The meaning of exile

Why Judith Shklar and why exile?

Judith Shklar is known and acknowledged as the author of a number of important books and essays that show her as a modern sceptic who favoured a ‘liberalism without illusions’ (Yack, 1994). ¹ Readers will perhaps have read her books, Ordinary Vices (1984), The Faces of Injustice (1990) or the ground-breaking essay ‘The liberalism of fear’ (1989c). Those more specialized in modern political theory might have consulted one of her studies on Rousseau (Shklar, 1969), Hegel (Shklar, 1976) or Montesquieu (Shklar, 1987), and those interested in legal theory might have consulted her earlier book, Legalism (1964). However, I suspect that quite a few readers will have wondered what held these diverse writings together or how Shklar’s work has evolved.

There is one important theme that runs through Shklar’s entire œuvre − political psychology. Psychology here means thinking about the ‘software’ that citizens are equipped with and that modern liberal democracies need in order to maintain themselves. Within that, the possibilities and limits of loyalty and obligation occupy a prominent place, with exile figuring as a last resort or option. In one sense, the reason for the existence of such a thematic thread in Shklar’s work seems obvious: the discussion of what it means to be an outsider and/or a peculiar type of refugee and, concomitantly, the question of political obligation and its limits had its base in her own life experiences.

One could of course question such an attempt at making sense of Shklar’s life and work, particularly given her academic position at Harvard’s Department of Government and her prominence as President of the American Political Science Association. One may therefore legitimately ask: how much and what kind of an outsider was Shklar really? Did her experience of having been a refugee contribute to her peculiar self-perception and stylization? A life in exile and emigration can lead to the rejection of mainstream attitudes and positions, but is it really possible to spend an entire academic life at Harvard, among the world’s most prestigious institutions, and yet remain an outsider? The answer to these questions might give us some clues about how to gain a deeper understanding of the making of Shklar’s political theory.

Having been forced to leave Riga as a young girl, her experience of exile, first in Sweden, then on the family’s long odyssey to Canada, had a profound impact on Shklar’s psychological make-up. With time, the wound would heal to some extent. But it seems that she never forgot what had turned her life upside down, despite having later had a distinguished career at Harvard and, by all accounts, a happy life surrounded by family, friends and close colleagues. Once existentially threatened, that experience might eventually be overcome in terms of immediate pain levels; however, it can never be entirely forgotten. At a later phase in life, as was the case with Shklar, such experiences can be channelled productively. It is probably Shklar’s greatest personal achievement to have used her experiences exactly in this vein. She turned her traumatic experiences as an exile and her optimal marginality into a habit of thought and into a productive maieutic discourse.

A habit of thought

What turned Shklar into a passionate person who thrived on intellectual provocation was not always easy to understand, not even for her closest colleagues and friends. There are numerous accounts of her fearlessness and ferocity when it came to argument. I would suggest that this sense of passion for argument and ideas was a creative way of dealing with that émigré experience from her childhood and early adolescent years, the fear that had accompanied the exit from Riga and Sweden and the self-made life and independent learning that followed the refugee odyssey. Later experiences of independent learning may have confirmed such pre-existing feelings of strong individual independence.

We all know of cases of people who have had similar experiences: the sense of being thrown back onto one’s own resources, having no fallback position and no security but that which constitutes the true homo sacer. Having felt existential fear and being threatened with cruelty, such experiences can later potentially be turned into strong opinions in which defending one’s argument passionately and firmly becomes crucial – even long before the ‘official’ arguments may have been stated or become clear to others. It is a latent response mechanism, both defensive and creative, as it fashions an environment in which one can feel safe and secure. In Shklar’s case, the experience not only of having to live with fear and exile at a young age but also the experience of learning a lot quickly on her own, mainly due to the absence of real parental influence in the times of existential crisis, later turned into an adult habitus, a habit of thought that gave a peculiar tone to her work and publications.

