Abstract
In light of recent interest among political theorists in the idea of political realism, Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear has come to be associated with anti-Rawlsian thought. This paper seeks to show that, on the contrary, Shklar’s specific formulation of political realism, unlike more recent variations, was not motivated by a critique of Rawls. This paper will address three concerns: first, it will show what exactly Shklar’s initial realism was responding to; second, it will consider the implications of this realism for thinking about liberal democracies; third, it will attempt, briefly, in light of this, to make sense of her relationship with Rawls and, in turn, through a comparison with Bernard Williams’s thought, her relationship to anti-Rawlsian political realism.
Keywords
In ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’, Bernard Williams argued that ‘liberal political theory should shape its account of itself more realistically to what is platitudinously politics’. 1 Attacking the ‘political moralism’ of recent American liberalism – most notably the work of John Rawls – that prioritized the moral over the political, Williams sought an alternative conception of politics as ‘political realism’. He challenged theories in which politics is ‘the instrument of the moral’ or where ‘morality offers constraints … on what politics can rightfully do’. 2 However, his was not an anti-ethical realism, but one that emphasized the pragmatic constraints of practical viability as far more meaningful in politics than moral principles conceived in abstraction by philosophers. This political realism, which Williams related to Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’, was also intimately connected to what Judith Shklar has called the ‘the liberalism of fear’ – a ‘nonutopian’ liberalism of ‘the weak’, rather than the strong. 3
Williams’s idea of political realism has recently been characterized as part of a larger anti-Rawlsian movement in political theory that has been gaining momentum since the 1980s, which also includes the thought of John Dunn and Raymond Geuss, among others. 4 These theorists challenge wishful thinking and condemn the liberalism of analytic political philosophy as abstract, incoherent, remote from the realities of politics and premised on a misunderstanding of the true nature of power. 5 Thanks to Williams’s appropriation of her liberalism of fear, Shklar is often associated with these theorists. 6 Although she certainly shares much in common with these theorists, particularly with Dunn and Williams, situating Shklar in this bracket of realists says little about the historical origins or content of her political thought. 7 Shklar’s attempts to think realistically about politics were not developed in response to utilitarianism or to Rawlsian neo-Kantianism as Williams’s were, nor does her thought contain any substantial critique of Rawls himself. Rather, Shklar’s realism not only predates the 1971 publication of Theory of Justice but also attempts to accommodate an appreciation of Rawls within the realist framework. This paper will examine the origins and content of Shklar’s political realism. First, it will show what her realism was responding to; second, it will consider the implications of this realism for thinking about liberal democracies; third, it will attempt, briefly, in light of this, to make sense of her relationship with Rawls and, in turn, through a short comparison with Williams’s thought, her relationship to his anti-Rawlsian political realism. Lastly, it will examine Shklar and Williams’s liberalisms of fear and suggest how some of the tensions between their respective liberalisms and realisms might be resolved.
I
In ‘Decisionism’, a short article published in the 1964 volume of the interdisciplinary journal Nomos, then edited by her former teacher and colleague, the constitutionalist Carl Friedrich, Shklar examined three types of political theory that illustrated what she called the ‘decisionist temper’: existentialism – that rebellious ethics of authenticity (exemplified first by Alexander Herzen, then Albert Camus) that attempts to ‘de-ideologize morality’ and reject the rules and officialdom of ‘institutionalized life’; radical legal realism – a form of rule-skepticism that prioritizes the moral decisiveness of the judge over the rule-follower; and international relations realism, rejuvenated by Hans Morgenthau, which focuses on concepts of ‘power’ and the ‘national interest’ and draws on a tradition of political realism including, most notably, Thucydides and Machiavelli. 8 Shklar argues that these moralities, which elevated decision-making and choice to moral principles, were each reactions against the dominant rule-based ethics of modern political and legal theory. As political theories, each ultimately failed. Decisionist critiques of rule-moralities unfortunately went too far: instead of worshipping rules, they glorified concepts of the self, the judge and power respectively. But Shklar claims that, despite their eventual failures, each conveyed something about what was lacking in political theory. Decisionism was ‘at least an effort to cope with the most difficult issues’ of morals and politics. To see what had gone wrong in political theory to lead to this decisionist renaissance, Shklar sought to consider the ideology that these moralities had revolted against: the ideology of legalism. 9
Given the importance Shklar assigns to the law in her later liberalism of fear, it is perhaps surprising that legalism was the original opposite to her political realism. But Shklar did not challenge legalism to undermine the doctrine of the rule of law; rather, like all her other objects of study, she began from a position which took seriously the ideological implications of legalism as a significant ethical system in postwar America, and sought to show its weaknesses. She was not ‘anti-legalism’ – just as she was not anti-utopian, although the title of her first book, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957) and her subsequent reputation as an anti-utopian theorist, have led many interpreters to suggest otherwise. 10 What she wanted to consider was the question of political theory’s relevance to a changing world. In After Utopia, Shklar claimed that the static categories of political theory could not keep up with the temporal shifts of the 20th century: unable to take account of historical and contemporary events, political theory itself had become unrealistic, and in turn, fatalistic – hence her well-known claim that the time of optimism, in which theorists could discuss justice, is now over. 11 This early work displays her anxieties about the relationship between history and thinking about politics. 12 While Shklar recognized that the long historical view was the only approach that could enhance our understanding of our present predicaments, she feared simultaneously that this long view could tell us little about contemporary problems.
