Judith N Shklar as theorist of political obligation

Abstract

The useful publication of Judith N Shklar's final undergraduate lectures at Harvard provides an opportunity to take a careful look at her reflections on political obligation, a matter always of great interest to Shklar, and one to which she devoted a great deal of energy in her final years. When read alongside her published writings and more formal scholarly presentations from the same period, we can discern three core ideas Shklar was struggling to formulate. First, she sought to defend individual moral conscience against those writers (e.g. Hannah Arendt) who have expressed skepticism about its role and typically circumscribed its political significance. Second, she targeted Michael Walzer and other communitarian models of political obligation, faulting them for obscuring fundamental differences between matters of personal loyalty and impersonal obligations to the state. Third, she highlighted the narrow confines of recent liberal accounts of political obligation, suggesting that the increasingly tired mainstream scholarly debate on the topic might be rejuvenated by exploring the complexities of political exile. Each of Shklar's observations remains pertinent to contemporary debates about political obligation and civil disobedience.