Cruelty,Injustice,and the Liberalism of Fear

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing so, I show how her exploration of the faces of injustice—especially the importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first. Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear.

Judith N. Shklar’s most famous contribution to political theory is her account of the liberalism of fear, at the heart of which is the idea of putting cruelty first. This understanding of liberalism has been adopted by political theorists such as Richard Rorty (1989, xv, 74, 146) and Bernard Williams (2005, 3, 52–61, 138), with others applying Shklar’s account to a wide range of theoretical debates on topics including multiculturalism (Levy 2000), human rights and victimhood in international politics (Lu 2002; Meister 2002; Stullerova 2013), and even animal ethics (Abbey 2016). In 1989, the year “The Liberalism of Fear” first appeared, Shklar also published an essay entitled “Giving Injustice Its Due,” which was then expanded to form the first chapter of The Faces of Injustice the following year. ¹ Shklar’s ideas on injustice have proved influential too, especially among those who have challenged the dominant (Rawlsian) approach to theorizing justice by instead foregrounding real-world injustices (e.g., Barnett 2017, 242–46; Bufacchi 2012, 2; Fricker 2007, vi–vii, 39–40; Goodhart 2018, 27–29; Medina 2013, 12–13). For the most part, however, political theorists who draw upon the liberalism of fear do not attend to Shklar’s views on injustice, while those who follow Shklar in prioritizing questions of injustice are less concerned with her views on cruelty. This is not especially surprising. In her work on injustice, Shklar never mentions either the liberalism of fear or the injunction to put cruelty first. Yet political theorists interested in building upon what has aptly been called Shklar’s “negative political theory” (Stullerova 2022, 720) would do well to ask whether putting cruelty first and giving injustice its due are complementary aspects of her thought, or whether they pull in different directions.

What, then, is the relationship between cruelty and injustice? This question has received little attention from Shklar scholars. Some present her late work on injustice (and American citizenship) as following straightforwardly from her commitment to the liberalism of fear. Dunn (1996, 45), for example, claims that the liberalism of fear served as the “axis for each of her two final and most passionately political books, The Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship”, and Gatta (2018, 38) regards these two books as “the embodiment” of the liberalism of fear. More generally, Fives (2020, 22) takes the liberalism of fear to encompass Shklar’s approach in “her work from the start of the 1980s up to her untimely death in 1992”, and Stullerova (2019, 74) observes that the liberalism of fear is typically considered “emblematic of Shklar’s mature work, and rightly so.” Often when Shklar scholars turn to The Faces of Injustice, then, they do so to show how it can complement and deepen our understanding of the liberalism of fear (for other recent examples, see Hall 2022, §4; Kaufmann 2020, 589–93). There are some notable exceptions. Yack (1991, 1999) has analyzed The Faces of Injustice in considerable depth on its own terms, without assessing the ways in which it either draws upon or departs from the liberalism of fear, while others have examined Shklar’s account of injustice in light of her skepticism (Misra 2016, especially 83–85; Whiteside 1999, 516–22). Nonetheless, the underlying relationship between injustice and cruelty as two distinct and potentially conflicting evils remains largely unexplored (see also Royer 2022, 709).

In this article, I argue that Shklar’s analysis of injustice should not be read through the lens of the liberalism of fear. In doing so, my aim is to demonstrate its independence from (rather than incompatibility with) the idea of putting cruelty first. Shklar’s reasons for thinking that cruelty should be ranked first among the vices do not extend to injustice. To the contrary, I maintain that giving injustice its due raises serious difficulties for the liberal commitment to putting cruelty first. In this respect, injustice shares more in common with vices such as betrayal and hypocrisy, which she cautions against ranking too highly. My analysis has implications for those who turn to Shklar to theorize either cruelty or injustice. On the one hand, reading her work on injustice alongside the liberalism of fear gives rise to questions about how much injustice one is willing to tolerate in order to put cruelty first. As we shall see, the injunction to put cruelty first appears even more demanding once injustice is brought into the picture. On the other hand, for those who regard The Faces of Injustice as a welcome corrective to ideal theories of justice, attending to the relationship between cruelty and injustice casts doubt on according any single value—negative or positive—too much weight. Shklar is rightly associated with a “negative morality” approach to political theory (Allen 2001). In her case, however, this involved not only starting with social evils, or negative values, and trying to develop a “liberal theory of politics from the ground up” (Shklar [1989] 1996, 277), but also exploring the relationship between different negative values, which can easily be overlooked by focusing on either cruelty or injustice alone.