This fear of irrelevance and historical unreality motivated Shklar to address contemporary political and legal theory in her 1960s writings. Legalism: Laws, Morals and Political Trials (1964) was aimed at legal theorists and practising lawyers who, in Shklar’s view, ignored real political events. Here Shklar addresses two forms of ‘legalist’ thinking: legal positivism and natural law, exemplified in the 1958 debates between H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller. 13 With specific reference to political trials such as Nuremberg, she shows the limited capacity of these theories for accounting for politics – both in extraordinary and ordinary circumstances. She also begins to formulate her own political theory, what she calls her ‘barebones liberalism’, that sees tolerance as the primary liberal virtue and choice-making as the definitive liberal freedom. 14 What is most interesting about this text for the purposes of charting Shklar’s political realism is that it is here that she begins her lifelong battle with ‘formalism’. It is a recurrent theme of Shklar’s thought – connected to her early worry about the irrelevance of categories – that definitions are unstable and often have limited political purchase. Philosophy that aims solely at definitions may have little bearing on reality. The formalism of legalist thinking, in which abstract models and rule-based procedural morality are prioritized and divorced from the contingencies of historical actuality, was problematic for two further reasons. 15 First, legalism abstracted from political and moral contexts and gave false autonomy and mythical status to the law. This led to legal realities – which often involved political components – being completely misunderstood. Law was in fact neither pure nor neutral with respect to politics. Legal and political theory ought to be intimately connected, just as the law should be situated on a political continuum, not artificially divorced from politics altogether. Law, like politics, Shklar argued, can be ‘dirty’, too. The meaningful distinction for Shklar is not between law, morals and politics, but between more and less legalistic values, ethics and political institutions. 16 Institutions and procedures were not themselves problematic (in fact, as we shall see, they were the fundamentals of Shklar’s liberalism). Rather, it was their purportedly neutral and overly legalistic incarnations that were misleading and mystifying. Second, legalism’s artificial separation of the rule of law from politics could have sinister political implications. Legalism is entirely compatible with procedural repression: Hitler’s Germany, Shklar points out, was initially well-suited to an ethics of procedure. The consequence of such an ethics is to value order above liberty. Legalism thus risks reinforcing preference for authority. 17
Shklar has no quarrel with the idea of the rule of law itself and never departs from the liberal position that sees law as the best defence against coercion. 18 Nor is she unsympathetic to formalist aspirations: she argues that positivist formalism is simply the intellectual expression of sceptics who appeal to doubt and uncertainty, against philosophical essentialism, in an attempt to de-ideologize political discourse. Rather, her point is precisely that it is not possible to de-ideologize politics. The logical extremes of the attempt to do so force us to lose sight of political reality altogether. By deliberately isolating the law, legalism creates an artificial ‘thereness’ that does ‘considerable violence to political actualities’ and ‘is thus also an effort to say “is” about a legal system where “ought to be” would be more appropriate’. 19 However, there need not be dissonance in the liberal ideal of a strong neutral legal system, so long as liberals do not also deny the intimate connections between law, politics and morality. Those who insist on drawing misleading conceptual distinctions will eventually pay the price of irrelevance. 20 And, for Shklar, it is this irrelevance that political theory must avoid at all costs.
This early critique of formalism evidenced Shklar’s openness – like Friedrich and many of her peers in Harvard’s Government Department – to developments in the social sciences, comparative politics and legal scholarship, her commitment to expanding political theory beyond its more narrow confines and her concomitant dislike of those who wished to keep their disciplines ‘pure’. 21 The same critique resurfaced in her later 1980s works, at a time when new disciplinary battles that echoed those of the 1960s were being fought. In the 25 years that separate Legalism from The Faces of Injustice (1990) much had changed in the landscape of political theory, but the thrust of Shklar’s argument had not: where Legalism was directed at legal theorists, The Faces of Injustice attacks moral philosophers and post-Rawlsian justice theorists. 22 Shklar’s suspicions of formalism did not, then, originate in an attack on Rawls; however, Rawls’s critics could easily utilize her arguments against legalism – particularly, her criticisms of Hart (with whom Rawls shared much, in spirit if not in fact) and her critique of the formalist confusion of ‘ought’ and ‘is’.
In The Faces of Injustice Shklar argues again that procedural and rule-based moralities do not correspond ‘to our daily experience of moral and political choice and conflict’.
23
Nor can they account for a basic fact of politics: that, with time, things change. Here Shklar challenges the ‘normal model of justice’ that takes injustice as its opposite, arguing that there can be no single rule to define injustice or draw the thin, flexible line between injustice and misfortune. Theories that rely on rule-bound procedures for dealing with the complaints of victims regularly fail to take seriously their actual experiences. Shklar writes:
Not only does this procedure miss a good deal about what it is like to suffer injustice, it also assumes a stability of perspectives that is just not there. Who exactly is to decide what does and what does not constitute a valid expectation? The law of contracts may do so well enough for the relations it is designed to cover, but there are a lot of unjust relations out there that have nothing to do with contracts and bilateral promises.
24
This passage points to another failure of formalist theories: they do not take sufficient account of the fact of pluralism that is the necessary backdrop to any serious, realistic political thought. However, it is not only the formal theories that gloss over questions of moral complexity and value pluralism that are problematic; Shklar is also opposed to theories that begin with moral complexity but require a (quasi-Hobbesian) sovereign to fix meaning and define injustice. For Shklar, reality cannot contain an equivalent moral arbiter. The ‘normal model’ thus rests on the ‘groundless belief’ that it is possible to stabilize meaning and an equally illusory definition of justice as something other than ‘a question of who has the power to define the meaning of action’. 25 And so, formalist theories of justice are doubly removed from actuality: either they fail to acknowledge the basic facts of pluralism and diversity; or they acknowledge these facts and posit false paternalist solutions. This is both a problem in the search for moral meaning and a problem of distributive justice – indeed Shklar argues elsewhere that procedural theories that require the presence of a supra-political agent to distribute resources are similarly illusory (and, given that redistribution from above often involves the neglect of actual, local conflict, potentially something far worse). 26
Shklar thus seeks to connect the methodological limitations of formalism with the repressive implications of specific political mechanisms used within formal theories in order to show that the intellectual choice to abstract from complex political reality has substantive ethical implications. In so doing, she oscillates between moral criticism (they prioritize order over liberty) and epistemic criticism (formal theories are false because they get reality wrong). About what this reality consists in, and how political theorists might engage more productively with it, she is less explicit. One thing that is clear is that, alongside her engagement in debates about the gap between abstract and realistic political theory, she also considered the relationship between political theory and life. In Ordinary Vices (1984), Shklar gives her only sustained treatment of what being a realist about liberal democracy might mean. To this text we now turn.
