Judith N. Shklar

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Judith Nisse Shklar (born September 24, 1928 in Riga , Latvia as Judita Nisse ; died September 17, 1992 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American political scientist and professor at Harvard University .

Life and academic career

Judita Nisse was one of three daughters of the Latvian entrepreneur Aaron Nisse and the pediatrician Agnes Nisse. The mother was an atheist and brought up the children in accordance with their own stay in a Swiss boarding school for girls to fulfill their duties and to exercise self-control; her father was a Zionist , if not a practicing Jew. Judita and her sisters belonged to the Jewish sports association Makkabi and attended the Jewish Ezra school, which had to be re-established in 1936 because the Jews were excluded from attending the German grammar school in Riga; the de facto language of instruction was German (but officially Latvian and Hebrew).

In 1939 the family fled to Stockholm after the German invasion of Poland and the threatened Soviet occupation of Latvia . When Sweden no longer seemed safe from the German conquests, she fled through the Soviet Union to Japan with false passports and was interned in Seattle as an illegal immigrant. Eventually she made it to Canada, where Nisse attended a Protestant school.

Nisse studied at McGill University in Montreal and, after she had obtained her Bachelor and Master of Arts (1949/50) there, at Harvard University , where she studied under Carl Joachim Friedrich with a Ph.D. completed. She married the dentist Gerald Shklar and they had three children. Judith Shklar taught at Harvard until her retirement. She was the first woman to have a permanent position in the university's government department. She was the chair of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and the American Political Science Association.

As a university teacher, she gained a high reputation. Many of her students contributed to a commemorative publication for Judith Shklar entitled Liberalism Without Illusions , edited by Bernard Yack.

In 1970 Shklar was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1990 she was a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1984 she was a MacArthur Fellow .

The work

Shklar has emerged historically as a historian of ideas and systematically as one of the most important theorists of liberalism. Her historical interest related primarily to the European Enlightenment ( Montesquieu , Rousseau ) and to American state theory since the early phase of the republic.

Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Liberalism of Fear (1989)

At the center of their systematic reflections on the nature of liberalism is above all the thought that cruelty is the greatest of all evils ( summum malum ). She initially touches on this topic in putting cruelty first and Bad Characters for Good Liberals (the first and last chapter of her book Completely Normal Vices ). She took up this idea again in her most important work, The Liberalism of Fear, which is now canonical . Here she reiterates the view that cruelty is the greatest of all evils and that governments tend to exploit the "inevitable distribution of power" that arises from political organization. It therefore advocates a liberal constitutional democracy, which, while imperfect, is still the best form of government imaginable, as it protects people from the powerful by limiting the power of those in power and by exercising power over a variety of political activities Groups is distributed.

Shklar assumed that "every adult should have the opportunity to make as many decisions about any area of ​​life without fear and without favor as is compatible with the corresponding freedom of other adults." For them that was "the original and only defensible meaning of liberalism." ( The Liberalism of Fear )

For them, rights are not so much absolute freedom with regard to morality as they are options that citizens must have in order to protect themselves from abuse of power.

About Injustice (1991)

Shklar was also interested in the injustice and evils in politics. She believed that philosophy did not pay due attention to injustice. In the past, most philosophers would have ignored the problem of injustice and only talked about justice , just as they would have ignored vice and talked only about virtue . After Quite Normal Vices , Shklar tries to close this gap in philosophical thinking in On Injustice . It draws on literature and philosophy to show that injustice and the feeling of injustice exist across time and culture and are of great importance to modern political and philosophical theory.

Fonts

Shklar wrote numerous books and articles in the field of political science , including:

Various essays have been published posthumously, including:

  • Political Thought and Political Thinkers . Ed. Stanley Hoffmann , foreword by George Kateb. University of Chicago Press , Chicago 1998 ISBN 0-226-75346-8
  • Redeeming American Political Thought , ed. Stanley Hoffmann, University of Chicago Press, 1998 ISBN 0-226-75348-4
  • The liberalism of the right . Edited by Hannes Bajohr. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2017 ISBN 978-3-95757-241-7 ; contains the essays:
    • Rights in the liberal tradition. (Rights in the Liberal Tradition , 1992)
    • The idea of ​​rights in the early stages of the American republic. (The Idea of ​​Rights in the Early Republic , previously unpublished, written in 1984)
    • Political theory and the rule of law. (Political Theory and the Rule of Law , 1987)
    • Positive freedom and negative freedom in the United States. (Liberté positive, liberté negative en Amérique , 1989)
  • Commitment, loyalty, exile . Edited by Hannes Bajohr. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2019; contains the essays:
    • Commitment, Loyalty, Exile (1992)
    • The work of Michael Walzer (published posthumously, 1998, originated in the early 1990s)
  • About Hannah Arendt . Edited and with an afterword by Hannes Bajohr, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2020, ISBN 978-3-95757-797-9 .

literature

  • Hannes Bajohr : Judith N. Shklar (1928–1992). A work biography sketch . In: Judith N. Shklar: Ganz normal Laster , Matthes and Seitz, Berlin 2014, pp. 277–319 (also separately as an e-book, ISBN 978-3-95757-060-4 ).
  • Samuel Moyn : Judith Shklar on the philosophy of international criminal law , translation by Hannes Bajohr , in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 4/2014, pp. 683–707
  • Andreas Hess: The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar. Exile from Exile . Palgrave Macmillan, Basinstoke 2014, ISBN 978-113703-249-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hannes Bajohr: Judith N. Shklar (1928–1992). A work biography sketch . In: Judith N. Shklar: Quite normal vice . Matthes and Seitz, Berlin 2014, pp. 277–319.
  2. ^ Judith N. Shklar, 63, Professor at Harvard , Obituary, in NYT, 1992
  3. ↑ Member History: Judith Nisse Shklar. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 26, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Alexander Cammann: Judith Nisse Shklar: Triumph of an outsider . In: The time . July 3, 2017, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed August 1, 2017]).
  5. ↑ Jan-Werner Müller: Fear is a good advisor , in: NZZ , October 8, 2013, p. 45
  6. ↑ approving z. B. Bernard Williams in Tolerance: A Political or Moral Question? , contained in tolerance: philosophical and social foundations of a controversial virtue , Rainer Forst (Hrsg.), Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2000
personal data
SURNAME Shklar, Judith N.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shklar, Judith Nisse (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH September 24, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH 17th September 1992
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts