Podcast appearances and mentions of judith shklar

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comJohn Gray is a political philosopher. He retired from academia in 2007 as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and is now a regular contributor and lead reviewer at the New Statesman. He's the author of two dozen books, and his latest is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. I'd say he's one of the most brilliant minds of our time — and my first podcast with him was a huge hit. I asked him to come on this week to get a broader and deeper perspective on where we are now in the world. He didn't disappoint.For two clips of our convo — on the ways Trump represents peace, and how heterosexuals have become more like gays — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: this week's inauguration; the peaceful transfer of power; the panic of the left intelligentsia; the contradictions in the new Trump administration; Bannon vs Musk; Vivek's quick exit; the techno-futurist oligarchs; Vance as the GOP's future; tariffs and inflation; the federal debt; McKinley and the Gilded Age; Manifest Destiny; Greenland; isolationism; the neocon project to convert the world; Hobbes and “commodious living”; Malthus and today's declining birthrates; post-industrial alienation; deaths of despair; Fukuyama's “End of History”; Latinx; AI and knowledge workers; Plato; Pascal; Dante; CS Lewis' Abolition of Man; pre-Christian paganism; Puritans and the woke; Žižek; Rod Dreher; Houellebecq; how submission can be liberating; Graham Greene; religion as an anchor; why converts are often so dangerous; Freudian repression; Orwell and goose-stepping; the revolution of consciousness after Christ; Star Wars as neo-Christian; Dune as neo-pagan; Foucault; Oakeshott's lovers; Montaigne; Judith Shklar; Ross Douthat; the UK's rape-gangs; Starmer and liberal legalism; the Thomist view of nature; the medieval view of abortion; late-term abortions; and assisted dying.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Jon Rauch on “Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

In deze podcast praat Bart Geeraedts met Florian Jacobs over de de Lets-Amerikaanse filosoof Judith Shklar (1928-1992). In haar boek Over onrecht (1990) legt Shklar de basis voor een nieuwe theorie van recht en onrecht. In tegenstelling tot de traditionele politieke filosofie vertrekt Shklar niet vanuit een abstracte definitie van rechtvaardigheid, maar vanuit de vraag wat onrechtvaardigheid concreet betekent. We moeten volgens Shklar niet doof blijven voor wat slachtoffers van onrecht ons te zeggen hebben.  Over onrecht is onlangs verschenen bij ISVW Uitgevers. #judithshklar #shklar #filosofie #onrecht #overonrecht   

David Anderson (University of St. Andrews - @scotswoodworker @StAndrewsIR) speaks with the Thinking Global team about Judith Shklar and International Relations in Part Two of our two-part series. David Anderson chats with Kieran (⁠⁠⁠@kieranjomeara⁠⁠⁠) about Civil Disobedience, cruelty, our duty to transnational civil disobedience, and using Shklar in thinking about International Relations. Thinking Global is affiliated with ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠E-International Relations⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the world's leading open access website for students and scholars of international politics. If you enjoy the output of E-International Relations, please consider a donation⁠.

David Anderson (University of St. Andrews - @scottwoodworker @StAndrewsIR) speaks with the Thinking Global team about Judith Shklar and International Relations in part one of a two-part series. David Anderson chats with Kieran (⁠⁠⁠@kieranjomeara⁠⁠⁠) about who the political theorist Judith N. Shklar was and the qualities of her political thinking in part one of this two-part series. Thinking Global is affiliated with ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠E-International Relations⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - the world's leading open access website for students and scholars of international politics. If you enjoy the output of E-International Relations, please consider a donation⁠.

Samuel Moyn, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek, Fabio Wolkenstein LIBERALISM AGAINST ITSELFThe Cold War Roots of Liberalism´s Present Crisis By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his new book “Liberalism Against Itself” Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek and Fabio Wolkenstein will discuss with Samuel Moyn his findings and thoughts.   Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of many books on the history of ideas and politics in the twentieth century Herlinde Pauer-Studer is Professor emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna Alexander Somek is Professor of Legal Philosophy at the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna Fabio Wolkenstein is Associate Professor at the Institute for Political Science, University of Vienna