To go back in time briefly, Shklar had by all accounts a privileged upbringing and an excellent private education, yet her formative experiences included rampant anti-semitism in Riga and the loss of a beloved sister at the crucial moment of having to leave Latvia and thus being forced to change countries and languages. ² All this had an impact and might serve as an explanation for Shklar’s own personality and for a considerable part of her early and later writings. Other experiences such as being blocked for many years from promotion to full professor must be seen in the light of these earlier events. Shklar clearly cultivated her role as an outsider to a certain extent; she always considered herself to be from Harvard intellectually without actually being part of the university’s establishment. In an interview she gave in 1981, by which time she had been promoted to full professor, she confessed that maintaining an outsider status after many years at Harvard was perhaps not quite appropriate. ³ However, in the same interview, she also pointed out that she understood her role still very much in those terms – although the function had changed somewhat and the energy appeared now to have been channelled into the intellectual realm. Thus, the role of outsider first helped Shklar to prevail against adverse institutional circumstances such as starting an academic career and surviving as the only woman at Harvard’s Department of Government while also fulfilling other important roles such as being a wife and a mother of three. Later in life, such struggles were reflected upon and used imaginatively and creatively, mainly in the context of her distinct and idiosyncratic way of dealing with intellectual history and political theory.

In order to make sense of Shklar’s œuvre, it is crucial to tease out the various connections between her life experience and her teaching and writing. But in doing so one has to maintain a sense of proportion. It seems problematic to have an over-socialized conception of man in which everything is reduced to social and cultural circumstances. ⁴ Particularly when it comes to rich experiences and lives that are not dominated by academic interests and environments, we must always ask how individuals have managed to succeed, despite earlier hindrances, obstacles and often traumatic experiences. Individual creativity, individual autonomy and the psychological capacity to be the maker of one’s own fortune are crucial when fighting against adverse conditions. This was certainly the case with Shklar. The qualities mentioned show in all of her writings: she attempted to humanize the history of political theory by always giving credit to individual effort and almost existentialist notions of self-creation.

At the same time the attempt to understand the connection between Shklar’s life and œuvre cannot limit itself to the view that a person is entirely self-made. While we try to make sense of the world as individuals, we also learn, struggle, fight and take issue with the world and the people around us. It seems futile to distinguish here sharply between character and role. Instead, for a portrait of an intellectual, it is crucial to get the proportions right. Certainly intellectual networks and influences matter, but so do individual perception and digestion of information in the light of lived experiences. In Judith Shklar we encounter a person who preferred to set or choose her own intellectual agenda and who was extremely self-reliant in pursuing her epistemological interests. Although she took note and on occasion responded to intellectual currents of the time, she would never become a follower, joiner or networker. Neil McLaughlin (2001) has termed such a creative way of making use of outsider status, of being a stranger, of belonging to what Tony Judt (2010) has called ‘edge people’, ‘optimal marginality’. It is an alternative way of explaining how individual thinkers and ideas have moved from the creative margins to the centre by using their outsider status to optimal effect. Such a view does not deny the role of socialization or the importance of belonging to a network, of being a member in some established organization or professional association; but instead of using these as the only explanation for an individual intellectual’s success, ‘optimal marginality’ gives more credit to the creative and innovative subject who keeps his or her critical distance from both established orthodoxies and from sectarian minority positions.

I suspect that one of the reasons why Shklar thematizes exile only very late in her life has to do with the fact that she was not, to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, a hedgehog, i.e. somebody who thinks one big thing, but rather a fox, a person who changes positions, uses different epistemological vantage points and thinks and writes about many things (Berlin, 1997). This means there is not one big work that stands out and that could be mined by scholars for many years to come. That is also true for the way she thought about obligation, political psychology and exile; as to the latter, Shklar thought about exile − just not all of the time. The theme pops up frequently in her work but only latently so or in submerged ways. Only towards the end of her life does the preoccupation become more obvious, perceptible, in short, manifest. Second, Shklar never liked being exposed to the spotlight. She remained sceptical about the ‘dynatropic’ guard ⁵ of Harvard’s Department of Government, be it personified by power-hungry advisors such as Zbig Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger or political analysts and commentators like Samuel Huntington. She always warned her colleagues not to become substitute parents, or, even worse, substitute Che Guevaras. In contrast, Shklar insisted on the careful yet formative experiences of serving both as a teacher and writer. Interestingly, she thought of the two activities as being two different, yet on occasion, complementary roles. Thus, when Shklar defined herself as an academic teacher who was a conscious outsider with a calling, she had a maieutic purpose in mind. ⁶