Investigating the relationship between cruelty and injustice also sheds light on the way that liberal and republican traditions of thought intersect in Shklar’s work (on which, more generally, see Ashenden and Hess 2018; Hess 2014, especially 140–43). Although she is most famous for articulating the liberalism of fear, in The Faces of Injustice she more often appeals to a republican tradition to illuminate the importance of active citizenship. Shklar does not appear to have regarded liberalism and republicanism as incompatible traditions, at least in the American context where early proponents of the liberalism of rights combined civic republican concerns about public virtue with Lockean rights theory (Shklar 1992, 33–34). Some scholars have recently highlighted parallels between Shklar’s account of freedom in “The Liberalism of Fear” and the “republican” conception of freedom as nondomination most famously championed by Philip Pettit (see Ashenden and Hess 2018, 210, 219–20; Fives 2020, 78). Without denying these similarities, it is worth stressing that it is unclear whether Shklar would have thought it made any sense to identify liberalism and republicanism as distinct historical traditions based upon rival conceptions of freedom. Unlike some contemporary republicans, she did not reduce liberalism to a preference for negative liberty, and she repeatedly pointed out the limitations of Isaiah Berlin’s dichotomy between negative and positive liberty for understanding liberalism and rights in the United States (Shklar 1992, 32–33, [1990] 1998, [1990] 2019). Insofar as there is a tension between liberal and republican strands in Shklar’s thought, I suggest, it is best understood as one between a form of liberal constitutionalism that seeks to eliminate systematic cruelty and a qualified commitment to a form of active citizenship required to counteract injustice.

Shklar did not examine the relationship between injustice and cruelty in any detail herself. In a sense, my approach in this article seeks to extend her project of exploring the relationship between different vices from Ordinary Vices. Although it receives little attention there, injustice has a strong claim to being “the most ordinary of ordinary vices” (Yack 1991, 1134), and Shklar ([1989] 1996, 277) once suggested that her work on injustice grew out of her discussion of betrayal from the earlier book. To investigate the relationship between cruelty and injustice, I thus trace some of the most important developments in Shklar’s late work, from her 1982 article “Putting Cruelty First” to The Faces of Injustice in 1990. ² I proceed, in the next section, by drawing on her work from the early 1980s to emphasize key aspects of her position on putting cruelty first that are sometimes overlooked when her claim about cruelty being the summum malum takes center stage. The following two sections then analyze the relationship between cruelty and injustice. Although she occasionally presents the two as closely connected evils, I first show that injustice shares more in common with betrayal than it does with cruelty, before turning to identify the potential conflicts between putting injustice or cruelty first that are implicit in Shklar’s account of democratic citizenship. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice reflects a distinct strand of Shklar’s political theory that goes beyond her commitment to the liberalism of fear.

Putting Cruelty First

In this section, I chart how Shklar’s ideas on putting cruelty first developed throughout the 1980s. In particular, I draw attention to important features of her account that are not so prominent in her 1989 essay, “The Liberalism of Fear,” but which will prove instructive for evaluating the relationship between cruelty and injustice.

Shklar’s 1982 essay, “Putting Cruelty First,” opens with an anecdote about a Roman Catholic friend asking her “Why must you liberals bring everything down to cruelty?” The friend was no defender of cruelty or enemy of liberalism, yet he rejected “the mentality that does not merely abhor brutality, but that regards cruelty as the summum malum, the most evil of all the evils.” Shklar takes cruelty to be “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear” (PCF, 17), ³ and, with Montaigne and Montesquieu as her guides, she proceeds to explore the challenges involved in putting cruelty first. Montaigne’s and Montesquieu’s decisions to put cruelty first should be understood in terms of their rejection of Machiavellian politics and their revulsion at the Spanish massacres in the New World, which “served as the ultimate example of public cruelty.” Cruelty was “the ubiquitous moral disease of Europe” for Montaigne, and he put the vice first “because it had become the most conspicuous and the least reformed evil, especially in the course of the then-current wars of religion” (PCF, 18–19). This is the closest Shklar comes in the essay to offering a reason for putting cruelty first, and it is one that appeals to the historical experiences of early modern Europe. In this respect, it serves principally to explain why they (Montaigne and Montesquieu) put cruelty first, rather than why we (liberals today) should do so. Indeed, Shklar concludes that her friend had been wrong to equate putting cruelty first with liberalism, as the position distilled in the essay “goes well beyond anything one can call liberalism” (PCF, 26–27).

Shklar incorporated most of the 1982 essay into chapter 1 of Ordinary Vices in 1984, yet her discussion of cruelty is expanded there and framed slightly differently, in at least three respects. First, she broadens her analysis. Where in the earlier essay she briefly discussed how the “profound philosophical misanthropy” generated by putting cruelty first led Montaigne and Montesquieu to attribute improbable virtues to the victims (PCF, 20–22), the Ordinary Vices chapter contains an extended discussion of the difficulties involved in thinking about victimhood (OV, 15–23). The chapter also distinguishes between physical cruelty and moral cruelty, with Shklar arguing that by focusing too much on moral cruelties—such as injustice, self-torment, or hypocrisy—“one can readily adopt every one of Machiavelli’s cruelest maxims,” which is not the case for those who put physical cruelty first (OV, 42). ⁴ This addition can partly be explained in terms of the second difference of note: in Ordinary Vices (unlike the earlier essay) Shklar is concerned with analyzing the relationship between the vices and, in particular, with evaluating the psychological and social consequences of putting different vices first. The vices “have to be ranked” (OV, 3). She thus examines what putting physical cruelty first entails in comparison with putting moral cruelty or other vices first. The third difference is that by Ordinary Vices Shklar had overcome any initial hesitation about associating liberalism with putting cruelty first. In the introduction, she claims that cruelty “is often utterly intolerable for liberals, because fear destroys freedom” (OV, 2), before coining the term “the liberalism of fear, which makes cruelty the first vice” (OV, 5, also 237–39). She cuts the anecdote about the conversation with her Catholic friend and now defends the view that (a certain strand of) liberalism does put cruelty first, rather than having this association attributed to liberalism by a (friendly) critic. ⁵

