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Article: Judith Shklar's dystopic liberalism.
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- June 22, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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RUNNING like a red thread through Judith Shklar's life-work is a "dystopic" vision of liberalism; a liberalism which is not only anti-utopian but self-consciously dystopian. One of the earliest statements of this vision is contained in Legalism. An Essay on Law, Morals and Politics (Shklar, 1964). Published in 1964, with the memory of the Nuremberg trials on the one hand and the Cold War on the other still very much alive, Shklar positioned herself against too much self-congratulation on the part of Western liberal democracies. Drawing a rather sharp line between the ideologies of free market capitalism and the political essence of liberalism, she wrote of her ...