The role of maieutics

Mark Greif has recently drawn attention to the modern use of maieutics. In Greif’s view, in The Age of the Crisis of Man (Greif, 2015), the very conception of man was questioned after the totalitarian experiences between the early 1930s and the early 1950s. As Greif has further argued, this debate contained contributions that were neither radically anti-Enlightenment nor held the Enlightenment directly responsible for the cataclysm, but rather seemed to constitute attempts at re-enlightenment. Instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater (like Adorno and Horkheimer, for example), such contributions conceded that something had gone wrong and that man was in need of protection and restraint. Such attempts at re-enlightenment did not produce towering figures along the lines of a Rousseau, Hume, Kant or Voltaire and certainly never took the form of comprehensive system-building; rather post-war writers purported to protect or attempt to restrain man from his own extreme thought and actions, yet without seeking refuge in or help from a God or Supreme Being or a sense of progress towards the betterment of the human race.

This form of reasoning took on the form of maieutic discourse, i.e. a classic rhetorical tool that employs ‘insistent and forceful questioning’ in order to ‘bring to birth in another person answers that will reward the questioner’s own belief in the character of the universal capacity for thinking – and do something to the other person’s character, too’ (Greif, 2015: 24). Greif points out that there is a strong normative dimension in this:

Maieutics are shoulds in discourse or within the intellectual life that help to say what must be addressed and talked about, what stands up as a serious or profound question or contribution, regardless of its ability to solve or determine the inquiry. (2015: 25)

Greif focuses on a number of tropes and concepts and a certain nomenclature in respect of the émigrés’ maieutic discourses. These involved the discussion of ‘the human condition’, ‘situation(s)’ and their ‘existential’ dimensions, the ‘crisis of the individual’, new and insightful discussions of the meanings of ‘guilt’ and ‘fear’ (or freedom from fear) and – perhaps most pronounced – a new conception of ‘human rights’ (2015: 68ff), including, for the first time, ‘the right to have rights’ (2015: 95).

Returning to the theme of exile

Greif identifies maieutic discourse in a number of post-war writings mainly but not only in the field of literature. ⁷ There is no obvious reason to limit the discussion to literature only. We can see similar tropes and discourses in Shklar’s political theory, for example. However, things are perhaps a bit more complex when it comes to positioning her work. This is mainly due to the complex relationship between vita activa and vita contemplative and how they are reflected in Shklar’s teaching and writing. To begin with, in her first book, After Utopia (1957), Shklar had been very sceptical as to the possibilities of grand political theory after the experiences of World War II and the ideological confrontation of the Cold War. Shklar’s second book, Legalism (1964) took on an equally sober tone with its critical view of the possibilities of a ‘justice in robes’ to address war crimes, genocide and the politics of fear. And looking back at Shklar’s intellectual preoccupations and publications over the three decades that followed, it would be a mistake to assume that she had somehow abandoned her earlier scepticism midway by taking flight to the classics of philosophical and political theory or by suddenly discovering American political thought. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that Shklar remained preoccupied with the questions of what one could hope for, what could realistically be achieved, and what it meant to have decent and democratic arrangements and a stable political order that avoided cruelty and the politics of fear. The question of the possibilities of a coexistence of democratic order and freedom and what kind of moral mindset was necessary to sustain them, remained central to her political theory. Shklar never abandoned it, not in her discussion of Rousseau (1969), Hegel (1976) or Montesquieu (1987), nor by developing later an interest in American political thought, nor in turning to the theme of injustice and citizenship (see the various publications gathered now in Shklar, 1998b; 1998c).