In considering how Shklar’s position on cruelty developed during the early 1980s, we can see that she originally approached the topic with certain concerns in mind that are not so prominent in “The Liberalism of Fear.” This is best illustrated by examining her point about cruelty and the summum malum. In Ordinary Vices, Shklar claims that very few people “have chosen to run the emotional and social risks of putting cruelty first, to regard it as unconditionally the summum malum,” which is unsurprising if it really does “doom one to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy” (OV, 8). Her starting point is the fact that people differ greatly in how they rank the vices and that a liberal society must learn to navigate (and not eradicate) this problem (OV, 4, 8, 227). In her later and more famous essay, by contrast, Shklar claims that the liberalism of fear begins with “a summum malum, which all of us know and would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself” (LF, 11). This formulation has understandably led critics to conclude that the liberalism of fear appeals to some form of consensus about the summum malum, which (so those critics contend) is implausible in light of the wide range of different evils that people fear and seek to avoid (see Kekes 1996, 840–43; McCabe 2010, 131–32; Müller 2015, 45–46; Sleat 2013, 102–103; Tamir 1997, 297–302).

Where in Ordinary Vices the summum malum claim highlights the difficulty of putting cruelty first, in “The Liberalism of Fear” it is presented as the basis for making sense of liberalism as a political doctrine that is not founded upon any particular metaethical position, such as Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism (LF, 10). In each case, however, the summum malum claim diverts attention from some of the most important aspects of Shklar’s position, for at least two reasons. First, as is evident from Ordinary Vices, she does not think that everyone does, in fact, regard cruelty as the worst evil. Sometimes she suggests that liberals put cruelty first. She claims, for example, that “hating cruelty, and putting it first, remain a powerful part of the liberal consciousness,” and that “liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first.” On both occasions, though, she immediately qualifies her point by suggesting that very few people have faced the consequences of putting cruelty first (OV, 43–44). ⁶ Most of us, after all, have never been asked to rank the vices or reflected deeply about what putting cruelty first entails. Yet she also maintains that many people hate cruelty, even if they do not regard it as the greatest evil, such that taking cruelty seriously has become “an important part of Europe’s accepted morality” (OV, 8, also 35, 239–40). Indeed, her later claim from “The Liberalism of Fear”—that all of us fear and would avoid cruelty if only we could—does not necessitate that we all regard cruelty as the greatest evil, but merely that we all regard it as one extremely serious evil. The “fear of systematic cruelty is so universal” that, to motivate the “immediate appeal” of the liberalism of fear (LF, 11), it may suffice that everyone recognizes cruelty as an extremely serious evil—the lowest common denominator, perhaps—but not necessarily the summum malum. ⁷

The second reason why the summum malum claim diverts attention from the most important aspects of Shklar’s position concerns its relation to the objective of ranking the vices. In “The Liberalism of Fear,” Shklar’s claim about the summum malum is divorced from the framework of comparing and ranking different vices. To see the significance of this, notice that even if it is granted that we should rank cruelty first among the vices, it does not necessarily follow that cruelty is the greatest evil. There could be other evils that are not always caused by a specific human vice but which might be considered at least as bad as being subject to, or living in fear of, cruelty. The liberalism of fear has thus been criticized on the grounds that its focus on cruelty leaves it ill-equipped to prioritize other “chronic harms” such as “opportunities lost in poverty” (Whiteside 1999, 514), with a recent case being made for regarding serious suffering in general, rather than cruelty and the fear it inspires specifically, as the summum malum (Enoch, unpublished). For present purposes, I remain agnostic about whether the fear of systematic cruelty is a greater evil than, for example, the fear of living in extreme poverty. The important point is that this question does not even arise if one starts with the problem of ranking the vices, as Shklar did in Ordinary Vices, rather than that of identifying the worst evil that humans can face.

