Judith Shklar

Ordinary Vices

In Kant's view, despotism reduced its subjects to perpetual infancy, and that meant that they could not choose their characters at all. They would remain obedient children—and thoroughly nasty ones at that. Liberal government for bad characters did not promise us that freedom would make us good; it merely argued that it would remove the most horrible obstacles to any ethical undertaking that we might conceivably try. To demand more would not reduce vice. It would only shackle us again, and revive those pious pretenses and pious cruelties which a religious establishment had perfected and which Kant, no less than Montesquieu, regarded as one of the principal sources of public oppression. And although now, as then, every authoritarian critic of liberalism has found it easy to show that the citizens of free states are indeed very corrupt and lack both the classical martial and the Christian virtues, it is utterly impossible to claim that the subjects of more repressive, not to say terroristic and authoritarian, regimes are not worse people and far worse off. For their every impulse is hemmed in by fear, cruelty, and a massive dishonesty, which they share and which also accounts for their deference and governability. The character structure of all those slaves and metics who existed solely in order to make Aristotle's great-souled character possible is also easily imagined, and would not conform to any model of virtue. One would hope that they would all be as sly and conniving as the slaves we meet in Roman comedy, but we can be sure that they were just dull and miserable, for we know a lot about slavery. The admirers of Aristotle who find his noble hero irresistible might well reflect upon the cost to the rest of mankind, not excluding themselves from among those who would have to pay for him. The advantages of Montesquieu's self-assertive vices might correspondingly recommend themselves.

Kant and Montesquieu were, of course, not the only early liberals to think seriously about character. Clearly, Locke was a greater psychologist than either one of them. And, indeed, he gave the matter much thought. His good character is meant to be a good citizen of a liberal society. He is brought up to be neither servile nor domineering, and he is habitually independent, truthful, and polite. We may suppose that he will have the strength to avoid false associations of ideas and to cope with the uneasiness that besets all of us all the time. Liberal government does not, however, exist only for the sake of this paragon. It is there for everyone, because we all can summon up enough rationality to grasp and to act for our rights to life, liberty, and property. It would be a great mistake to think that the author of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding underestimated the vices, but it is also true that the liberalism of rights is different, though entirely compatible with one that puts cruelty first. I shall call the latter the liberalism of fear. It contributed as much to American liberal democracy as did the 'great Mr. Locke,' powerful as his influence was.

Indeed, whenever I talk about putting cruelty first, I am confronted by a rhetorical question and answer: 'Why?' 'Because we have rights.' That is, unhappily, a gross oversimplification, possible only, I suspect, among people who have relatively little experience of protracted and uninterrupted fear. To put cruelty first is not the same thing as just objecting to it intensely. When one puts it first one responds, as Montaigne did, to the acknowledgment that one fears nothing more than fear. The fear of fear does not require any further justification, because it is irreducible. It can be both the beginning and an end of political institutions such as rights. The first right is to be protected against the fear of cruelty. People have rights as a shield against this greatest of public vices. This is the evil, the threat to be avoided at all costs. Justice itself is only a web of legal arrangements required to keep cruelty in check, especially by those who have most of the instruments of intimidation closest at hand. That is why the liberalism of fear concentrates so single-mindedly on limited and predictable government. The prevention of physical excess and arbitrariness is to be achieved by a series of legal and institutional measures designed to supply the restraints that neither reason nor tradition can be expected to provide.

Among these are effective rights. Enforceable rights are the legal powers that individual citizens in a liberal society can bring to bear individually and collectively in order to defend themselves against threats backed by force. This is not the liberalism of natural rights, but it underwrites rights as the politically indispensable dispersion of power, which alone can check the reign of fear and cruelty. Montesquieu thus does not begin with rights, natural or other. He is concerned with imposition of laws that have one primary object: to relieve each one of us of the burden of fear, so that we can feel free because the government does not, indeed cannot, terrorize us.

The liberalism of fear does not suffer from any of the notorious weaknesses of utilitarianism or hedonism. Kant worried quite reasonably that if one puts happiness first, one may well choose a benevolent despotism rather than freedom. Indeed, Montesquieu before him had already tried to show that benevolent despotism was a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, one can imagine only too readily that people might look forward to a state of material comfort without political responsibilities or the conflicts imposed by freedom. They might be, or at least might expect to become, happy under such circumstances. The liberalism of fear can never indulge in such fantasies. It begins with the assumption that the power to govern is the power to inflict fear and cruelty and that no amount of benevolence can ever suffice to protect an unarmed population against them. It therefore institutionalizes suspicion—and only a distrustful population can be relied on to watch out for its rights, to ward off fear, and to be able to make their own projects, whether these be modest or great.

The unique position of cruelty was indeed fully recognized by Montesquieu's and Locke's most distinguished heirs. The Eighth Amendment to the United States Consttution prohibits, among other things, the infliction of 'cruel and unusual punishment.' Since this amendment has after its long dormancy suddenly come alive, its origins may be of special relevance. It is not that American governments have become more brutal—far from it—but that the experiences of this century have made many of us more aware of the cruelties that governments generally are capable of.