Rather, what happened was a shift in emphasis. The trilogy on Rousseau, Hegel and Montesquieu examined the modern classics in order to look at earlier conceptualizations of how political liberty could be conceived in general terms, while Ordinary Vices (1984), The Faces of Injustice (1990) and American Citizenship (1991) must be understood as attempts to find out more about the modern moral ‘software’ that is needed to establish and maintain functioning democracies. From the last three books a whole new set of questions emerged, particularly in relation to political obligation, loyalty and exile. Thus, the theme of exile, which had until then played a submerged role, comes out into the open – and with it a stronger maieutic impulse.

In the last months before her untimely death, Shklar had made detailed notes for a course on Political Obligation and Moral Reasoning, a course she had been developing over some time at Harvard. Earlier, at invited lectures at the University of California in Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, she had made additional attempts to gather her thoughts on the theme of obligation and loyalty. ⁸ Both the Harvard course and the invited lectures helped Shklar to gear up for a stay in Cambridge, England, scheduled for autumn of 1992. ⁹

The notes she made for the course lectures were comprehensive and it is not hard to see the contours of a book on the topic of loyalty, obligation and exile emerging (see the various notes in HUGFP 118, Box 7). The set of lectures begins by discussing moral choices between loyalty and obligation during the Nazi dictatorship and of whether to escape into ‘internal exile’ or to resist openly. Shklar uses the examples of the German Foreign Office diplomat von Weizsäcker and the Protestant anti-Nazi Bonhoeffer to show the continuing relevance of moral reasoning in our time. She then returns to the classics and step-by-step builds her case concerning the various shifts and changes of the meanings of obligation and loyalty as they occurred in the course of history.

This is not the place to recount the entire argument of the lectures, for our purposes here we will pick out only a few maieutic moments that seem crucial to ground Shklar’s exile argument. In the lecture which immediately follows the Weizsäcker and Bonhoeffer discussion, Shklar zeroes in on the discussion of Socrates’ trial, his decision to stay loyal to himself – and to take the punishment for it. Socrates’ trial was an example against the corruption of character and a prominent case that highlighted the most difficult of choices that one has to make: to stay true to one’s principles, come what may (HUGFP 118, manuscript, MR Socrates) or to exit. For Socrates, political obligation came first, not even the argument of friendship could convince him to stay alive and to go into exile. The thorny and often uneasy relationship between the public and the private sphere, between politics and personal relations, was later, as Shklar shows, picked up by others.

In her lectures, Shklar also discusses in great detail the various religious understandings of obligation and loyalty, for example, the problematic situation that adherents of the New Testament faced when confronted with Rome. Sin and disobedience against God remained the crucial question for early Christians − not what Caesar and the public authorities did. This changed only later when Rome began to embrace Christianity and the nature of the duty to obey included Christian citizens. Still, for a long time theologians continued to remain sceptical as to tyranny and what to do about it. This often involved seeking refuge and exile in safer territories. Only later, with the rise of radicalized Protestantism did attitudes change. On the Continent, Protestantism developed in opposition to Rome; however, Lutheran Protestants did not openly advertise radical regime change. While it is true that both Calvinism and Lutheranism demanded a break with Rome, Luther’s insistence on the inner life where worldly powers had no say led to a different understanding of loyalty compared to developments in Britain. There were, as Shklar explains, two contracts, one between the people and God (mediated through princes and other rulers), the other between the people and their ruler. Lutherism obviously focused more on the former (thereby creating that mental space for what some followers would later claim as internal exile), whereas in the British context both contracts became important to Protestant sects (thereby giving a more political reading to the covenant).