Shklar offers several considerations for ranking cruelty first among the vices, ⁸ one of the most important of which becomes fully apparent only in the chapter on misanthropy. It constitutes a response to Pliny the Younger’s view that “He who hates vice hates mankind,” a hatred which can inspire and justify violence against human depravity (OV, 192). Anyone who takes seriously the difficulties involved in putting cruelty first will have to ward off the dangers of misanthropy, which can easily lead to rage and “has the most destructive political possibilities.” Yet liberalism also “owes a deep and enduring debt to misanthropy,” since misanthropy can be channeled into a healthy suspicion of public officials (OV, 3, also 196–97, 214–21). If we do not rank the vices, then we may “indeed end up with an unlimited hatred” (OV, 217) and succumb to a misanthropy “rooted not in a loathing for physical cruelty, but in a loathing for the moral blight of hypocrisy, snobbery, and betrayal,” which Shklar associates with the antiliberal backlash against constitutional government that developed in the wake of World War I (OV, 221, also 3–4, 211–12). ⁹ She agrees with Pliny that the risk of misanthropy arises as soon as we contemplate the ubiquity of the vices, yet putting cruelty first remains the best response for avoiding the most destructive and paralyzing forms of misanthropy. To the extent that Shklar’s case for putting cruelty first appeals to considerations such as this, however, it makes sense only in the context of ranking the vices.

There is much more that could be said about Shklar’s views on putting cruelty first, and the foregoing remarks are not intended to offer a complete analysis of her position. What I hope to have shown, however, is that focusing on her famous summum malum claim (especially as formulated in “The Liberalism of Fear”) diverts attention from some of the most important aspects of her account. Her views on cruelty are better understood in light of her concern with ranking the vices (rather than identifying the greatest evil), and it is in the spirit of this project from Ordinary Vices that I turn next to investigate the relationship between cruelty and injustice.

From Cruelty to Injustice, via Betrayal

How are cruelty and injustice related? Shklar does not discuss injustice in any detail in Ordinary Vices (or at all in “The Liberalism of Fear”), but at times she implies that cruelty and injustice are closely connected. The first time she mentions injustice is at the beginning of the chapter on cruelty, where she observes that Giotto’s Injustice (a painting she would discuss at length in The Faces of Injustice) is the only one of his Vices that depicts cruelty. Cruelty is found “at the feet of a cold and negligent figure of Injustice” (OV, 7). She refers to “the victims of political torture and injustice” in the same chapter, from which it could be inferred that injustice (like torture) is one form that cruelty often takes (OV, 18), and later, when discussing Montesquieu’s liberal constitutionalism, she explains that “a government was to be designed so as to avoid its own worst vices, cruelty and injustice” (OV, 197). The idea that cruelty and injustice are closely linked also finds support from Shklar’s (1986, 24, also 25, 27) introduction to a volume of essays on justice and equality, where she criticizes contemporary theorists of rights (and their communitarian critics) for failing to understand “that the history and present function of rights is the expression of personal outrage at injustice and cruelty.” These formulations could give the impression that injustice occupies a place alongside cruelty as the chief evils that constitutional governments should strive to avoid, in which case we might be tempted to conclude that Shklar’s work on injustice follows straightforwardly from her concern with cruelty and the fear it inspires.

There is, however, also evidence that counts against this conclusion, some of which can be found as early as Ordinary Vices. For instance, although Shklar observes that “a sense of injustice” is one reaction to the horrors of cruelty, she also cautions that it would be a mistake to see it as the sole aspect of our emotional response—only “those who put injustice absolutely as the first of evils might even think so.” (OV, 24) To put injustice first would result in an incomplete understanding of cruelty and its psychological impact upon those who witness it. As we saw in the previous section, Shklar also lists injustice as an example of moral cruelty, which, when put first, can be used to justify physical cruelty (OV, 42). Sometimes there will be a choice between putting physical cruelty or injustice first, and prioritizing cruelty may involve tolerating injustices.

In an autobiographical lecture delivered in 1989, Shklar ([1989] 1996, 277) explained the transition from her then most recent book, Ordinary Vices, to the one she was currently completing, The Faces of Injustice, merely by remarking that “[f]rom betrayal to injustice is a short step.” This statement may have come as a surprise to those familiar with Ordinary Vices, as its chapter on betrayal gives little indication that injustice is only a short step away. ¹⁰ Indeed, it is far from evident in Ordinary Vices that she considered injustice a topic worthy of any sustained investigation in its own right. In the Faces of Injustice, however, betrayal is central to Shklar’s depiction of the sense of injustice experienced when we think that we have been wronged. First and foremost, she explains, the sense of injustice “is the special kind of anger we feel when we are denied promised benefits and when we do not get what we believe to be our due. It is the betrayal that we experience when others disappoint expectations that they have created in us” (FI, 83). Elsewhere she uses phrases such as the “sense of betrayal and injustice,” “the sense of betrayal, which is the very core of the sense of injustice,” and “the sense of injustice, or having been betrayed” (FI, 11, 52, 57). We cannot understand the sense of injustice without attending to the feeling of betrayal, it is now clear, and Shklar insists that political theory cannot afford to ignore this “integral part of our social and personal experiences” (FI, 50, also 15–16).