Show Notes: Richard Primus initially had no idea what he wanted to do professionally after graduation, but eventually realized that he wanted to be a professor with interests in both law and political theory. He took HW Perry's constitutional interpretation class and decided to pursue graduate school and political theory before going to law school. Richard decided to study political theory at Oxford with the idea of becoming a law professor. He found his studies there focused on the abstract nature of political theory at the time, which required abstract questions about justice, liberty, and government. Richard wanted to ask questions about Hobbes's ideas and how he saw the world he lived in and the system in which he was operating, but this didn't align with what his teachers at Oxford taught.   His time at Oxford made it clear that he belonged in America, and he was excited to return home and attend Yale Law School where he confirmed his decision to become a law professor. His experience in England and Yale helped him understand the importance of being an American and the need for a diverse perspective on the world. He also learned about the challenges faced by students in law schools and the importance of a good professor in teaching. Working in The Supreme Court He spent four years in New Haven clerking for a federal judge and spent two years in Washington, DC, clerking for Justice Ginsburg at the US Supreme Court.  Richard discusses his frustration with the US Supreme Court and goes on to explain how a great law school teaches students. He also talks about his time as a clerk on the US Court of Appeals, and what he learned about processes and how cases are approached. He goes on to talk about his time at the US Supreme Court, which was more personality-driven and focused on technical cases. He found that these cases were satisfying because they weren't just about clashing ideologies. He later worked as a lawyer in DC before deciding to finally become a law professor. He was offered a position at the University of Michigan where he has taught for 23 years.  Behind the Scenes at The Supreme Court Richard shares insights gained while working in The Supreme Court, which is often seen as the least lawful court in the federal system, which can distort our perception of courts and law. However, when functioning well, it has a different function: statesmanship rather than rule application, which is essential when dealing with difficult cases where ideologies play a role and there are no easy answers.  It calls for the exercise of a different kind of judgment than is applied in other parts of the system. Trial judges must exercise judgment about witnesses' credibility, litigation progress, and governance, whereas Supreme Court Justices need to exercise judgment about governance and how it functions, and how it negotiates among the various aspects of the system that trade off against each other. A lot of this falls outside of the scope of rules that can be applied. Some justices may pretend this isn't the case, but this is not a realistic understanding of what the court does or could do. Richard goes on to explain what he has been unhappy with in a lot of the recent work and direction of the court. He also talks about the right vs. left components of involvement, and how the steady shift right by judicial doctrine in most areas was largely masked from the general public.   A View on Federal Judges Richard talks about why people become federal judges. They are often smart, good attorneys who could make more money as private practice people. They take pay cuts, often from private practice.  People become federal judges partly because they like the idea of public service, partly because the work is interesting, and partly because they like prestige and power. One of the hazards of the job is spending their working life with people who defer to you, which can lead to losing perspective. Some of the best federal judges create structural ways to prevent themselves from losing perspective. Constitutional Expectations Richard discusses his favorite essay, "Constitutional Expectations," which he wrote 15 years ago after a minor crisis in American constitutional history. The incident involved President Obama taking the inaugural oath, but he and Chief Justice John Roberts got their signals crossed, resulting in Obama saying all the words in the presidential oath out of order. The next day, they restaged the oath one on one with the Chief Justice. However, the second time through, they still didn't recite the oath exactly as it appears in the Constitution. This highlights the deep and important aspect of constitutional law, as it teaches us that people do not believe they have a constitutional obligation to adhere to the printed words in the text of the Constitution. Instead, it's society's deeply developed expectations about how the system is supposed to work. The essay "Constitutional Expectations," explores the difference between the big C constitution and the smaller C constitution. Richard offers a few examples of interpretations from the big C constitution to small c constitution and norms that have developed. Richard's Book on The Constitution Richard moves on to talk about his book that explores a central idea in constitutional law, which is that, state legislatures are legislatures of general jurisdiction, meaning they can make any law without affirmative prohibition from the federal government. However, Congress has a specific list of authorizations written into the Constitution called the enumerated powers of Congress. This understanding has been an orthodox part of American constitutional law since its inception. Richard's book aims to show that many of the things we say about enumerated powers are not true, and that the system of federalism doesn't depend in any way on Congress. He believes that the text of the Constitution and the history of the Constitution do not fully explain the enumerated powers required by the Constitution. He goes on to explain the role of the Bill of Rights and the myths surrounding it, its function, and its place in history. Influential Harvard Professors and Courses  Richard shares his passion for teaching and the experiences he gained from his first year of college. He enjoyed taking various classes, including Greatest Hits, Sandell's justice class, Stephen Jay Gould Science B16. He also enjoyed Seymour Slive's Rembrandt class, and a European history class with Peter Baldwin. He mentions the Constitutional Interpretation class with W.H. Perry,  and one of the teachers he appreciated was Judith Shklar in the Gov. department. Richard also mentioned his dual track in law school, where he learned from professors and implemented best practices in his own teaching. He learned from Carol Rose, a property professor, who taught the class critically, asking questions, and building conversate conversations with students. Richard learned the importance of communication, high expectations, and pushing students' success. Timestamps: 05:11 Academic journey and approaches to political theory 09:30 Law school, clerkships, and judicial decision-making 15:01 The politicization of the Supreme Court and its unique workings 22:27 The role of judicial judgment in the Supreme Court 27:15 Why people become federal judges and research interests 31:19 Constitutional Expectations vs. Textual Interpretation 40:07 The origins of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights 46:36 Constitutional Interpretation and Historical Record 51:42 Teaching techniques and intellectual growth in law school Links: Website: https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/richard-primus