II
What, for Shklar, are the realities of politics? As we have seen, in her early works she emphasizes the facts of diversity and pluralism. ‘Actuality’ consists in multiple moral scenes and persons, choosing between multiple moral claims. 27 Political power, conflict and uncertainty are historically given. In Ordinary Vices, Shklar adds the fact of inequality. 28 It is the task of politics to reduce the harmful effects of that inequality by institutional means. In this, Shklar is more Montesquieu than Hobbes – in the latter she saw an overly rational optimism, in the former a ‘grim realism’. 29 Drawing on what in Men and Citizens (1969) she called Rousseau’s ‘psychological realism’, she argues that politics must start with ‘men as they are’ and respond to these worldly actualities. 30 Politics must take seriously the ‘prevalence of unreason’. Considering the irrational is not, as formalist philosophy suggests, an epistemic compromise. Rather, the very existence of institutions ‘bespeaks our irrational self-regard’. 31
This is the basis for the ‘liberalism of fear’ – a minimal liberalism grounded in psychology rather than rights or nature. Elsewhere labelled a ‘liberalism of permanent minorities’, it seeks to protect the weak against the strong and ‘regards abuses of public powers in all regimes with equal trepidation’. 32 It is a politics of ‘damage control’. Shklar makes the case for ranking the vices according to which pose the greatest threat to liberal democratic society, and the liberalism of fear ‘puts cruelty first’ among these vices. This liberalism seeks to limit cruelty and the fear of cruelty, and assumes that, above all, ‘we fear a society of fearful people’. 33 Formulating these ideas in the late 1970s and drawing on a tradition of liberal thought that looked to Montaigne as well as Montesquieu, Shklar sought a politics grounded in everyday life that closed off appeals to any order other than ‘actuality’. 34 The liberalism of fear does not appeal to reason, to God or to categorical positive norms. 35 Politics is taken off its pedestal: it is a ‘human verdict on human conduct’. 36 Although this is similar in character to Shklar’s earlier ‘barebones liberalism’ which was equally a defence of victims and politics’ losers, what is new about this formulation is her emphasis on the psychological underpinnings of fear and the centrality of physical cruelty. And so, while the liberalism of fear may represent a significant narrowing of the normative possibilities of liberalism, it simultaneously widened the scope of politics. For Shklar, feelings were not insignificant in the face of ideals and principles: personal experience ought not to be shunned in the face of procedure. Similarly, the physical realm should not be downgraded: like Montaigne, Shklar emphasized the creaturely aspects of humanity. Putting cruelty first was her way of dealing with a morally ambiguous world – her solution to the problem of moral ambiguity raised earlier. The universal constant of physical cruelty, which all can understand, sets a standard which bypasses the need for Hobbes’s sovereign. As she recognized, it made her sound like Caesare Beccarria or ‘some other refugee from the eighteenth century’. 37
In prioritizing the elimination of cruelty from political life, Shklar was also rejecting Machiavelli. While she readily acknowledged that we inhabit a Machiavellian world, she wanted a Machiavellian solution even less than a Hobbesian one. 38 While Hobbes gives us peace by repressive means, Shklar’s Machiavelli simply gives us violence. The economically rational use of cruelty proposed by Machiavelli is, she claims, a psychological fantasy. 39 Putting cruelty first protects from such fantasies. It also circumvents the risk of glorifying political conflict. Conflict may be a fact of life, but it should not be glamorized by the powerful. There are no heroes in Shklar’s ‘politics-as-accommodation’. 40 The liberalism of fear is the institutional, impersonal, procedural solution to the problems of personality in politics: focusing on protecting individuals from acts of organized cruelty eliminates the emphasis on the consciences of rulers. 41 However, it does not remove doubt and uncertainty: only faith can do that, Shklar says, and although avoiding cruelty provides a strict moral standard, it leaves much unanswered and is still very far from an act of faith. 42 As far as Shklar is concerned, this problem of moral ambiguity has no final political solution – or at least, no straightforward or recognizably liberal one. Even the liberalism of fear has shortcomings: given the continuation of personal politics in the 20th century, such models of impersonal rule are limited. 43 They are still, however, the best models of government on offer. Disagreements about meaning will continue, but in Shklar’s terms, there is nothing very wrong with disagreement, so long as cruelty is prevented. 44
In Ordinary Vices, Shklar argued that one of the points of liberal democracy was to avoid forcing democratic citizens to make intolerable choices. But within the boundaries of the tolerable, there are still difficult choices to be made. Putting cruelty first was Shklar’s first guideline in helping us make sense of these choices, but it had its own implications. Some morally unattractive vices might be more necessary to its survival than we like to admit. Being realistic entailed an honesty about the nasty sides of representative democracies in which certain kinds of hypocrisy are necessary to democracy’s survival, snobbery is an unintended outcome of freedom and betrayal is an inevitable consequence of the divided loyalties built into pluralist society. 45 It also entailed justifying democracy in more prosaic terms: for Shklar democracy is not based on the ‘illusory’, ‘invented entity’ of ‘the people’. 46 Rather, the American ‘democracy of everyday life’ is a response to the demands of ‘negative egalitarianism’ – a corollary to ‘putting cruelty first’ that sees increased equality as one way to limit what the strong can do to the weak. Inequality generates cruelty and illusions. It also limits freedom, and so democracy is a means to protecting freedom. More important, in Shklar’s view, liberal democracy is what America now has and so a realistic political theory that speaks to ‘us’, here and now, will deal with the dilemmas of liberal democracy – specifically, in this case, with the effects of the vices on democratic life. Wherever the line between public and private is drawn (and the important thing for liberalism is not where it is drawn, since this is always contingent, but that it is drawn) the vices will affect both sides of the line. 47
The vices are where morals and politics, public and private, meet. 48 The next question is whether the line between the public and private (wherever it is drawn) generates two morally distinct realms. Shklar’s answer to this question has significant implications for situating her conception of political realism. For, against the realist tradition that draws on Machiavelli’s distinction between private morality and public immorality – a tradition that in Shklar’s terms opens the door to cruelty – she argues that the reality of modern politics is something more like the reverse: politicians’ actions are held to a higher account of moral responsibility, not to a lower standard of morality, as Machiavelli thought. In this sense, modern reality is closer to what Weber described. Public servants ‘are required to live up to a higher standard of probity than are private persons’. 49 However, Shklar is not content to see modern politics and morality as Weber saw it and will not, she says, settle for his choice ‘between Christ and Caesar’. 50 She seems to want to suggest that because Weber came from an age where personality still flourished in politics, his teachings are no longer relevant. This rejection of Weber puts Shklar at a tangent to some of the more banal formulations of realism that focus narrowly on Weberian theories of power and the state. But it also sits uncomfortably alongside Shklar’s acknowledgement that the legacy of personality has, unfortunately, held fast throughout the 20th century (indeed, it also fails to take account of Weber’s own discussion of the routinization of charisma through bureaucracy). Equally, the accusations of irrelevance in this respect do not stop her following Montaigne’s attempt to level private and public morality, even though he certainly came from an age of personal, princely rule. Rather, it seems that Shklar’s choice of Montaigne over Weber has far more to do with her antipathy towards those who glamorize politics than with the question of balancing personal and impersonal rule. She implies that, even though Montaigne does not speak from the golden age of impersonal rule (only Montesquieu and The Federalists have that honour), his teachings are nonetheless compatible with the ethics of liberal democracy. This is because, like Montaigne, Shklar wants to consider the predicament of citizens as much as politicians – she is interested in the masks we all wear, all the time, not simply the masks worn by our representatives in government.