Insofar as the sense of injustice and betrayal are closely intertwined, we could infer from the considerations raised in Ordinary Vices that injustice should not be considered among the greatest evils. Putting betrayal first can easily inspire cruel and violent misanthropy (OV, 3–4, 221). If the feeling of betrayal is at the heart of our sense of injustice, then it follows that violent misanthropy could also be a dangerous consequence of putting injustice first. The Faces of Injustice is not concerned with ranking the vices, however, and Shklar says very little about how injustice relates to other vices, such as cruelty or misanthropy. Some injustices will involve cruelty, and there is no reason to doubt that most acts of public cruelty—the principal concern of the liberalism of fear—would also count as unjust. ¹¹ But much of The Faces of Injustice examines cases that do not involve any cruelty, as is best illustrated by considering passive injustice.

Passive injustice is typically overlooked by the “normal model” of justice, which mistakenly assumes that injustice is merely the absence of justice (FI, 15). Shklar defines passive injustice as “the refusal of both officials and of private citizens to prevent acts of wrongdoing when they could and should do so,” before adding that it is a “specifically civic failure to stop private and public acts of injustice” (FI, 5–6). As passive injustice is the failure to perform the obligations we have as citizens, it makes sense only in the context of a theory of democratic or republican citizenship. Cicero is our best guide to understanding passive injustice in this respect, for he looked beyond the normal model of justice and never gave up on republican citizenship (FI, 40–41). Shklar’s examples of passive injustice include tolerating political corruption, not giving evidence in court, and failing to speak up when another person has clearly been treated unfairly, such as when someone notices a shopper being short-changed by a cashier (FI, 6, 42–44). None of these examples involve any cruelty. In other cases, passive injustice may facilitate cruelty that could have been avoided—for instance by not reporting a violent attack one witnesses to the police. Yet the passive injustice still does not amount to cruelty because it does not constitute the deliberate or willful infliction of physical pain on someone else (cf. OV, 8; LF, 11). The attacker who deliberately inflicts pain on their victim is cruel; the bystander who observes the attack without calling for help is not, even if they are passively unjust.

Although Shklar first explains passive injustice as passivity in the face of active injustice, she often considers cases that do not necessarily involve any active injustice. She denounces F. A. Hayek’s argument that market outcomes cannot be unjust on the grounds that “when we can alleviate suffering, whatever its cause, it is passively unjust to stand by and do nothing” (FI, 81, emphasis added), and many of her examples, including famines and natural disasters, are cases where the failure of public agencies to intervene arouses a deep sense of injustice even though the disaster in question was not caused by any active wrongdoing (FI, 56, 64–65, 67–71). In discussing the passive injustice of public bodies and officials, Shklar argues that governments should be concerned with seeking to prevent and remedy many evils, whether or not they involve cruelty (or any other form of active injustice), and she reproaches defenders of minimal government for ignoring “its impotence in the face of our suffering” (FI, 117). Governments should be attentive to a wide range of injustices and Shklar does not offer any reasons for thinking that those involving cruelty should be given priority.

Some commentators have resisted this conclusion and, to see why, it helps to outline one of the most pressing objections that The Faces of Injustice has encountered. Throughout the book, Shklar stresses the importance of taking the victims’ sense of injustice seriously. This does not mean, however, that the victim is always right when they perceive injustice (FI, 4), ¹² which gives rise to the question of how we should assess the complaints of victims and decide which are valid. The problem here, according to several critics, is that Shklar fails to provide a clear standard for determining which complaints are legitimate—or who the real victims are amid competing claims of victimhood—and, further, that providing any such standard would require a positive theory of justice of the very type she eschews in favor of focusing on injustice (for variations of this objection, see Heins 2019, 190; Kraut 1992, 394–95; Levy 2000, 36). ¹³ As Kaufmann puts it, “Shklar’s victim-centred approach is unable to distinguish ‘legitimate’ grievances and expressions of injustice from . . . unjustified resentment and perceived injustice.” Kaufmann reconstructs a response on Shklar’s behalf, according to which subjective claims about victimhood should be evaluated against the normative principles of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear it inspires as the summum malum (Kaufmann 2020, 591–93). This line of defense, which draws upon both “The Liberalism of Fear” and The Faces of Injustice, was clearly available to Shklar and is one plausible way of addressing the objection that we require a normative standard to assess subjective complaints of injustice. Yet at no point in The Faces of Injustice does Shklar appeal to either the liberalism of fear or the injunction to put cruelty first, and it is thus worth taking seriously the possibility that she had good reasons for not doing so.

One reason is that Shklar’s appeal to the summum malum would help only in evaluating instances of alleged injustice where cruelty is involved in some way, which will not be the case for many disputes about whether something is unjust. A more decisive reason, however, is that one of the main aims of The Faces of Injustice is to explore the profound difficulties involved in arriving at any ethical or legal standards that can settle disputes about injustice. ¹⁴ Shklar frames the book around the distinction between injustice and misfortune and argues that there is no “simple and stable rule to separate the two” (FI, 2, also 5, 9, 55, 126). The line can be especially difficult to draw in cases of passive injustice, which depend upon expectations about who could and should have intervened to prevent or remedy what would otherwise have been a misfortune. These expectations are shaped by social circumstances, political ideology, and technological possibilities, among other things, and in a pluralistic society it is impossible to formalize them all into rules. This problem is exacerbated by the “irreducibly subjective component” of victimhood and the fact that people “differ enormously about what they feel personally to be unjust” (FI, 37–38). The normal model of justice appeals to established legal or ethical rules to determine which claims about injustice are valid, but this “assumes a stability of perspective that is just not there” (FI, 7). When it comes to adjudicating whether something is a misfortune or an injustice, there “seems to be no measuring rod at all” (FI, 55). There is simply “no clear answer to the question of who determines whether an expectation” is legitimate and should be politically recognized (FI, 90). To be sure, Shklar thinks that legal processes of adjudication are required in any decent and stable society, but she maintains that it would be a mistake either to believe that such processes can ever provide a complete solution to the problem of injustice or to neglect the extent of injustice that takes place within states that possess well-functioning legal systems (FI, 18–19).