Wreedheid meer haten dan enig ander kwaad veroordeelt iemand tot een leven van skepsis, besluiteloosheid, walging en vaak misantropie. Het is een te grote bedreiging van de rede voor de meeste filosofen om het überhaupt te overdenken. Op deze manier drukte de Lets-Amerikaans politiek-filosoof Judith Shklar uit dat wreedheid te vaak vermeden wordt als moreel criterium.  Wat bedoelt Shklar met het liberalism of fear?Waarom moeten we meer aandacht hebben voor ordinary vices - de dagelijkse ondeugden?En waarom krijgt ze het verwijt dat haar filosofie te weinig hoopvol is? Te gast is Thijs KleinpasteDe denker die centraal staat: Shklar

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Samuel Moyn about cold war liberalism. They provide a definition of liberalism, cold war liberalism, and some of the differences between these two forms of liberalism. They discuss some of the lessons from Cold War liberals for liberals today and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. They discuss the work of Judith Shklar, romanticism for Shklar and Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and historicism, Hannah Arendt on liberalism, Lionel Trilling on Freud and Cold War liberalism, the future of liberalism, and many more topics. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has his law degree from Harvard University and his PhD in modern European history from University of California, Berkeley. He is fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His main interests are in international law, human rights, and 20th century European moral and political theory. He was recently named one of Propsect Magazine's top thinkers in the world for 2024. He is the author of numerous books including his most recent, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of our Times. Website: https://campuspress.yale.edu/samuelmoyn/Twitter: @samuelmoyn Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe

Recording of a salon held on October 19th with Arash Azizi about socialism, liberalism, and the Israeli Palestinian conference. EVENT UPDATE: This salon is being reframed in light of the current crisis in the Middle East: Arash Azizi, a specialist on Iran, and Celeste Marcus, a liberal Zionist, will discuss how Arash's socialism and my liberalism inform our views of the current paroxysms. Both of our ideologies are universalist, and that universalism is in tension with our respective tribalisms. This is sure to be a spirited, respectful, and interesting conversation.   Arash Azizi, author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran's Global Amibtions, and What Iranians Want: Women, Life Freedom, joins Celeste Marcus to discuss how the humanism that undergirds his socialism is complimentary of, if not identical with, the liberalism to which Liberties is dedicated. Liberalism is a political and philosophical theory dedicated to the protection of individual rights. It is itself secular, though an ideal liberal society is pluralistic and protects the rights of individuals to practice and observe as they please so long as their practices do not infringe on the rights of others. Because of liberalism's pluralism, it depends on minorities to use the liberal system in order to advocate on their own behalf. Therefore, liberals are often dependent on non-liberals (since statistically a large percentage of leaders of minority groups will not identify as liberals) to do the advocacy work which allows a liberal society to function healthily. Arash Azizi is an example of a writer and advocate who uses the language and philosophy of socialism to advocate for the individual rights that liberalism too holds dear. This will be a discussion about how his socialism is and is not consistent with Liberties‘ liberalism. Recommended reading: “Liberalism of Fear” by Judith Shklar is the text that best informs Celeste Marcus' liberalism “Marxism and Democracy”  by  Michael Harrington will furnish an understand of Arash Azizi's socialism. See also: “What Karl Marx Really Thought About Liberalism.”

