latvia to go back to St. Petersburg, where Agnes joined him as soon as she could. Both Agnes and Aaron had regarded with favor the Revolution of February 1917, and the Kerensky government: few had much nostalgia for the Tsar, other than – in Latvia – the great landowners of German origins, who had always been largely autonomous even as they enjoyed the political support of the Russian authorities. The Nisses, who were liberals, were more critical of the October Revolution: in fact, they quickly returned home to Latvia amid countless difficulties. Starting in 1920, Latvia and the young Soviet Union parted ways, with the former’s independence.

With independence, the Jewish population was encouraged to abandon German or Russian cultural heritage, more threatening for the young Latvian state, in favor of the rebirth of an independent Jewish culture. The linguistic allowances were, however, of scarce interest for the Nisses, who continued to speak German at home: that was Judith Shklar’s mother tongue, and the one in which she started her life of reading and learning. Her mother shared with her her countless cultural interests, increasing the gap between a family environment where art and literature were cultivated, and their surrounding world increasingly imbued with prejudice.³

As was the case for many nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism increasingly conditioned the Nisses’ daily life. World events were offering disquieting news: Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933, and soon after the boycott of Jewish businesses started. At the beginning of April Jewish professionals in Germany were excluded from public office. Similar sentiments grew in Latvia as well, and must have been particularly painful for the Nisses who, because of their language, culture, and social position were dealing mostly with Germans. The older Nisse girls were dismissed from their German schools.⁴ Aaron tried tirelessly to convince his wife to leave Europe, but Agnes continued to refuse the idea of leaving her job, her family, and everything she had to take three young daughters to an unknown destination.

The story of these family discussions, increasingly frequent and dramatic, is an integral part of the history of the Holocaust, and it is worth recalling here briefly. During these discussions, which in the beginning simply and calmly explored the possibility of emigrating, the lives of millions of Jews were decided. In these first years no one could imagine that the stakes would be the annihilation of an entire people. The discussions revolved around something smaller, and closer to us: prejudice and small humiliations. The enormities that followed have displaced what came before, and the risk, losing sight of their origins, is to pretend that they can no longer happen.⁵

Heeding these family discussions, we can see why millions of Jews did not leave “earlier.” As Primo Levi observed:

Wondering why is once again the sign of a stereotypical and anachronistic conception of history, or more simply of a diffuse ignorance and forgetfulness, which is increasing as those events recede in the past. Europe in the 1930s and 40s was not Europe today. Emigrating is painful always; back then it was even more difficult and expensive than it is today. In order to do it, one needed not only a lot of money, but also connections in the destination country: relatives and friends willing to offer help and hospitality.⁶

But having friends or relatives outside one’s own country was extremely uncommon in the 1930s, and was something only the most privileged families had (like the Nisses):

“abroad,” for the great majority of the population, was a scenery vague and far away, especially for the middle class. In the face of Hitler’s threat, most of the indigenous Jews in Italy, in France, in Poland, even in Germany, preferred to remain in what they saw as their country, with shared motivations, even as they slightly differed from place to place.⁷

One either had nothing to lose by leaving, but no international connections, or international connections but a lot to lose. The family of Judith’s mother was an example of the tendency to stay, prevalent among wealthy families. In Latvia, the Berners had prestigious homes splendidly furnished, they were leading a good life: it was inconceivable for them to “pass the border with only a suitcase in their hands, becoming themselves their own world, their own thinking space.”⁸ This prospect could maybe entice someone belonging to less privileged classes, or even just people like Aaron Nisse, with no prestigious family background and a sufficiently fearless outlook on life. Obviously, for many of these people the challenge remained finding the money to expatriate. Still Levi:

The difficulty in organizing emigration was shared by all. Those were times of grave international tensions: European frontiers, nowadays almost nonexistent, were practically closed. England and the Americas had very small immigration quotas.⁹

England was not only legally inaccessible, but also too close to Germany to be considered a safe haven.¹⁰ Immigration into British Palestine was discouraged by British authorities. In any case, even for those like Aaron Nisse, who owned land and money there, that part of the world did not seem much more tranquil than the rest of Europe: Jews and Arabs were not living peacefully, and a possible alliance between Arabs and Nazis could not be ruled out. Moreover, it was not clear what the British would have done in the region. In 1921 the United States had introduced laws extremely restrictive of the right to immigrate: quotas had been established for Jews, Italians, Slavs, and other ethnicities threatening to displace the country’s Anglo-Saxon identity. Canadian law gave out visas to anyone who owned land in Canada and could prove to have farming skills to cultivate it. Or one could try and bribe Embassy officials. Obtaining visas for other destinations such as Argentina, Panama, and the Dominican Republic was not impossible.

But the answer to the insolent question often posed to survivors includes another fundamental chapter:

This village, or city, or region, or nation, is mine. I was born here, my ancestors rest here. I speak its language, its customs and culture are mine; to this culture I even maybe contributed. I paid taxes, I observed the laws. I fought its battles, without a concern about whether they were right or wrong. I risked my life for its borders, some of my friends and relatives rest in war cemeteries. I myself, espousing the rhetoric of the day, declared myself ready to die for the country. I do not want to leave it, nor can I. If I die, I will die “in my own country,” and it will be my way to die “for the country.”¹¹

These are the considerations of an individual, tied to his or her own country, to his or her ancestors. But the story of those who stayed is also the story of family ties impossible to break, of mothers who could not leave because they would have left behind children unauthorized to leave the country, of children who could not leave elderly parents unable to travel. To all of this one must add the hope that things would get better, somehow:

Obviously this sedentary and homey, rather than actively patriotic, attitude would have been overcome if European Jews could have foreseen the future. Some signs were there: since his first books and speeches, Hitler had spoken clearly: Jews (and not only German Jews) were the parasites of humanity, and had to be eliminated as one eliminates pernicious insects. But disquieting deductions are easily pushed aside: until the extreme, until the incursions of Nazi and fascist officials from home to home, one found ways to disavow the signals and ignore the danger.¹²

The tearing decision to abandon one’s home, one’s country, and one’s world was often taken in the moment between the realization that catastrophe was inevitable and imminent, and the realization that all ways out were already closed.

In the case of the Nisses, the decision was not made by them but by Agnes’s brother, and Aaron’s best friend and business partner, in the immediate aftermath of a most tragic circumstance: the death of Judith’s beloved older sister. She had studied to become a doctor in Switzerland and was on her (reluctant) way to continue her studies at Columbia University. She was found lifeless in a bathtub, the victim of eith...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Stage-Setting: A Brief Biography of Judith Shklar
• PART I: On Modernity
• PART II: Skeptic and Radical: Liberalism for the 21st Century
• Conclusion
• Index