Shklar also wants to go a step further. By placing the realm of politics on equal moral footing with the private realm, she brings politics back down to earth. Challenging those who elevate and romanticize politics by creating a morally prior and ontologically autonomous realm of the political, Shklar criticizes both traditionally realist political theory and aspects of contemporary communitarian and democratic theory too. 51 She attempts to escape a conception of politics that revolves around the decisions and responsibilities of politicians. Politics, she argues, is far less about the internal ethical conflicts and difficult choices of individuals than Weber’s legacy implies. The force of his drama lies in the continuing relevance of personality politics, and in the fact that there continue to exist tasks that only public agents perform – war and punishment. 52 But political theory that glamorizes these tasks misrepresents the rest of the unglamorous political world. Politics is not about romantic agonism, but more prosaic, less rebellious struggles.
Shklar’s early criticisms of decisionism reappear here in more vitriolic form, directed at contemporaries to whom the ‘Weberian politics of the great gesture’ still appeals. She does not reference anyone specifically, but there is reason to think that, as well as the international relations realists, she is thinking of theorists like Michael Walzer (and also, perhaps, of the more general move in moral philosophy to a focus on ‘moral dilemmas’ in politics). Shklar challenges those
who like to think of ‘dirty hands’ as a peculiarly shaking, personal and spectacular crisis. This is a fantasy quite appropriate to the imaginary world, in which these people see themselves in full technicolor. Stark choices and great decisions are actually very rare in politics.
53
And anyway, ‘as social actors, we all have unclean hands some of the time. It is not a glamorous melodramatic issue for conspicuous agents only.’ 54 For Shklar, then, a realism that falls into the trap of glorifying conflict and ‘necessity’ claims fails to capture the uncertainty and mundanity of politics as bargaining and negotiation, and is as a result no realism at all. In fact, those who claim to know the art of politics but consider politics in these terms are engaged in a kind of mystification that conceals the realities of political persuasion and compromise. These realisms are themselves unrealistic: if political theories exist on a spectrum between legalism and decisionism, these realisms sit too close to decisionism. Political realism proper should occupy a middle ground. In Shklar’s terms, however, very few political theories seem to qualify as candidates for this superior space.
There is an alternative way of looking at this argument against ‘dirty hands’ realism, from the perspective of another antinomy that frequently appears in Shklar’s writings. This is the dynamic between what is real and what is imagined, between the real and the idealized. The distance between these poles are crucial to understanding Shklar’s view of political theory, and of politics. In these terms, where the ‘dirty hands’ theorists go wrong is by believing that their ‘stark choices’ are appropriate to the real world, rather than the world of ‘full technicolor’. In politics, similarly, difficulties spring from the asymmetries between our expectations and reality. 55 The ability to judge the distance between what is actual and what is imagined is vital to politics and political theory, which must both operate within the bounds (or at least in sight) of the possible.
What this argument might mean in practice can be seen in Shklar’s treatment of the vice of betrayal. Following Montaigne again, she discusses the private and public – in this case marital and political betrayal – in tandem. All betrayal is ambiguous, Shklar says, because motivations and contexts are always multiple and complex. Both marital and political betrayal can be understood by examining the gap between reality and the imagination, in particular the gap between the real and what is hoped for, expected and promised. ‘Treachery exists wherever and whenever trust is given or expected, but governments are the most conspicuous focus of both.’ 56 All contractual human relationships based on trust are rife with betrayal and the fear of subversion from within. Like in marriages, in democracies the feeling of betrayal can be ignited without the act of betrayal itself: societies, like individuals, change. The passage of time can entail an experience of betrayal without any actor being directly responsible for that experience: some betrayal is blameless. Not all changes are acts of betrayal, however, although Shklar does suggest that in any relationship that looks to the future, betrayals may be inevitable: trust, after all, ‘is a response to the limits of foresight’. 57 However, Shklar also makes clear that some betrayals are made worse by misperceptions of reality. One of her examples is Emma Bovary, whose experiences prompt Shklar to claim that ‘betrayal is built into any relationship where trust is placed in an imagined person, and not an actual one’. 58 But trusting in imagined persons is sometimes unavoidable, particularly in political terms. The workings of representative democracies ‘force participants to promise a moral order that nobody can create’. 59 Citizens need to trust in larger-than-life actors or imagined sovereigns. Representative democracies necessarily generate disappointment: rulers, like lovers, can never live up to expectations. The gap between hopes and actualities mean that actualities are perceived as fraudulent and deceptive. And so, the gap between expectations and actuality opens space for betrayal and, in turn, accusations of hypocrisy.
What this shows is that, for Shklar, to be realistic about politics meant not just paying attention to what is real, but to the political role of the imagination – what is possible, what is imagined, what is expected. Trust is born of the imagination, and trusting imaginary persons is sometimes inescapable (indeed, it is often a political convenience). Following John Dunn, Shklar argues that trust is a political technique for coping with the freedom of others. 60 Representative government rests on a fine balance between trust and distrust. Betrayal is thus built into democracy. But though it may be impossible to escape trust and betrayal, it is certainly possible to mitigate their worst effects, by being wary of the consequences of too much imagination, as well as the perils of having too little. It is important to be able to differentiate between what is real and what is imagined – not in order to avoid trusting imagined persons (actual persons may be no better), but so as to temper expectations accordingly. Focusing on the gaps between the real and the actual also make visible the failures and disappointments built into the very structures of expectation and trust in representative democracies – something that the view of politics as the drama of choice fails to capture. 61 However, though Shklar frames this argument as quotidian and undramatic, she also acknowledges that it is very morally demanding. Ultimately, what it amounts to is an argument for as much self-awareness as possible. This is no small demand: in fact, Shklar’s realism requires a particularly heightened sensitivity to the traps and temptations of political life. It is by no means clear that this sensitivity – the prerequisite of Shklar’s realism – is itself realistic.
III
If the gap between the real and the imagined is crucial to grasping democratic reality, it is even more important to understanding what in Shklar’s terms are the tasks of political theory. Towards the end of Ordinary Vices, she writes:
The great intellectual advantage of telling stories is that it does not rationalize the irrationality of actual experience and of history. Indecision, incoherence, and inconsistency are not ironed out or put between brackets. All our conflicts are preserved in all their inconclusiveness … Without the poets in prose and verse, we would not know how to approach these characteristic features of the less than fully speaking person or group. It is often said that literature is not life; but though that seems obvious, it does not really matter much. Historical narratives are not like personal experience of men and events, either.