On this edition of Parallax Views, Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, joins the show to discuss his new book Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Samuel examines and dissects the beliefs of Cold War intellectuals like Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt to argue that liberals of the Cold War in many ways ended up undermining the progressive and Enlightenment principles of the liberal tradition in their attempts to combat communism. In doing so, he makes the case, they helped paved the way not only for modern equivalents/heirs of the Cold War liberalism like Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Tony Judt, and Leon Wieseltierm, but also the reigning power of the current neoliberal order and the withering of the welfare state. A note that this conversation is talking about liberals and liberalism in a very academic sense rather than it's colloquial usage. Among the topics discussed are Judith Shklar's After Utopia (and why Shklar is a guiding force throughout Liberalism Against Itself), Sigmun Freud and the politics of self-regulations, decolonization and paternalisitic racism in the Cold War era, Jonathan Chait's scathing review of Liberalism Against Itself and Samuel's response to it (excluive, thus far, to this show), Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed and Samuel's critique of the burgeoning postliberal right, thoughts on Sohrab Ahmari's Tyranny Inc., Karl Popper of The Open Society and Its Enemies fame and the problem his critique of historicism, the Mont Pelerin Society and neoliberalism, F.A. Hayek, Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Christian thinker Lord Acton, the Cold War liberals' critique of romanticism and Samuel's response to it, the Soviet Union and the idea of Progress and who lays claim to it, the concept of emancipation and the French Revolution, and much, much more!