Even if Shklar does not invoke the liberalism of fear when it comes to evaluating subjective claims of victimhood, it might still be thought that the reason why we are required to listen to the victims in the first place is “precisely because the avoidance of cruelty is . . . the basic norm” (Fives 2020, 64). ¹⁵ In Ordinary Vices, after all, Shklar had claimed that putting cruelty first gives us an “incentive” to think carefully about victimhood (OV, 23), and in “The Liberalism of Fear” she had argued that the only reliable test of knowing what cruelties people are willing to endure is to ask the victims while offering them a viable alternative (LF, 16–17). In The Faces of Injustice, she goes much further in seeking to understand the common condition of victimhood by foregrounding our sense of injustice (FI, 16). Yet the condition of victimhood is not characterized by the fear of cruelty, even if this is one form that victimhood takes. As we have already seen, our sense of injustice emerges when we do not receive what we believe to be our due, based upon the expectations that others have created in us. Expectations are disappointed and the sense of injustice aroused in all sorts of contexts that have nothing to do with cruelty. As a matter of democratic principle, Shklar maintains, the voice of the victim cannot be silenced and any decisions that fail to take the victim’s perspective into account will be unjust (FI, 35, 82, 90, 105, 117, 126). Democratic political theory should follow Rousseau, its “greatest representative,” in assuming that individuals can normally tell when they have been affronted and that their sense of injustice is the appropriate response (FI, 84–91). Rather than appealing to the basic norm of putting cruelty first, then, Shklar instead appeals to the norms of democracy to explain why the victims must be heard.

The concepts of cruelty and injustice should therefore be decoupled. Although they will sometimes be closely connected, Shklar’s analysis in The Faces of Injustice extends beyond cases that involve cruelty, and her key arguments do not draw upon the rationale for putting cruelty first that she had set out in her writings on the liberalism of fear. Our sense of injustice is more closely related to betrayal than to cruelty, which, if anything, suggests that the obstacles betrayal poses to putting cruelty first may also arise in relation to the sense of injustice. It is to these potential conflicts between injustice and cruelty that I turn next.

The Sense of Injustice vs. Putting Cruelty First

The sense of injustice is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Shklar insists, it is “our best protection against oppression.” It leads us to protest the injustices we perceive and to demand both our own rights and those of others (see also Shklar 1986, 26). The outrage expressed by those who either experience or witness injustice can help to ensure that public officials are responsive to citizens’ concerns and alert to the impact of the choices they make (FI, 55–56, also 3, 65). On the other hand, the sense of injustice gives rise to a desire for revenge. “Probably nothing can assuage the sense of injustice as well as revenge,” yet revenge is incompatible with legal justice and can easily lead to violence and cruelty (FI, 84, also 49, 91–101). In Ordinary Vices, Shklar warned that if “one puts dishonesty or betrayal first, then there is no built-in restraint upon fury” (OV, 3), and we could say much the same about the sense of injustice, for not only is it closely bound up with feelings of betrayal, but it is also leads to a desire for vengeance. The sense of injustice can inspire “dangerous fanatics, and we may prefer a measure of injustice to their righteous zeal and the kind of political rule they might impose on us” (FI, 39). Resentment and anger often lie behind revolutionary movements, and those with a burning sense of injustice are particularly susceptible to ideologies that romanticize violence (FI, 95–97). If one puts injustice first, then there is no built-in restraint upon vengeance.

Shklar argues that democratic and legal procedures are the best remedy for the sense of injustice, while acknowledging their considerable limitations. Systems of legal justice serve to tame and neutralize the desire for revenge, but they cannot overcome it. From the victim’s perspective, retributive justice does not wipe the slate clean and thus serves as a poor substitute for revenge, which comes much closer to repaying injustice in kind. Where justice must be impartial, proportionate, and rule-bound, the desire for revenge is personal, immeasurable, and often insatiable. In this respect, there is a deep asymmetry between the requirements of justice and the sense of injustice (on which more generally, see Yack 1999, 1112–18). At best, retributive justice can mitigate the victim’s sense of injustice, but it will neither satisfy nor eliminate their desire for revenge (FI, 93–94, also 12, 101).