62
It is one of Shklar’s central concerns to show that political theory, like literature, is not life, but a description of life – just another story. It is never entirely accurate, but in Shklar’s terms, is probably a lot more like life than formalist philosophy. She certainly thought that stories should supplement abstract philosophical modes. That they might be fictional was not always relevant. Fictions could be very useful too, and Shklar elsewhere praised creation myths and ‘subversive genealogies’ for their capacity to shine critical light on politics and society. 63 Moreover, Shklar’s scepticism led her to believe that ‘telling the story right’ was very difficult, for historians and social scientists too. 64 This was not reflective of a postmodern mood, but quite the opposite: a return to the premodern, before academic specialization and intellectual pluralism, in which storytelling in political theory was quite normal. 65 For Shklar, problems arise not from the use of fictions but when the imagined is confused with the real, or when fictions unknowingly eliminate or eclipse the real. So long as political theory recognizes and refers to actuality, it can move very far away from it. We can imagine alternatives to politics, so long as we hold on to our knowledge of what exists now and understand what is possible. Shklar’s point is that political actuality must be the baseline for our redescriptions, just as it should be the baseline for our political expectations and moral demands. Hence the liberalism of fear refers only to the realm of politics: it can be based only on what we already know, and cannot refer to anything beyond political reality. Political reasoning proceeds by factual observation and counterfactual evaluation. To be realistic, political theory must operate within epistemic limits.
It was this sense of the importance of political reality that Williams emphasized when, in his late political writings, he took up Shklar’s liberalism of fear. 66 For Williams, like Shklar, the liberalism of fear was a politics of ‘damage control’. It was also a helpful slogan in his broader effort to downgrade moral philosophy and reclaim a sphere of political thinking separate from applied ethics. Faithful to the original, Williams argues for a ‘universalism of negative capacities’ and emphasizes that, while the liberalism of fear belongs to the party of memory, it is equally concerned with the question ‘of what, and how much, you hope for’. 67 Like Shklar, he thinks we can learn what counts as sensible hope by taking seriously the psychological costs and inbuilt failures of liberalism and democracy. Political theory must, like literature, attempt to capture the irrationalities of experience and the role of the imagination in political life. It must pay close attention to ‘the gap between reality and aspiration’. 68
Williams examines how that gap shapes political reality and our experience of it. He focuses on how our beliefs affect the standards of truthfulness we expect from our governments. He shows that what counts as lying in politics will depend on the expectations citizens have of their states, and the extent to which they participate in government. Liberal institutions of free expression and communication are not always compatible with the transmission of truth. Given that our relations to politics are mediated (we are not all rulers) we should take seriously how political relations are represented. If we do not, politics can easily end in collective ‘self-deception, that great enemy of truthfulness’. The fact that the slide into self-deception is likely does not, however, mean that we should ‘simply forget the need for our relations to that world to be truthful’. Rather, it is the task of realist political theory to try constantly to make sense of them. 69
To do so, Williams, like Shklar, looks beyond systematic theory (which itself encourages self-deception by misrepresenting reality) to moral psychology, history and literature. They share the conviction that, among its other moral and intellectual uses, history chastens hope and helps draw the boundaries of the possible. Fiction too can play such a role. Indeed, Williams writes that ‘it could be a test of realism in a style of ethical thinking that it can learn from compelling fictions’. 70 Moral philosophy, in his terms, withdraws ‘our ethical interest from both chance and necessity’. It gives only good news and thus fails in what should be philosophy’s ‘special commitment to not forgetting or lying about the horrors’. The achievement of fiction ‘is to offer a necessary supplement and a suitable limitation to the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people’. 71
Both Shklar and Williams see literature and history as providing an antidote to this way of theorizing morality. Fiction can test the validity of an ethical theory and can itself be a useful part of that ethical theory. There are two meanings of fiction at work here: fiction as literature, a way of explaining reality; and fiction in the sense of philosophical abstraction – ideal fictional societies and thought experiments which reduce and abstract from reality. For Shklar, part of how ideal theory works is by creating useful fictions in the second sense. Potentially, then, the creation of ideal, alternative models of society that abstract from current reality can be a useful format for moral and political inquiry, so long as the specific ideal theory begins from the realities of psychological and political experience. But this seems to create a puzzle: does Shklar want to oppose formalism altogether, or does she want to say that formalist theories can also be useful fictions? Some abstractions appear to be more realistic, and thus more useful, than others. One of the abstractions that Shklar does see as useful is the political philosophy of John Rawls.
Shklar’s attitude to Rawls highlights a difference between her and Williams’s thought that has been overlooked in recent discussions of their realisms. Although both Shklar and Williams challenge formalist theory, it is worth pointing out that Williams’s critique rests on a far fuller account of the limits of the kind of philosophical enterprise he is opposing – an account that contains a severe critique of Rawls’s thought. The key target of Williams’s critique is not formalism in general, but modern ‘moral philosophy’. His battle is with the ubiquity of the ‘moral system’, which he challenges most forcefully in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). 72 Much of his work can be seen as part of this challenge: his critique of rationalist ethics and external reasons for action; his attack on the idea of ethical consistency and his claim that ‘moral conflicts are neither systematically avoidable, nor all soluble without remainder’; his call for discussions of praise and blame to take seriously ‘moral luck’ and escape ‘pure’ accounts of morality. 73 What moral philosophy does not need, Williams writes, ‘is a theory of its own. There can not be any very interesting, tidy or self-contained theory of what morality is.’ 74 Williams’s bogeyman is always something like an absolutist version of Kantianism (although utilitarianism, too, met his wrath). 75 For example, what follows from his neo-Humean argument that reasons for action must be internal is an attack on alternative, Kantian, reasons as myth. Kantian morality, in Williams’s controversial reading, alienates us from our natural person and the particular things we value. Williams brings these meta-ethical assumptions to bear on his political realism. His anti-Kantianism shapes his political thought by proscribing the kinds of political arguments that are open to him: in particular, his attack on Kantian reasons constrains the kinds of political justifications he can give when he discusses what legitimates political coercion.
It was precisely because Williams saw Rawls as a sophisticated representative of modern moral philosophy that Rawls attracted his particular ire. Williams argues that, in linking politics to a Kantian conception of morality, Rawls builds this morality into elements he claims are non-moral. 76 For Williams, then, Rawlsian political philosophy represents the continued hegemony, in politics as well as ethics, of what is fundamentally the wrong way of thinking about morality. This points to a more prosaic difference between Shklar and Williams: as a philosopher, Williams’s battle with moral philosophy was career-long; for Shklar, moral philosophers came to dominate political thought far later in her career (and even once they did, they could, for the most part, be ignored).