In his provocative new book, Liberalism Against Itself, historian Samuel Moyn revisits the work of five key Cold War thinkers—Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Lionel Trilling—to explain the deformation of liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in his telling, liberals abandoned their commitment to progress, the Enlightenment, and grand dreams of emancipation and instead embraced fatalism, pessimism, and a narrow conception of freedom. For Moyn, the liberalism that emerged from the Cold War is, lamentably, still with us—a culprit in the rise of Donald Trump, and a barrier to offering a compelling alternative to him. Sources:Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023)Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957)Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)Matthew Sitman, "How to Read Reinhold Niebuhr, After 9-11," Society, Spring 2012 ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast was recorded about a week before its subject, Andrea Long Chu, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, so it doesn't come up in the conversation with Blake Smith, but it's interesting to keep in mind as he and I analyze Chu and try to understand the particular role she plays in the broader intellectual and journalistic ecosystem.Our story begins in early 2018, when the hipster intellectual magazine N+1 published a long essay titled “On Liking Women.” The essay, which went rather viral, was about the author's transition to being a woman, her fascination with the 1967 radical tract the SCUM Manifesto, the dynamics of sissy porn, and her complicated feelings about wanting to be a woman, wanting women, and the universal fear of being feminized.Its author, Andrea Long Chu, was at the time a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and in all respects unfamous. The essay would change that, rather dramatically. In the way that Ta-Nehisi Coates was, for a time, the black intellectual, and Wesley Yang was the Asian intellectual, Chu became, and perhaps remains, the trans intellectual of the moment. Later that year she wrote another splashy piece,“My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy,” for the New York Times. Her 2019 book, Females, got an immense amount of attention. In 2021 she was hired as a staff critic for New York magazine, and in that role has written a series of buzzed about reviews. She's not famous, exactly, but she's almost as close to it as journalists get it. She is now friends, for instance, with the genuinely famous Emily Ratajkowski, whom she profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and who later interviewed Chu for her own podcast, High Low with Emrata.As she says to Ratajkowski, some of this success was a matter of timing. There was a space waiting to be filled. Trans issues had gotten big in the culture, and while there were a lot of good trans memoirs out there, and an increasing number of trans people making a name for themselves in the “influencer” space, there was neither an intellectual nor a magazine feature writer who had yet made a name for him or herself reliably and stylishly explaining the trans thing to the world. Chu has been able to step into this space so successfully because she is a stylish writer, because she has a command of the relevant theory, and also because she has that thing that so many it boys and girls of journalism have had: she's a tease. She comes close and dances away. She reveals and withholds, issues grand pronouncements, and then implies that she's just kidding … maybe.Here she is at the end of her breakout essay, I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness. How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.…This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.I've been reading and listening to Chu recently, and I find myself atypically confused. I honestly don't know what she's trying to say, about gender and sexuality and sex and politics, nor whether she actually believes whatever it is she's trying to say. I don't know if she's the real deal or, like so many it boys and girls of the past, she's performing a role that is ultimately too disconnected from a genuinely grounded self to write things that are meaningful.To help me process my confusion, I reached out to Blake Smith, who recently wrote a highly critical piece on Chu. Officially, Blake is an historian of modern France coming off a Fulbright in North Macedonia, and before that a PhD from Northwestern University. Unofficially, but more relevantly for our purposes, he's been writing up a storm of intellectual but accessible essays over the past few years, for a variety of publications, most often Tablet, where the Chu piece was published. These fall into a few different buckets. One is what I'd call his ongoing project to identify potential intellectual and creative resources for the revivification of liberalism. This has manifested in critical essays on various eminent and obscure European and American intellectuals, including folks like Michel Foucault, Philip Rieff, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Jacob Taubes, Richard Howard, and Roland Barthes. Another bucket is criticism of woke thinking and writing, and a third is