Beyond legal justice, Shklar argues that constitutional democracy is “the best available response to the sense of injustice” (FI, 85). But it is far from perfect. Democratic attitudes and institutions do not even “constitute an adequate response to the sense of injustice,” and we should not expect them to “conquer the dominion of injustice” (FI, 91). In societies where there will never be perfect alignment between public rules and the established expectations of private citizens, democratic processes can at most seek to steer a path between the resentment that many citizens presently feel at existing injustices and the sense of injustice that would be activated in others through social reform and legislative change. Shklar goes so far as to claim that every “social change, every new law, every forced alteration of public rules is unjust to someone” and therefore to “redress one injustice is to create another.” This is not an argument against political change, but it is one that stresses that no social reforms can avoid arousing the sense of injustice of those citizens whose established expectations—that is, expectations based upon the prevailing policies or laws that are set to be changed—will be disappointed. The best way to resolve this problem, Shklar argues, is through a continuous process of democratic participation where no one wins or loses all the time. This is “the promise of democratic politics,” which takes its inspiration from Rousseau’s idea of continuous consent in the Social Contract, even if modern representative democracies do not call for anything quite as intense as Rousseau’s democratic vision (FI, 120–22).

Shklar says very little about the institutional implications of continuous participation in modern democracies. ¹⁶ She sometimes indicates that the most that can be said for constitutional democracy is not that it lives up to its promise, but instead that, unlike most other regimes, it does not silence protest and opposition (FI, 85, 106, 108, 124). The importance of realistic opportunities for dissent is crucial to Shklar’s account of democracy, and, absent such opportunities, “we should assume that the least advantaged members of society resent their situation” (FI, 115–16).

Even in democracies with plentiful opportunities to participate and protest, there will always remain a considerable gap between the citizens’ private sense of injustice and the laws of the society. This gap could be overcome only through a transformative education that socializes citizens “so completely that their private aspirations will never diverge from public goals,” but there is no evidence that citizens of modern democracies would find this solution acceptable (FI, 107, also 122). In part, this is because any such education in civic virtue would imperil liberty and risk greater injustices. ¹⁷ The problem with many plans for perfecting democracy is not that they are too radical, but, rather, that they involve remaking or educating citizens through paternalistic measures that will enflame the recipients’ sense of injustice (FI, 118–19). Opposition to such transformative measures is also down to the fact that we are often unwilling to “give up the peace and quiet that injustice can and does offer.” Many people would prefer to tolerate injustices than to take up the role of the active citizen, which may well be for the best insofar as “active citizenship does not automatically translate into wise, just, or humane politics” (FI, 45, also 98). The solution for passive injustice, in particular, is active citizenship, and while there are places where Shklar emphasizes its great importance for democracy (FI, 41, 105–106), she also recognizes the risks of trying to cultivate virtue directly and acknowledges that many people understandably prefer the quiet life of passive injustice. Active citizenship and passive injustice are both accompanied by very real dangers, and striking a tolerable balance between the two is a difficult task.

Shklar was under no illusions that democratic politics could provide anything close to a complete remedy for the sense of injustice. Once liberal democracy has become established, it will soon be “perceived as restrictive and resented,” with its failure to deliver on its promises encouraging “political cynicism and passivity” (FI, 107, 109). The democratic hope is “to be our own masters,” yet we ultimately “live under rules and laws not of our own making or in our interest,” which is one reason why no one else should have the right to determine the validity of our sense of injustice (FI, 122–23). These concerns about the inability of democracy to satisfy the expectations it generates echo points from Ordinary Vices. Given the connections between injustice and betrayal already examined, it is perhaps unsurprising that Shklar’s analysis of betrayal includes some discussion of how (especially American) citizens feel betrayed by the failure of elected representatives to keep their promises, as more generally do citizens who lose out from the changes to existing arrangements that democratic politics facilitates (OV, 184–85, also 220). The concerns are even more prominent, however, in Shklar’s account of hypocrisy. Liberal democracies are especially prone to accusations of hypocrisy because (among other reasons) they inevitably fall short of the “extraordinary hopes” that liberal ideals inspire. Democracy has been denounced as a sham from the outset in the United States, for the pretense that “the people ruled” is a considerable exaggeration of the role that citizens actually play in electoral systems. The politics of persuasion is key in democracies, yet this involves dissimulation and promising more than can ever realistically be delivered, which invariably “generates disappointment, and a sense of always being deceived.” The hypocrisy of democratic politics “bothers us all the time” (OV, 67–75).