In the modern age of ideology, notions of loyalty shifted again. Loyalty became bound up with the rise of collective entities and actors such as nations, races and classes. With it the notion of personal obligation changed again. While in the past, religious belief and organized religious life had been responsible for developing moral codes and moral conduct in relation to loyalty to God, in modern times it is the state that has come to demand total loyalty, with all the problems that this entails. This also paves the way to the story of modern exile.

Of the modern ideologies Shklar identifies not liberalism or socialism but nationalism as the most potent influence, mainly because it ‘draws no distinction between loyalty and obligation’ (HUGFP 118, manuscript, MR Loyal) – a situation that would lead many to look for alternatives elsewhere. There was now simply less a connection between one specific government and loyalty than between the nation and national legitimacy. In other words, the nationality of the rulers has become more important than any particular moral strength of a government. As Shklar shows, the American case is all the more complicated when compared with European nations, simply because of its ‘artificial’ political character. By this, Shklar refers to the simple fact that national loyalty meant and still continues to signify something different for a nation consisting to a large extent of immigrants who came from somewhere else.

Being a new nation whose citizens (or prospective citizens) exited from somewhere else entailed a big problem: there seems to be nothing that binds the many exiled-turned-citizens together other than invented political rituals such as loyalty oaths or some pledge of allegiance. As Shklar shows, such public rituals are never unambiguous and can have a darker side, ranging from suspicions of the lack of loyalty, the emergence of openly xenophobic movements or the introduction of extreme measures such as the internment of citizens. The most disturbing fact about these occurrences was often that they were not top-down or government initiatives but that governments often felt pressured by public sentiment and prejudice to do this.

So far I have referred to Shklar’s discussion of some of the causes which can point towards exit and exile, such as the total identification of loyalty with obligation. Let us now turn to Shklar’s more maieutic moments in which she discusses exile more explicitly. Among the papers related to her Political Obligation lectures one finds a manuscript entitled ‘The Obligation of Exiles’ (HUGFP 118, Box 10). In a fragmentary note towards the end of the manuscript, Shklar commented on Paul Tabori’s (1972) book An Anatomy of Exile (therein particularly pp. 37–8):

An exile is a person who (1) is compelled to leave homeland though the forces that send him may be political, economic or just psychological. (2) The status of the exile is dynamic as he/she changes from exile to emigrant, resolve to return may weaken. (3) However assimilated, some sort of attachment to homeland remains. (4) Contribution to new land may be greater than host recognizes. Identity problems persist and so do political loyalties. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ The tragedy lies in the fact that one was compelled to go.

The perspective of exile allowed Shklar to pursue a new epistemological interest. It marks an important turn in her work: it made it perhaps even possible to write an entire alternative history of political thought. Exile, so she notes, is a fundamental human experience and has been dealt with extensively in history and literature. However, surprisingly little has been said about it in terms of political theory – something that Shklar attempts to remedy in her late teaching and writing. Exile seemed particularly important to her because it allowed her to explore and discuss various aspects and themes of political thought – conditions for submission to rules, political obligation, etc. – from a different angle. At least in relation to the political dimensions of exile, it also implied a form of extreme decision-making, often engaging ‘the entire personality’ (Shklar, 1998a: 59).

Shklar maintains that the case of exile and exiles elucidates some of the tensions and potential conflicts involved for both individuals and political communities. Exile, she points out, is as old as politics. One of the earliest forms of exile was ostracism, a common democratic practice that could take on different forms. Its early application served the purpose of getting rid of tyrants. Later it came mainly to serve the purpose of avoiding civil war or factitious break-ups. As Shklar describes it, it was one way of avoiding open conflict and tearing a citizenry apart (1998a: 45–7, 61). What is remarkable about this early praxis is that while a citizen could be excluded by and from the citizenry, this did not necessarily imply that that citizen would lose face. As such, ostracism was not necessarily seen as dishonourable on a personal level; one could remain loyal to the community by conceding publicly that one had disrespected and violated the rules and was therefore obliged to go into exile. The person who accepted ostracism and left could in principle maintain his virtuous position since his acceptance meant releasing pressure from the political community to which he belonged and giving that polity another chance. Classical philosophers ranging from Greece to Rome, from Aristotle to Cicero and Plutarch, may have differed in their treatment and interpretation of individual exiles, but that exile and ostracism provided a release mechanism and that loyalty and obligation were crucial to its success is beyond doubt; much depended, of course, on the concrete circumstances.