his interest in queer theory. His Chu piece falls into both of the latter buckets, although Chu has a complicated relationship to woke. It may overlap with the first too, though that's not as obvious a connection.His Chu piece begins not with Chu herself, but with the archetypal conversion (or transition) story of western civilization, that of Saul of Tarsus, who had a vision of Jesus while on the road to Damascus. He abandoned his Judaism, changed his name to Paul, and dedicated his life to evangelizing for the new faith. Or, in Smith's tart description, he just changed his stripes, remaining “what he had been before—an antagonizing, persecutory self-promoter,” but with a new lexicon of values and a new set of targets. Smith writes:In his letters to churches throughout the Roman Empire, Paul gave an account of himself as being uniquely guilty and abject—the “chief of sinners”—and especially favored by God. In doing so, he created a powerful and enduring model for the way people seek attention and influence in Western culture, from the Confessions of Augustine to the ubiquitous self-narrations of our own moment. Flamboyant rejection of a former life, a lurid picture of its depravity and danger, the wrenching rapture of being overtaken and undone by an outward power, a new self to be declared and recognized by others, new enemies (shadows of the old self) to be exposed and attacked, and a continual staggering back and forth between declarations of one's utter unworthiness and ethical exaltation.One of the most successful contemporary practitioners of this mode of confession, in which a conversion is narrated in a mode of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement, is the essayist Andrea Long Chu. In 2018, Chu, who transitioned from male to female, established her reputation with essays for N+1 and The New York Times on her desire for femininity and her feelings about her new vagina. “Few of us” trans women, she argued, “dare to talk about” the truths she purportedly exposed in these essays—that transition is motivated by fetishistic investment in the most external, sexualized aspects of traditional femininity (“Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”)—and that transitioning had made her more dysphoric and “suicidal.”Chu positioned herself in national publications as declaring hidden truths that other people like herself had been too cowardly to avow. Publications from The Point to The Nation to Vogue interviewed her, and New York magazine has more recently hired her, while scholars devote articles and even special issues of journals to her contributions to gender theory. The most notorious of the latter was her 2019 pamphlet-length book, Females, published with Verso, a press that once had something to do with the left. In Females, Chu worked on two different double registers. She played at once comic and serious, giving herself the right to backtrack her most radical claims as ironic “bits.” She gave, moreover, a reading of Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto (1967) as a statement about the nature of desire as such, for everyone, and as a kind of prefiguring of her own transition. It was as if Chu became the protagonist of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, who is convinced that a local writer's autobiographical poem is in fact the elaborately allegorized story of his own life. Where Solanas had called for the extermination of men, she took her plan only as far as a failed attempt to murder Andy Warhol. Females ends with Solanas, at a distance of half-a-century, killing another “Andy”—Chu's former, male self. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comAurelian is a political scientist and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. His two most recent books are A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. His forthcoming book is Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals. If you think you know what moderation is, Aurelian will surprise you. Not mushy; not vague; not the median: it's a political temperament and philosophy with its own distinctive heritage. We talk of Raymond Aron and George Orwell, Albert Camus and Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin and Adam Michnik. And why we need these kinds of thinkers today.For two clips of our convo — on whether the right or left is more of a threat to moderates, and why moderates oppose the notion of salvation — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Aurelian growing up in communist Romania near Ukraine; his five key principles of moderation; the French philosopher Raymond Aron and his rivalry with Sartre; Camus and Orwell as men of the left whom leftists hated; Isaiah Berlin and pluralism; Tocqueville, Judith Shklar, and Montaigne; relativism vs. skepticism; Keynes, and how liberty and equality are not incompatible; Machiavelli and the role of luck in politics; Oakeshott, politics as the art of improvisation; Adam Michnik's courage in dark times; Plato on when moderation is not a good thing; MLK's critique of moderates, Flight 93 elections, the Benedict Option, the cancel culture of the right, Oscar Wilde and the need for relaxed humor in politics. Yes, it was a lot. But we had a lot of fun as well.