Shklar concludes that we should strive to tolerate hypocrisy because it is “one of the few vices that bolsters liberal democracy” (OV, 248). Ranking hypocrisy first among the vices, by contrast, “entangles us in too much moral cruelty . . . and unbalances our politics” (OV, 86). Even though she does not join the dots herself, there are important parallels between Shklar’s account of hypocrisy in Ordinary Vices and her later reflections on the sense of injustice, which might lead us to look at each in a slightly different light. If we consider these connections in terms of hypocrisy, then we could add to Shklar’s analysis in Ordinary Vices that the hypocrisy central to liberal democracy can easily breed resentment and anger alongside disappointment, since our sense of injustice emerges in precisely those cases where the expectations that others have created in us are disappointed. If our intolerance of hypocrisy is compounded by a sense of injustice, then it may be even more difficult to overcome than Shklar suggests. If we consider the connections in terms of the sense of injustice, then we could extend the reasons that count against putting hypocrisy first to better understand the case against putting injustice first. Those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship may well be tempted to put injustice rather than cruelty first, and navigating this risk is at least as challenging as navigating those between cruelty and the other vices that Shklar addresses in Ordinary Vices. Indeed, if one lesson of that book is that in liberal democracies we must learn to live with a great deal of hypocrisy, broken promises, and unmet expectations, then, once we bring The Faces of Injustice into the picture, it follows that we must also learn to live with a great deal of injustice.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that Shklar’s analysis of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear and its emphasis on putting cruelty first. By independence, I mean, quite simply, that her position on injustice does not depend upon her account of the liberalism of fear. One could be entirely persuaded by the considerations she adduces for putting cruelty first without endorsing anything she says about giving injustice its due. Conversely, one could find her exploration of the faces of injustice compelling without endorsing the liberalism of fear and its injunction to put cruelty first. Those who have criticized Shklar for singling out cruelty as the greatest evil and thereby neglecting other evils that humans fear might welcome her approach to studying injustice, which encompasses a wider range of human suffering.

None of this is to deny important overlaps or continuities between Shklar’s writings on the liberalism of fear and those on injustice, or that they may profitably be read in conjunction with one another. We should not assume, however, that injustice and cruelty are (always) closely related evils, and that the liberalism of fear should therefore be understood in opposition to cruelty and injustice, above all else. To be sure, Shklar occasionally presents the relationship between cruelty and injustice in this way, but, on those occasions, she is not giving injustice its due. Once we attend to the different faces of injustice and consider their relationship with the vices that Shklar explored in Ordinary Vices, we can see that the sense of injustice will sometimes be one of the main obstacles to putting cruelty first. One of the implications that follows from Shklar’s analysis (but which she did not draw explicitly) is that anyone committed to putting cruelty first must often be willing to tolerate injustice, despite the resentment and anger that will understandably be felt by those whose established expectations have been disappointed. Liberal democracy creates hopes and expectations that, in practice, can never be fully realized, and the hypocrisy this involves will often arouse our sense of injustice and feelings of betrayal. Putting injustice first, then, could easily lead to many of the same risks that follow from ranking hypocrisy, betrayal, or other vices as greater evils than physical cruelty.

Shklar never presented her work on injustice as building upon her account of the liberalism of fear. In seeking to decouple the concepts of injustice and cruelty, while showing how they may come into tension with one another, my aim has not been to charge her with inconsistency or poke holes in her theory. When Shklar argues that we should give injustice its due, her main point is that we should treat injustice as an independent phenomenon and not merely as the absence of justice. She does not claim that we should rank it first among the vices and, in this respect at least, there is no incompatibility between giving injustice its due and putting cruelty first. But one position does not entail the other. We could put cruelty first without giving injustice its due, and we could give injustice its due without putting cruelty first.

Although I have considered Shklar’s analysis of injustice in relation to cruelty and other vices, there remains a deeper sense in which The Faces of Injustice reflects a very different strand of her political theory to that developed in her work on the liberalism of fear. To illustrate this difference, notice that while Shklar thinks that liberal constitutionalism owes its greatest intellectual debt to Montesquieu (OV, especially 214–21, 235–39; see also Shklar 1987, 89, 126), ¹⁸ he does not feature once in The Faces of Injustice. The most important historical inspirations in that book are instead Cicero and Rousseau—Cicero for giving passive injustice its due while setting out a theory of citizenship to counter it (FI, 4, 40–42, 105–106), and Rousseau for making the sense of injustice “the very heart of a wholly new democratic notion of political morality” (Shklar 1989, 1138; see also FI, 86–90). Cicero and Rousseau were republicans, not liberals, ¹⁹ and they serve as Shklar’s most important guides for thinking through what citizenship entails in a modern democracy. This might go some way to explaining why Shklar did not adopt the liberalism of fear framework in The Faces of Injustice.

Shklar was alert to the dangers of trying to cultivate civic virtue in modern states, and she did not follow Cicero or Rousseau without reservation. Nor did her qualified endorsement of active citizenship lead her to romanticize the “deeply illiberal” aspects of the pre-revolutionary republican tradition on display in J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (LF, 4). Yet in placing concerns about the demands of democratic citizenship at the heart of The Faces of Injustice (as she would also do in her later American Citizenship), we can detect a prominent republican strand of Shklar’s political theory that goes beyond anything we encounter in her writings on the liberalism of fear. There is no reason to conclude that this republican strand should take priority over the emphasis that the liberalism of fear places on curtailing public cruelty through law-bound constitutional government, but nor does the liberalism of fear come close to exhausting Shklar’s reflections on the challenges facing modern democracies or the perspectives we should adopt to address them.