By contrast with Williams, Shklar tries to defend Rawls’s achievements. How does she do this? As we have seen, her critique of formalist, abstract theoretical modes was not in its original form aimed at Rawls. Yet it is difficult to claim that the substance of that critique does not encompass Rawls’s thought and might be (indeed, has been) taken up by Rawls’s critics. Shklar was aware of this, and tried to dull the force of her critique. What her reasons were for doing this, and how successful they were as justifications for her defence of Rawls, are worth considering at length. Not only do they indicate differences between hers and Williams’s political theories, but they also point to the difficulties of taking seriously both Rawlsian thought and political realism.
Shklar suggested a variety of reasons why political theorists might take Rawls’s work seriously. The first is best understood by examining her views on utopian and normative thought. Shklar’s realism, though non-utopian, was not in itself anti-utopian. Indeed, she wrote in After Utopia that thinking about justice, that true subject of political philosophy, required ‘an ounce of utopianism’. 77 As her early essays on the utopian tradition show, the classical utopia in the model of More and Rousseau could teach about political actuality, since utopias were really fictional vehicles for social criticism. 78 As with her discussion of fiction and literature, what Shklar opposed was not the positing of political alternatives remote from reality, but the misguided idealization of aspects of moral and political life. This applied not only to utopian thought, but also to any theory that is premised on an idealization of or abstraction from reality: political theories that idealize victims and treat them as heroes, or as we have seen, endow rules, decisions or the law with moral priority, are equally culpable. Still worse is any theory (or relationship) that rests on an idea of ‘a world elsewhere’. 79 Political theories cannot be justified by an idea beyond what we already know – hence Shklar’s rejection of the democratic idea of ‘the people’ as an obfuscating, rather than useful, fiction that directs us away from real politics. The ‘world elsewhere’ is simply a means by which we fail to face up to political reality. It is an epistemic avoidance tactic. For Shklar, Medea’s problem is that Jason was her ‘world elsewhere’ – the idea of him prevented her from acknowledging the reality of her situation. An idea of politics that does the same and justifies political action by reference to anything other than reality is wilfully irresponsible.
Shklar’s concern with certain kinds of idealization and utopias, then, is not their distance from reality, but the way in which they manage this distance. This is best understood through a further distinction that she draws along these lines: the distinction between transformative and normative thought that she outlines in ‘What is the Use of Utopia?’ Here Shklar distinguishes transformative (as opposed to classical) utopias as works of faith; by contrast, normative theories are reformist standards from which to judge actuality. Transformative theories forget reality. So long as the premise or referent of the ideal society is some variation of actuality, the imagined redescription still has some relationship to fact and the expectations have some grounding in reality, then there is no problem. What Shklar’s realism challenged was not utopia, nor hopeful politics, but the expansion of the realm of the possible beyond what we sensibly know to be true. Within this taxonomy of hopeful politics, Rawls’s thought exemplified the best kind of normative theory – not quite fictions but, in the tradition of Aristotle, models that set standards for reformers to work towards. 80 Therefore although Shklar acknowledged that Rawls’s thought contained some fictional devices that could be politically useful, she was keen to distinguish his work from the aspects of the utopian tradition that too often blurred useful fiction with transformative fantasy.
Shklar also gave a historical justification for taking Rawls seriously. She believed Rawls rescued analytic philosophy from its ‘antiseptic bubble’. 81 Although to contemporary political theorists accustomed to the charges that Rawls forgets politics for public reason, this now seems a tired claim, the Philosophy and Public Affairs group, of which Rawls was part, did indeed help put politics back into analytic philosophy. 82 (The philosophy that dominated Harvard philosophy before Rawls had, after all, been the analysis of W. V. Quine, who had little to say about politics.) Moreover, Shklar believed that Rawls, more than anyone, was responsible for restoring to political theory the hope that had been lost in the postwar years. Unlike Williams, Shklar made sense of Rawls’s contribution to political theory by recourse to the story that began with the exhaustion of political theory in the 1950s and ended with its reawakening with A Theory of Justice. 83 Not only was Rawls, then, not utopian, but he had also played a vital historical role in 20th-century thought.
Though Shklar objected to the formalism and paternalistic implications of theories of distributive justice, she was always careful not to direct her criticisms at Rawls himself, but at what she called his ‘small army of squabbling heirs’. 84 In part, it seems likely that Shklar objected to these heirs simply because they were followers (her dislike of academic disciples was notorious). 85 However, her objection is also related to a further justification for her defence of Rawls: the idea of intellectual honesty. Rawls was quite honest, in Shklar’s terms, about what he was doing. For Williams, Rawls might come under his category of self-deceiver; for Shklar, her declaration that she cares ‘more about being honest than about finding the truth’ tempers her other concerns. 86 She seems to want to say that, even if Rawls’s thought had been altogether fictitious, this would not have mattered much. Rawls was engaged in ideal theory and about this he was under no illusion. The justification of ideal theory fit perfectly into Shklar’s understanding of the boundaries of the possible, the probable and the actual. Rawls did not confuse ideal theory with politics – unlike many political theorists he never confused redescription with life. He knew when he was talking in fictions. By contrast, it seems that what was problematic for Shklar was that his followers, the squabbling heirs, took Rawls (rather than reality) as the referent for political theory.
However, it is not at all clear that these arguments – Shklar’s historical account of normative theory, analytic philosophy in America or her belief in Rawls’s honesty – really provide sufficient justification to counteract her critique of formalist thought. Thus her sympathy with Rawls sits uncomfortably alongside her anti-formalist realism. Nonetheless, this tension also serves to highlight something important about the character of Shklar’s thinking. This is that, in the case of Rawls, her own moral and political sympathies with his work trump her epistemic critique of formalist theory. As we have seen, her reasons for charging certain ideologies with unreality were often as much moral as they were epistemic. The distinction she drew between transformative and normative political theory was not simply based on differing attitudes to, and awareness of, reality, but was certainly also motivated by her moral preference for liberal reformist politics and defenders of some kind of welfare state (and thus for Rawls). Where she argues for Rawls’s and similar theories, it is largely because of their political virtues, rather than their intellectual cogency. This suggests that Shklar’s realism was not, like Williams’s, necessarily opposed to the ‘moralism’ of applied ethics, but was far less rigid, and in turn less consistent, in what it challenged.