Eliot and Eric welcome Constanze Stelzenmuller, the Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Transatlantic Relations at the Brookings Institution. They discuss the current row over Germany providing Leopard Tanks to Ukraine, the political constraints on German Chancellor Olof Scholz, the role of Cold War ostpolitik on contemporary policy debates, the intellectual impact of Carl Schmitt and Victor Klemperer on elite German thinking, and the Hitler-Putin comparison. They end with a discussion on the late Judith Shklar as a political philosopher and teacher of political theory and her writings on power and cruelty. Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Email us with your feedback at shieldoftherepublic@gmail.com. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder (https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471) “Scholz is a wartime chancellor, whether he likes it or not” by Constanze (https://www.ft.com/content/d2fdb3cc-de73-4ad5-85fa-b48a6408f669) “A Wartime President” by Eliot (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704107104574571444249809148) “Obama does not accept war for what it is” by Eliot (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eliot-cohen-obama-does-not-accept-war-for-what-it-is/2014/07/31/8f27346e-1830-11e4-9e3b-7f2f110c6265_story.html) The Treaty Offered by Russia in December 2021 (https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en) Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (https://www.amazon.com/Language-Third-Reich-Lingua-Imperii/dp/0826491308) Spiegel Report on Bundeswehr (https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-bad-news-bundeswehr-an-examination-of-the-truly-dire-state-of-germany-s-military-a-df92eaaf-e3f9-464d-99a3-ef0c27dcc797) Helmut Schmidt's 2014 Interview with Bild (https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/helmut-schmidt/bild-interview-altkanzler-europa-ukraine-krise-36003626.bild.html) “Liberalism and Fear” by Judith Shklar (https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf) Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar (https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Vices-Belknap-Judith-Shklar/dp/0674641760) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eliot and Eric welcome Constanze Stelzenmuller, the Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Transatlantic Relations at the Brookings Institution. They discuss the current row over Germany providing Leopard Tanks to Ukraine, the political constraints on German Chancellor Olof Scholz, the role of Cold War ostpolitik on contemporary policy debates, the intellectual impact of Carl Schmitt and Victor Klemperer on elite German thinking, and the Hitler-Putin comparison. They end with a discussion on the late Judith Shklar as a political philosopher and teacher of political theory and her writings on power and cruelty. Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Email us with your feedback at shieldoftherepublic@gmail.com. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder (https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471) “Scholz is a wartime chancellor, whether he likes it or not” by Constanze (https://www.ft.com/content/d2fdb3cc-de73-4ad5-85fa-b48a6408f669) “A Wartime President” by Eliot (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704107104574571444249809148) “Obama does not accept war for what it is” by Eliot (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eliot-cohen-obama-does-not-accept-war-for-what-it-is/2014/07/31/8f27346e-1830-11e4-9e3b-7f2f110c6265_story.html) The Treaty Offered by Russia in December 2021 (https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en) Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (https://www.amazon.com/Language-Third-Reich-Lingua-Imperii/dp/0826491308) Spiegel Report on Bundeswehr (https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-bad-news-bundeswehr-an-examination-of-the-truly-dire-state-of-germany-s-military-a-df92eaaf-e3f9-464d-99a3-ef0c27dcc797) Helmut Schmidt's 2014 Interview with Bild (https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/helmut-schmidt/bild-interview-altkanzler-europa-ukraine-krise-36003626.bild.html) “Liberalism and Fear” by Judith Shklar (https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf) Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar (https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Vices-Belknap-Judith-Shklar/dp/0674641760) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Adaletsizlik, adalet kurallarının her gün adaletsiz insanlar tarafından fiili olarak ihlal edilmesiyle gelişmez. Gerçek ve potansiyel mağdurlara sırt çeviren pasif vatandaşlar, haksızlığın daha da büyümesine katkıda bulunurlar.” Diyor son yüzyılın düşünürlerinden Judith Shklar. VakıfBank Kültür Yayınları arasında çıkan “Adaletsizliğin Veçheleri” isimli kitabında adalet sorununu, günlük hayatta herkesin başına gelen küçük ve önemsiz olaylara bakarak incelemiş. Aristo'dan Platona oradan da Çicero'ya kadar adalet konusunda kafa yoran düşünür ve filozofların bakış açılarına yer vermiş. «« Yazar, bugünkü küresel adalet modelinin adaletsizliğin etkisiz katılımcılarını değil, yalnızca faillerini dikkate alması yüzünden başarısız olduğunu söylüyor. Pasif adaletsizliğe en net dikkat çeken düşünürün Romalı hukukçu Cicero olduğuna dikkat çekiyor. Karmaşık hale geldiğinde bizzat hukukun kendi adaletsizliklerini doğuracağından endişe eden Cicero şöyle diyordu; “Yapabilme imkânı varken yanlışı engellemeyen veya buna direnmeyen kimse, ülkesini terk etmişçesine bir yanlışın suçlusudur.” Cicero'ya göre pasif adaletsizlik, adil olamamanın ötesinde vatandaşlığın kişisel standartlarının altına düşmektir. «« Romalı hukukçu Cicero'nun fikirlerinden faydalandığı antik dönem filozofu Eflatun veya Platona göre genç bir haydudun yaşlı bir adamı dövdüğünü görüp de müdahale etmeyen sağlam vücutlu insanlar da saldırgan kadar suçludur. Normalde adaletsiz insan etkin olarak yasa ve adetleri ihlal etmek ve haksız davranmak suretiyle bunların altına düşmekle suçlanır. Ancak pasif olarak adaletsiz insan bundan daha farklı davranır, çevresinde olup biten hiçbir şeyi umursamaz, özellikle bir sahtekarlık ve şiddet olayı gördüğünde. Kanunsuz bir eylem veya suçla karşılaştığında, sadece kafasını çevirir. Ama eğer bir devlet memuruysa, o zaman suçu çok ağırdır. Pasif adaletsiz kime denir sorusunun cevabını da filozofumuz şöyle verir; O, her zaman ilk olarak “Hayat adaletsizdir” diyen ve mağdurları görmezden gelen kişidir. «« Adaletsizlik, karakter ve boyutu bakımından eşi benzeri olmayan toplumsal bir kötülüktür. Adaletsiz kimseler, sadece adaletsiz fiillerden doğrudan fayda sağlayanlar değil fakat aralarında hüküm süren adaletsizliğe göz yumanlardır da. Yalnızca yetkililer, suçlular ve düzenbazlar tarafından şehirlerde işlenen adaletsizlikleri değil, aynı zamanda sırf zahmetli bir iş diye suçları ihbar etmeyi, polise haber vermeyi, mahkemelerde ifade vermeyi ve mağdurun yardımına koşmayı reddeden vatandaşların pasif davranışlarının da adaletsizliğe yol açtıkları görülmelidir.