The fate of modern exiles shows some distinct features (here and in the following, see 1998a: 47ff). Athens and Rome, at least in their early democratic and republican periods, emphasized the public character and just procedures of their polities and demanded both obligation and loyalty to them. In contrast, many modern states have failed, by turning state apparatuses into organizations where ‘governmental illegality’ violates and disrupts civil society and the political process to the effect that ‘political loyalty may survive but not obligation to obey the law’ (1998a: 48). Shklar stresses that exiles, both those who leave but also those who go into ‘internal exile’ and try to maintain their clear private conscience, have absolutely no obligations to such a state, country or government. The difference between classical and modern exiles is predominantly marked not by the effort to avoid civil war but is instead based on the individual’s critical judgement and the conscientious rejection of what is demanded of him or her. Thus, massive exit virtually tests the legitimacy of the modern state (1998a: 59).

In some cases, the relationship between loyalty and obligation can produce bizarre results, as both the Dreyfus affair and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War show. In both instances, the country betrayed its citizens by arresting them and violating their civil rights. Dreyfus and the Japanese Americans maintained their innocence and, after a long and painful wait, finally achieved their freedom. They constitute, as Shklar notes, borderline cases in which loyalty led to the decision to stay and wait for the course of justice to prevail. In this context Shklar also discusses alternative reactions and scenarios where external exile can still be marked by a sense of loyalty. She refers to the example of Willy Brandt who fled Germany and continued to fight against the Nazis from Norway, his country of exile. He saw his political activity clearly as an obligation in terms of remaining a good German. Brandt never gave up the hope that a better Germany existed in the form of the German working class and its organizations, although obviously in a suppressed and somewhat submerged condition during the Nazi dictatorship. He hoped that one day that class would emerge again from the ruins. Brandt maintained that belief because he drew a line between a criminal Nazi government and what he saw as normal citizens. As Shklar points out, such an obligation to serve Germany even in bleak and dark times was never an option for persecuted German Jews. In contrast to Brandt and the two earlier examples, Dreyfus and the interned Japanese Americans, German Jews experienced, as Shklar notes, two broken contracts: not only had the government and state betrayed them but the overall majority had been indifferent to their fellow citizens and their fate (1998a: 50f). This meant that neither loyalty nor obligation presented themselves, neither during nor after the war.

For Shklar, the four examples demonstrate that one has to draw a line somewhere: The USA, despite its shortcomings as a just state during the Second World War, constituted a political entity that eventually learned from its mistakes and made a serious effort by either apologizing or trying to repair what could be repaired, or both. Nazi Germany does not fall into that category. The case of the German Jews and the majority of political exiles are examples in point: To return would have meant to paint over the radical rupture that had occurred. In terms of returnees, Willy Brandt remained the exception, not the rule.

Shklar was painfully aware that today’s emigrants and exiled face even more challenging conditions. In many instances, perhaps even a majority, there is no host country to offer asylum. In contrast to the examples from antiquity, in modern times there often is no clear exile destination or country one could escape to. Most of today’s refugees find themselves ‘in pure limbo’, a situation that in many ways resembles the situation of slavery in the ante-bellum American South (1998a: 52). It is a situation that evokes moral concern, even moral outrage. However, those who are outraged observers find themselves in a solitary Thoreau-like situation, that is, neither can they join a liberating force – there often is none to join (or if it exists, it might not be the force one wants to join, for all kinds of reasons, political or personal) – nor is it possible to identify fully with the many refugees (again, this could be for all kind of reasons, be it the lack of detailed knowledge, physical distance, culture and language, etc.). As Shklar rightly observes, there is no ‘we’ here, and, in any case, what exactly could loyalty and obligation refer to, or what kind of notions could they entail in such a situation? She concedes that she simply does not know the answer to these questions: ‘There is often nothing there when one protests against abstract and absolute evil, and it is exceptionally isolating’ (1998a: 53).