This difference can be developed by noting Shklar’s and Williams’s responses to the development of Rawls’s theory. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rawls gradually moved away from the formalism of A Theory of Justice, shifting his focus from the decision-theoretic hypothetical contract incumbent on all reasonable people to a kind of self-understanding appropriate to members of a pluralist democratic public culture. His concern with moral and religious conflict in a historically pluralist society came to the fore. There is some indication that he saw himself as moving closer to the kind of liberalism espoused in Shklar’s later political thought. In ‘A Reply to Habermas’, Rawls notes that Shklar’s liberalism was something like his own ‘political liberalism’. 87 Shklar may not altogether have accepted this: on reading his lecture for Hart (later published as ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’) in 1986, she wrote to Rawls that she was not so optimistic as he about the possibility of an ‘overlapping consensus’. Many groups, she claims, are likely to have an interest in disrupting such a consensus before it even gets off the ground. She also questions ‘the basic assumption on which you build your edifice: the implicit values of an actual political society’ and the possibility of ever being able to ‘draw out these intimations and make them explicit’. Even if it were possible to have the kind of social and political knowledge necessary to assess these values, Shklar thinks that Rawls’s emphasis on religious strife and ‘tolerance of creedal diversity’ is outdated: it is not only religion and ideology that now divides us, but also ‘ethnic incommunicability’. 88
Nonetheless, though she never published anything about Rawls’s intellectual trajectory, there is reason to think that Shklar accepted Rawls’s distinction between ‘comprehensive’ and ‘political’ liberalism. She was certainly sympathetic to later versions of justice as fairness. On reading a draft of ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’, she writes in a 1984 letter to Rawls:
As a political doctrine, justice as fairness is, in your compelling presentation, the necessary vehicle for any possible self a citizen might bring to bear upon cooperative enterprises. Without it nothing else can ‘go’ in a democratic society. What is so fine in this piece is that it goes a long way toward covering both the formal and the psychological character … of this view of justice. Like you, I am persuaded that even if devils in one respect, democratic citizens (perhaps most people) do in fact cherish fairness for themselves very deeply. So, the veil would probably be justified by more than intuition. But in the absence of such psychological proof (where would one find that?) one must do exactly what you have established.
In Shklar’s rendering of it here, Rawls’s formalism seems to spring from deep epistemic and psychological scepticism – the kind of doubt and uncertainty that in Legalism she recognized as underpinning all formalist aspiration. In the same letter, Shklar also praises Rawls for ‘situating justice historically and practically’. His growing interest in history immediately renders this version of justice as fairness more appealing to her. It is not, however, the grounding of justice as fairness in historical ‘values’ that appeals to Shklar. Rather it is his historical framing of procedures and institutions. She claims that ‘I have never been persuaded by an argument (Bernard Williams is too fond of it) that fairness-procedures are somehow secondary and must rest on some deeper consensus.’ 89 Here, then, Shklar positions her liberalism as closer to Rawls’s procedural and impersonal variant than Williams’s. Unlike Williams, she has deep sympathies for Kantianism. And she remains suspicious of the oppressive implications of anything that even slightly resembles an appeal to tradition.
If Shklar is so determined to support a procedural liberalism, why does she not soften some of her more critical claims about formalism? Instead of retracting her earlier claims, she actually extends them in her attack on ‘the normal model of justice’ in The Faces of Injustice. Consistent with her earlier critique in Legalism, her epistemic critique of the ‘normal model’ seems to be a stronger claim than her moral defence of that model as a necessary part of a liberal settlement. Thus, again, Shklar points to the intellectual limits of the formalist theories that represent the liberal rule of law and the ‘normal model’, while trying at the same time to defend these as the ultimate political virtues. The result is that, although in political terms, Shklar’s liberalism may look a lot like Rawls’s, few political theorists have found her defence of Rawls persuasive. Her reasons for finding Rawls appealing – particularly her appreciation of the standard-bearing role that such normative theories of justice can play in moral and political life – operate on a different level to her anti-formalist realism, a level that seems paradoxically both less fundamental to her work as a whole and vitally important to her understanding of political morality in general. Therefore, taking seriously both her defence of the rule of law and procedural justice and her critique of formalism and legalism involves taking Shklar at her word when she asserts that her critique is meant only to supplement, not challenge, more analytic versions of liberal egalitarian political theory.
Williams, by contrast, remains consistent in his opposition to Rawls, despite the move away from A Theory of Justice – and despite the fact that Rawls did not see his own thought as entirely incompatible with Williams’s. Rawls had spent time at Oxford in 1953, in the same academic context in which Williams also began his career. Rawls often asserted the importance of that year – particularly his experiences with Hart, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire – to his intellectual development. Famously, he also emphasized the importance of Hart’s 1972 criticisms of A Theory of Justice in ‘Rawls on Liberty and its Priority’ to the subsequent trajectory of his thought. But Rawls did not only take seriously Hart’s specific criticism; he also appears to have felt a deeper affinity with his thought, and more generally, with his brand of Oxford philosophy. In correspondence with Hart in 1981, Rawls responds to Hart’s question as to whether he considers his own view ‘objective in the way roughly that Dworkin, Nagel and Raz maintain moral conceptions are’ or whether he saw himself as sharing more with Williams, Philippa Foot and Hart himself. Rawls answers that his constructivism is ‘incompatible’ with the objectivity of the former group. Despite the many distinctions between his own views and the latter group’s, he does not reject the comparison between their thought and his own. Ultimately he puts himself in their camp with regards to questions of objectivity.
90
But though he recognizes a certain meta-ethical affinity, it is important not to give too much weight to these remarks. In a 1983 lecture to students, Rawls asserts:
Williams is right that there can be no ethical theory as he describes it, that is, a philosophical structure which together with some degree of empirical fact, yields a decision procedure for moral reasoning. Indeed, very often what Williams says seems correct, the problem is that his claims are somewhat exaggerated. Thus, who claims that ethical theory can provide a decision procedure? What is such a procedure? Perhaps, though, while it cannot provide a decision procedure, it can provide something else.
91
While Rawls seems to want to claim an affinity at some intuitive level with Williams’s Berlin-influenced emphasis on conflicts of values, Williams does not recognize this. He makes clear that the Rawls of Political Liberalism still counts as an example of ‘political moralism’, in spite of his ‘historical’ turn. He actively rejects Rawls’s distinction between ‘comprehensive’ and ‘political’ liberalism. 92 Philosophy should not aim, as Rawls’s does, at a ‘reflective equilibrium’ between intuitions and ethical theory. 93 Opposing Rawls and what he represents is entirely consistent with Williams’s general ethical and epistemological commitments, and fundamental to his claims about how realist political theory should proceed. By contrast, Shklar’s struggle to take Rawls seriously indicates that an opposition to liberal moral philosophy of the sort practised by Rawls is not a necessary condition of her realism. In her terms, Rawls’s political theory may not have been realistic, but Rawls was sufficiently realistic about the tasks of political theory.
