Meditations for modern liberals: a superb, closely reasoned, deeply
humane essay on the problematic consequences of "putting cruelty
first" - i.e., of following the kindly skepticism of Montaigne,
Montesquieu, and others in political and social life. In Of
Cannibals (I, xxxi) Montaigne calls treachery, disloyalty, cruelty,
and tyranny "our ordinary vices." After adding hypocrisy and
snobbery to that list, Shklar (Political Science, Harvard) notes
that until the Enlightenment cruelty and its various by-products
received surprisingly little attention in the great philosophical
(Aristotle) or theological (Aquinas) taxonomies of evil.
Machiavelli exalts the practical value of cruelty (as do terrorists
both in and out of office), while Nietzsche, by excoriating
hypocrisy as the worst of vices, envisions a liberating, cleansing
role for cruelty. To all this Shklar says a firm No, insisting that
we must combat cruelty as our worst enemy, because it engenders
fear, which ia the "ultimately evil moral condition" and makes it
nearly impossible to avoid other, lesser vices. Yet putting cruelty
first, while admitting that no government or group or individual
can do without it, inevitably raises inner tensions and foments the
most universally scorned modern vice, hypocrisy. Citing the
suicidal, anarchic sincerity of Moliere's Alceste, as opposed to
the forthright "acting" of Benjamin Franklin, Shklar bids us drop
our "obsession with openness" and the "traditional horror of the
hypocrite." Snobbery, though morally cruel, is just about
unavoidable, while hypocrisy actually "bolsters liberal democracy"
by easing the pressures created by ideological conflict, the gap
between rhetoric and reality, etc. Shklar, in other words, defends
a classical agnostic, melioristic, utilitarian position. But few
political philosophers have her clean prose style, her broad range
of literary reference, and her relentless logic. A first-class
performance. (Kirkus Reviews)
The seven deadly sins of Christianity represent the abysses of
character, whereas Shklar's "ordinary vices"--cruelty, hypocrisy,
snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy--are merely treacherous shoals,
flawing our characters with mean-spiritedness and inhumanity.
Shklar draws from a brilliant array of writers--Moliere and
Dickens on hypocrisy, Jane Austen on snobbery, Shakespeare and
Montesquieu on misanthropy, Hawthorne and Nietzsche on cruelty,
Conrad and Faulkner on betrayal--to reveal the nature and effects
of the vices. She examines their destructive effects, the
ambiguities of the moral problems they pose to the liberal ethos,
and their implications for government and citizens: liberalism is a
difficult and challenging doctrine that demands a tolerance of
contradiction, complexity, and the risks of freedom.
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