What can be ascertained though is that, globally speaking, loyalty fares far better under modern conditions than the isolated conscience just described. That exclusionary practice is not seldom the mother of loyalties (of often dubious quality), gives grounds to worry, but seems almost inevitable in a world that gives refugees and exiles little prospect of hope and provides them even less with real-life opportunities – never mind the prospect of civic participation and integration. In such a world, those countries that have remained open to immigration have become beacons of hope, particularly if they have opted for inclusiveness in terms of citizenship rather than exclusivity in ethnic or nationalist terms. If one conclusion can be drawn from the modern experience, it is that cultural and national cohesion remain vastly overrated ideas, eventually preparing and prolonging the conditions in which old and new injustices thrive. Access to citizenship might not be the solution to all problems but it remains a first important step towards preventing injustice.

It is in argumentation like this that the strong maieutic impulse of Shklar’s political theory shows through. The call for a paradigm shift appeals to the listener or reader to reflect on the modern meaning of obligation, loyalty and exile, yet without being able to guarantee immediate change. Shklar argues here how we should think about modern conditions and experiences, even if that entails no guaranteed prospect of immediate improvement or a ‘call to arms’ or some form of radical action.

Context and conclusion: Exile from exile

To understand Shklar’s point about emigration and exile, belonging and obligation, including her own experiences and how they have influenced her maieutic discourse, we need to turn to the wider historical context, other perspectives and other environments that might help us to situate Shklar’s position. In the 1940s, Alfred Schütz, himself an emigrant, and, more recently, Richard Sennett have discussed what it means to be displaced, to become a stranger, an emigrant and exile. They have added some important points that might help to elucidate Shklar’s habitus and thinking. Their arguments add some important aspects to Shklar’s perception of herself as a particular kind of refugee, a position referred to as ‘exile from exile’.

For Sennett, displacement, despite its common negative association, also has positive connotations: it helps to see things from a different viewpoint and thereby somewhat unintentionally ‘creates reflexive value’ (Sennett, 2011: 53). For the refugee. intellectual displacement functions as a ‘distorting mirror’ while most of those who had the alleged advantage of not having been forced to leave their home, city or country, take false comfort in ‘illusory solidity’ (2011: 53f). Sennett’s observations echo Alfred Schütz’s description of the perception of strangers half a century earlier (Schütz, 1944). Both Sennett’s and Schütz’s observations help us to explain Shklar’s initially muted adjustment to her new environment: It was the false sense of solidity that Shklar did not like and which might explain her reserved attitude and her relative isolation at Harvard, at least in the early years. Once something unforeseen or unpredictable happens, the stranger or the exile is much more likely to pick up on the new and to react or adjust to suddenly changed circumstances than the settled population because their previous experiences had prepared them for this kind of situation. Exiles who also happen to be social and political theorists not only perceive the world differently, they also have different ways of reflecting these experiences and integrating them into their theories. As Schütz has argued, it requires a certain type of exile and stranger’s knowledge to help to conceptualize the new when ‘ready-made typologies disintegrate’. The exile is much quicker to question ‘thinking as usual’.

The problem is, however, that the stranger’s views are often dismissed because he or she might not have the status of the in-group. He or she finds him- or herself on the ‘border case’ or on the edge, a marginalized man or woman. The task is then to communicate one’s own insights to the established group. This of course demands from the ‘translator’ a genuine capacity to use a certain vocabulary in order to be successful, the reason being that the stranger’s objectivity and doubtful loyalty act against the idols of the tribe and established cultural patterns. Especially later in life, Shklar was able to use her experience in a self-conscious manner and to the advantage of a more advanced and sophisticated intellectual argument about the role of exile and the development of political theory. These were moments when her experience as a particular type of exile enabled her to turn some of those experiences into an impetus to intellectual adventurousness. It was this capacity or ability to think differently and produce different insights which gained her admiration from students and colleagues alike. With Shklar, one could always be surprised, it was never ‘business as usual’ – something that explains to a large extent her success.