IV
Viewed over the course of their careers, Williams and Shklar are very different thinkers, but not for the reasons discussed here. Above all, their differences arise from the fact they operated in distinct disciplinary contexts. It is easy to forget this, given the similarities between Shklar’s and Williams’s late work, their differing views of Rawls notwithstanding. Nonetheless, they did share a belief in the uncertainty of political knowledge, which meant that both refused to formulate positive political theories. And yet, they both sought to defend liberal values. With the liberalism of fear, they outlined a liberal version of political realism. It is this liberalism that many critics have found unpersuasive. 94 Richard Flathman, for example, has recently argued that the least convincing aspect of Williams’s liberal realism – and by association, Shklar’s – is his defence of universalist moral claims in the form of basic rights. 95 Though they call it a liberalism of fear, positioned against a liberalism of rights, it is still a rights-based liberalism. How is their defence of basic rights to be understood in terms of their realisms? It has most often been explained by reference to the moral reasons – ‘putting cruelty first’ – that they give for supporting such rights. But there are two alternative ways of illuminating how their realism sits alongside the defence of rights.
The first is by pointing to the idea that realism can be understood as a rhetorical strategy as well as an analytical category – for both Williams and Shklar, but particularly for Shklar. Though she thought that we must be realistic about what we can hope for, this did not always mean giving the hopeful a dose of realism: it could also mean showing the realists what is worth hoping for – specifically what, in liberal democracies, is worth defending. When assessing Shklar’s defence of rights it is therefore useful to examine her audience. While Williams consistently attacks what he sees as the dominant paradigm of moral philosophy, Shklar frequently changes her targets. She is an internal critic of liberal political thought when it suits her, and a defender to its opponents. These defences illuminate what it is about liberalism that matters to her, for while she defended her chastened version of liberalism against rights-theorists, she also defended rights against rights-critics. In 1983–4, she spent a year at the University of Cambridge, where many political theorists were sceptical of American rights-based liberalism. During that year Shklar wrote and delivered a paper, ‘The Idea of Rights in the Early Republic’, which sought to explain ‘why Americans talk about rights all the time’.
96
By examining the American history of the political language of rights, she explains, and seeks to legitimate, America’s ‘ubiquitous, complex and lasting’ rights-talk.
97
She concludes her historical survey of rights by arguing:
Whether rights are claimed in the name of reason, nature, God, tradition, legal security or the demands of republican government, every argument sooner or later was between rights – whether it was those of monopolists and slave owners or of Northern workers and black slaves. So that if one wonders why American politics in the age of the welfare state and global war is still about rights, one should remember – what is after all perfectly obvious: that multi-racial and unequal America has not achieved what it set out to do when it ‘was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’ … When the pursuit of rights is powerfully supported by judicial institutions, by courts which themselves think in terms of rights, then contests for rights become the normal course of action and discourse.
98
Rights-talk, for Shklar, is itself realistic. Rights are what we have. Here she takes the long historical view that she first advocated in After Utopia. To those who looked to history to show the incoherence of rights, she responds by looking to history to show that, despite this incoherence, they have proved useful. Thus rights-language remains an appropriate language for reformers – a way of doing politics that represents how politics is actually already done.
The second way of making sense of Shklar and Williams’s recourse to rights is to understand their liberalism in terms of the realist preoccupation with the boundaries of the actual and the imagined. If within the boundaries of political realism, there is still space for imagination and redescription of reality, then there is also scope for exaggeration that is politically useful. Although Shklar does not spell out in full an account of exaggeration as a political mechanism, a number of remarks suggest that it is the practical appeal of certain concepts that leads her to prioritize them, even if they represent an exaggerated version of reality. She emphasizes the ‘immediate appeal’ and ‘recognition’ (as well as the philosophical necessity) of the universal need to protect against cruelty. 99 Similarly, in her defence of rights as negative protest rights born of outrage against cruelty, and in her defence of Amnesty International, there is implied the suggestion that certain kinds of imaginative exaggeration are important, if not necessary, to political change and reform. She writes that, when Amnesty throws light on the plight of individuals, ‘public cruelty is dramatized in the only really effective way. For we rarely react as intensely to the plight of nameless multitudes as to the injuries suffered by an identifiable individual.’ 100
In the case of Amnesty, it is the fact that rights relate to something which is precisely not fictional, but very real, that makes them plausible. Amnesty uses generalized fictional rights to direct us towards particular real wrongs that face individual beings. Exaggeration in such circumstances is thus not a departure from the truth, but a way of bringing one (and in Shklar’s morality, the most important) truth – the truth of cruelty – into sharp focus. As Williams argues in almost identical terms, ‘it may be politically helpful in certain circumstances to exaggerate the extent to which a practice resembles the paradigm of injustice’. 101 Williams captures what this might mean for political theory in the words of Goethe’s Faust, ‘In the Beginning was the Deed’. The fictional only makes sense if it invokes the real; political theory only makes sense if it invokes political action. ‘Whether it is a matter of philosophical good sense to treat a certain practice as a violation of human rights and whether it is politically good sense cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions.’ 102
Once understood within this schema of the actual and the imaginary, Shklar’s and Williams’s defences of basic rights seem less incongruent. Though Shklar never goes so far as to say that rights are useful fictions, she does concede that they can be understood ‘metaphorically’. 103 Since political theory is not, for Shklar, life, it is not essential that all its concepts and words map reality exactly – so long as they have real uses. Unlike Williams’s firm distinction between realism and moralism, her lines are often blurred. But in blurring some lines, Shklar sharpened others. This paper has tried to show that a distinction that stood fast in her thought was that between those who begin from, and those who ignore, the baseline actualities of physical cruelty, the ordinary vices and their political implications for liberal democracy. What we already know should always matter, both to those who believe that society is basically just and those who believe it must be transformed. This paper has also suggested that there may be something to say for a kind of political realism that can relax its strict understanding of what counts as realistic political theory to encompass other ways of thinking about politics. In Shklar’s terms, there are forms of dramatization that are useful and forms that are not: dramatizing ordinary cruelties that relate to ordinary human beings is a politically valuable form of dramatization; the drama of Weberian dirty hands which removes the theatre of politics from that of everyday life is not. The binaries of contemporary political theory – between realism and moralism, realistic and normative theory, for Rawls and against – do not, on their own, help us decide whether such forms of dramatization are indeed realistic. Shklar recognized this and struggled to overcome the dichotomies she constructed. Perhaps this was unpersuasive, given the thrust of her realism. Nonetheless, contemporary political theorists could do worse than begin where she left off.