In ihrem Buch möchte Judith Shklar die „Faces of Unjustice“, also die Erscheinungsformen von Unrecht darstellen. Denn für die Politologin sind ungerechte Sachverhalte stets viel konkretere Ereignisse als die hehre und ideelle „Gerechtigkeit“. Bürgerinnen und Bürger sollten daher stets wachsam sein, inwieweit der Staat sie ungerecht behandelt. Rezension von Andreas Puff-Trojan. Aus dem Amerikanischen von Christiane Goldmann Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 228 Seiten, 25 Euro ISBN 978-3-7518-0338-0

Si può discutere di un liberalismo, come teoria dei limiti del potere, che non è soltanto principio politico che libera dalla paura ma liberalismo egualitario che promuove il coraggio? Francesca Rigotti Liberalismo della paura o del coraggio? Judith Shklar, tra giustizia e libertà Domenica 19 settembre 2021 Sassuolo

Francesca Rigotti"Festival Filosofia"https://www.festivalfilosofia.it/Festival Filosofia, SassuoloDomenica 19 settembre 2021, ore 10:00Francesca Rigotti"Liberalismo della paura o del coraggio?"Judith Shklar, tra giustizia e libertàprenota il tuo posto: https://www.festivalfilosofia.it/"Il liberalismo della paura di Shklar, studiosa eccellente per il suo rigore intellettuale e la sua serietà morale, nonché per la sua filosofia sociale nitidamente laica e secolare da una parte, quanto dall'altra impegnata nella difesa dei deboli dall'oppressione e dalla tirannia, contiene una teoria dei diritti in base alla quale il primo diritto non è il diritto alla vita o alla libertà bensì il diritto ad essere protetti dal primo vizio, che a sua volta non è, nella teoria di Shklar, la superbia bensì la crudeltà, com'ella ben spiega in Vizi comuni. Tutti i diritti, anzi, dovrebbero essere impegnati a proteggere l'uomo dalla crudeltà. La crudeltà è il più crudele dei mali. La crudeltà ispira la paura e la paura distrugge la libertà. Questo non significa secondo Shklar che un sistema liberale non debba essere coercitivo e in alcuni casi incutere paura: un minimo di timore per la punizione in caso di trasgressione è implicito in ogni sistema legislativo, anche nel più liberale e democratico. Il senso profondo delle sue asserzioni è che il sistema liberale deve prevenire dalla paura creata da atti di forza arbitrari, inaspettati e non necessari, specialmente se perpetrati dallo stato, per esempio atti di crudeltà, di sopruso e di tortura eseguiti da corpi istituzionali come esercito, polizia e servizi segreti. In uno stato liberale non si dovrebbe aver paura della tortura perché la tortura non vi dovrebbe esistere, affermava Judith Shklar, mostrando ahimè non grande lungimiranza proprio rispetto al suo paese di adozione, gli Stati Uniti." https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/pauraArticolo di Francesca RigottiFrancesca Rigotti è professoressa di Dottrine politiche e Comunicazione politica presso l'Università della Svizzera italiana a Lugano. È stata docente alla Facoltà di Scienze politiche dell'Università di Göttingen come titolare di un “Heisenberg Stipendium” della Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e visiting fellow presso l'Università di Princeton. La sua ricerca è caratterizzata dalla decifrazione e dall'interpretazione delle procedure metaforiche e simboliche sedimentate nel pensiero filosofico, nel ragionamento politico, nella pratica culturale e nell'esperienza ordinaria. Tra i suoi libri recenti: La filosofia delle piccole cose (Roma 2004); Il pensiero pendolare (Bologna 2006); Il pensiero delle cose (Milano 2007); Gola. La passione dell'ingordigia (Bologna 2008); Partorire con il corpo e con la mente. Creatività, filosofia, maternità (Torino 2010); Metafore del silenzio. Il silenzio per immagini (Milano 2013); Nuova filosofia delle piccole cose (Novara 2013); Onestà (Milano 2014); Venire al mondo (Trento 2015); Manifesto del cibo liscio. Per una nuova filosofia in cucina (Novara 2015); «Una donna per amico». Dell'amicizia in generale e dell'amicizia delle donne (con A. Longo, Napoli-Salerno 2016); De senectute (Torino 2018); Migranti per caso. Una vita da expat (Milano 2019); Buio (Bologna 2020).IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

“I have seen the future, and it works”. That was what Lincoln Steffens wrote in a letter to Maria Howe in 1919 with respect to Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Union. Which societies are thought to “work”, and how does that influence the power and authority such societies have, and the global leadership they can exercise? Key Insights:We need to have another podcast on emerging great-power competition in a time of increasing global authoritarianismGreat powers remain great powers not just through economic and military strength, but by projecting an image that they are the wave of the future that others find attractive, or at least irresistibleIf Europe is a great power over the next two generations, it will be because of the great power status of fear—because fear of what unstable and inconsistent America, China, India, and perhaps Russia might try to bully it to do if it does not present a united front.The rise and fall of great powers is much more bizarre and contingent and subtle than historians see it in retrospectHexapodia!References:David Abernethy: The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 Peter Falk & al.(1971): Columbo Justin Kaplan: Lincoln Steffens: A Biography Jacob T. Levy: Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar? William Powell, Myrna Loy, W.S. Van Dyke, Hunt Stromberg, & al. (1934): The Thin Man Judith Shklar: The Liberalism of Fear Noah Smith: What Kind of Economy Leads to National Power? C.V. Wedgewood: William the Silent +, of course:Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here: There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.) Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

People tend to think of themselves as largely rational beings on life's important issues and one of these issues is the political. Is there a coherence running throughout the liberal ideology or the socialist ideology or the conservative ideology? Put another way, do all the political beliefs that a leftist tends to hold have a rational coherence that binds them together. Or is it an emotional coherence? I briefly look at late Harvard philosopher Judith Shklar and her work on the single emotional disposition that binds liberal beliefs as an ideology. 

Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS Episode: Shklar on HypocrisyRelease date: 2021-04-20Judith Shklar's Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other authors in this series – including Bentham and Nietzsche – and asks what price we should be willing to pay for putting cruelty first among the vices.Recommended version to buyGoing Deeper:David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy (2008)Katrina Forrester, ‘Hope and Memory in the thought of Judith Shklar', Modern Intellectual History (2011)Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, 'The Theorist of Belonging', Aeon (2020)[Audio]: 'The Moral Philosophy of the Good Place,' Vox See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other authors in this series – including Bentham and Nietzsche – and asks what price we should be willing to pay for putting cruelty first among the vices.Recommended version to buyGoing Deeper:David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy (2008)Katrina Forrester, ‘Hope and Memory in the thought of Judith Shklar’, Modern Intellectual History (2011)Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, 'The Theorist of Belonging', Aeon (2020)[Audio]: 'The Moral Philosophy of the Good Place,' Vox See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.