But how exactly did Shklar make the experience of exile count and work to her advantage? She succeeded because she developed a habitus that distinguished her ways of thinking from those of other exiles. Her position and argumentation can be described as that of an exile from exile. However, in contrast to other writers and exiles to whom that label applies (most prominently perhaps Alexander Herzen), Shklar never looked back sentimentally at her European life. Her notion of identity was no longer bound up with notions of belonging to a fixed territory or home; rather, forming an identity became to a large part self-creation. This process seems even more complicated for educated refugee intellectuals whose original language and original cultural horizon demand additional creativity such as language acquisition and learning all about fine cultural distinctions. Shklar often referred to her own self-driven education from early childhood on. The emigration experience accelerated that process and made her education and later career seem even more like an actively chosen path.

In Shklar’s case and her mostly academic environment, we can find similar tensions. They are at the heart of both her intellectual curiosity and her epistemological concerns. Her academic career and work can indeed be explained by her self-interpretation of having been a particular kind of refugee. Furthermore, the suggestion here is that Shklar developed and actively promoted a certain habitus and curiosity that have their roots in her experience of exile and emigration. Her self-perception as being self-made and searching for intellectual independence and impartiality clearly had its roots in that early experience.

The psychological make-up of the individual refugee intellectual, the code of exile and being a foreigner have serious consequences: One can remember either too little or too much, one can show either ‘nostalgia’ for the nation left behind or a ‘desire for assimilation’. The former makes any new experiences in the new host country impossible while the latter can lead to such extremes as denying the refugee’s own peculiar life story. Even if we accept Sennett’s conclusion that ‘for the foreigner, the knowledge that he comes from elsewhere, rather than being a source of shame, should be a cautionary tale’ (2011: 80), the refugee intellectual is still confronted with two further options, neither of them free from pitfalls. The first alternative would be to assimilate within the pluralist structure of immigrant societies. This bears the danger of self-enclosure; it usually limits the individual’s capacity to reflect on his or her own unique life course and experience and can often not be completed. The second alternative and danger consist in some form of ‘appetite for possessive individualism’ as a consequence of an ‘idealization of one’s own past displacement’. Again, the danger here would be a limited capacity to have any meaningful new experiences (Sennett, 2011: 81). Both scenarios can only be overcome by finding the right balance while remembering the past. One must neither be totally caught up in memories, nor be totally forgetful.

This last description sits well with Shklar’s reluctance to think of herself as a joiner or, even worse, as a follower of any group or ideological tendency, be it in terms of being engaged in civic or political affairs or following fashionable collective trends. As to Sennett’s earlier description of the dangers of self-enclosure or the appetite for possessive individualism, neither one of those two alternatives ever appealed to Shklar.

Yet, despite such well-laid-out strategies of coming to terms with the past, for an exile scars remain. Shklar knew this very well. A refugee never feels completely ‘at home’. In his or her search he or she can never be ‘identical’ with whatever one needs to be identical with. In times of crisis, be it personal or political, there is also no fallback position. Thus, Shklar would have been sympathetic to Sennett’s idea that we should think of displacement ‘as something gone wrong, but [still] as a process which has its own form and possibility’ (Sennett, 2011: 89). Instead of turning into a type, the more productive way of inventing oneself consists of coping ‘with the heavy baggage of culture [and] to subject it to certain kinds of displacement, which lighten its burdensome weight’ (Sennett, 2011: 89). This, I have argued, is exactly what Shklar has done. Taken together, her optimal marginality, her acquired habit of thought and her maieutic discourse form a powerful and convincing argument and make for a resourceful theoretical toolbox for analysing what lies ahead, in the words of another maieutic performer – ‘no direction home’.