Judith N. Shklar

Andreas Hess, The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar: Exile from Exile, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Giunia Gatta, Rethinking Liberalism for the 21st Century: The Skeptical Radicalism of Judith Shklar, London: Routledge, 2018. Jacob T. Levy, "Who's Afraid of Judith Sklar?" Foreign Policy (2018) at https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/whos-afraid-of-judith-shklar-liberalism/.

Several of her essays, including the "classic" "The Liberalism of Fear," have been collected in two posthumous volumes edited by Stanley Hoffmann and published by the University of Chicago Press: Redeeming American Political Thought (1998) and Political Thought and Political Thinkers (1998).

A renowned teacher and advisor, many of Shklar's former students and colleagues contributed to a volume of essays, Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar (University of Chicago Press, 1996), edited by Bernard Yack. Contributors include her celebrated former students Amy Gutmann, Patrick T. Riley, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Bernard Yack, Rogers Smith, Melissa Williams, and Tracy Strong.

In 1985 the Harvard University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa awarded her its teaching prize, calling her "demanding, rewarding, forthright, fair, and reasonable, a model of intellectual and human qualities rarely combined."

Shklar's thought centered on two main ideas: cruelty as the worst evil and the "liberalism of fear." She discusses the first idea in her essay "Putting Cruelty First," published in Daedalus (1982) and in Ordinary Vices (1984). Her second main idea, expounded in her essay "The Liberalism of Fear," is founded on the first idea and focuses on how governments are prone to abuse the "inevitable inequalities in power" that result from political organization.

She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1970 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1990. She served as president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (1982) and then as vice president of the American Political Science Association (1983). While serving as the vice president of the APSA, she was also the visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University (1983–1984). In 1984, she received a MacArthur Fellowship for her work. She served as a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, in 1983 and 1986. Following this, she was the Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford in 1986; Storrs Lecturer, Yale Law School, 1988; Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah, 1989; and Charles Homer Haskins Lecturer of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1989. Also in 1989, she was elected the first female president of the APSA.

Shklar joined the Harvard faculty in 1956, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department in 1971. During her first year in the job, the Department permitted her to stay at home with her first child while writing her first book. When it came time for her tenure decision, the Department dithered, so Shklar proposed a half-time appointment with effective tenure and the title of lecturer, partly because she had three children by then. In 1980, she was appointed as John Cowles Professor of Government. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann once remarked, “she was by far the biggest star of the department.” Hoffmann also called her "the most devastatingly intelligent person I ever knew here."

Judith Shklar was born as Judita Nisse in Riga, Latvia, to Jewish parents. Because of persecution during World War II, her family fled Europe via Japan to the US and finally to Canada in 1941, when she was thirteen. She began her studies at McGill University at the age of 16, receiving bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in 1949 and 1950, respectively. She later recalled that the entrance rules to McGill at the time required 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. She took her PhD degree from Harvard University in 1955. Her mentor was the famous political theorist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who, she later recalled, only ever offered her one compliment: "Well, this isn't the usual thesis, but then I did not expect it to be." Eventually she became his successor.

Judith Nisse Shklar (September 24, 1928 – September 17, 1992) was a philosopher and political theorist who studied the history of political thought, notably that of the Enlightenment period. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1980.