Duty, Accountability, and Commitment: On Judith Shklar's "On Political Obligation"
Judith Shklar | On Political Obligation | Yale University Press | March 2019 | 264 Pages
Fires, demonstrations, and violence rage across the nation, sparked by yet another murder of an African American man at the hands of a white police officer. Curfews do little to quell the violence, and police overreaction is rampant. This comes quickly after armed protestors swarm state capitals around the country, demanding the right to risk lives—including the lives of others--in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Conservative commentators and legislators demand that people go back to work despite very clear risks to their health. The ranks of the unemployed grow to almost-unimaginable levels and the death toll from a lethal virus reaches a new milestone weekly. The kindest thing one can say about the American president’s response to all of this is that he is flailing.
America, the Washington Post solemnly declares, is at low ebb.
As all of this swirls around us, it is useful, if not necessary, to think as carefully as we can about the nature of political duty, accountability, and commitment. Fortunately, we have help.
Political theorist Judith Shklar, one of the first women to earn tenure at Harvard, was my senior colleague for eight years. She died tragically at the age of 63 in 1992, leaving behind notes and drafts of scholarly papers that have slowly been edited and released, including a volume that has now been published under the title On Political Obligation (Yale University Press, 2019). It consists of the texts or, in a few cases, outlines for a series of lectures for a class she never was able to teach, and it is a gold mine of wisdom and clarity.
Dita, as she was known, was the most brilliant mind I have ever been privileged to see up close. Born to prosperous Jewish parents in Latvia in 1928, her family was forced to flee the fast-approaching Nazis in the early years of World War II; she knew in her bones that politics was no joke, that lives were at stake, that political ideas and ideologies matter. And none matter more than the concepts she skillfully dissects here. Like Dita herself, the style here is compact and matter of fact; she always had an uncanny ability to say in a sentence or two what other scholars could take reams of paragraphs, if not whole volumes, to say. Like the best work in political theory, the current volume combines rigorous analysis of canonical texts with reflections on more recent issues, and it takes its cues from history, from the ancients to the English Civil War to the United States.
Shklar was perhaps the most consistent liberal among late twentieth century theorists, and she begins here with a basic and often overlooked distinction between liberty and the conditions necessary for its enjoyment. The liberty of liberals, she says simply, “consists in not being interfered with.” Those chafing at COVID19 lockdown rules are correct, she would say, to think their basic freedom is restricted. But she would not stop there; she goes on: “Public health, education, raising the standard of living, security, encouraging the arts and sciences, protecting the environment: all are worthy ends, but they are not liberty, and they limit our freedom.” These worthy political goals “may also make liberty more likely; however, while they can be the conditions of liberty, they are not liberty itself.” Your liberty is useless if you die, she would say to the COVID protestors, and you have no right to endanger others; end of discussion. Here, in a few short sentences, she is settling a debate that has raged for decades among theorists about the nature of liberty and the distinction between negative (the right to be let alone) and positive freedom (the right to become one’s true or higher self).
On the issue of political obligation, her central topic, she starts with the Greeks, and, especially, Socrates and Antigone, and from there ranges from Rousseau to Hegel to Locke to Hume. She distinguishes between disobedience to the law based on conscience and that which is based on a conflict of loyalties. She is surprised, she writes, to discover how rarely conscience appears in political theory as a justification for disobeying the law. The great exception is America, where the conflict over slavery and then over its legacy creates a class of law-breakers from the abolitionists to Reverend King. In chapters with amazing relevance for today, she discusses civil disobedience in depth, and sees it as a peculiarly American phenomenon, where unjust laws can be tested in court.
Shklar claims that genuine civil disobedience “can occur only where the disobedient accept the government that is in place as being on the whole legitimate and just, so it cannot be part of a revolutionary enterprise, violent or not.” Thus the paradigmatic example for Shklar is the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and her analysis leaves us with tantalizing questions about our current moment. Do those protesting police violence and long-accumulating racial inequality accept the basic legitimacy of the American state? Watching the news, one has to wonder. Should they accept its legitimacy? Were she alive today, she would undoubtedly say that protesting the death of African Americans at the hands of out-of-control police officers is fully legitimate and necessary. But she would also ask those going beyond peaceful protest, what is your goal, what point are you making? Is the entire system intolerably unjust, and do you seek to foment a revolutionary moment?
Another key distinction, Shklar says, is between obligation and loyalty; the question of loyalty depends on “the degree of evil in the government.” On the question of loyalty she discusses the Japanese Americans interned during World War II and other cases. Does the violence roiling America’s cities today demonstrate a lack of loyalty over long-accumulating grievances, or something else? Does that lack of loyalty justify a lack of obedience? Again, fair questions, that clear thinking about concepts, about history, helps us answer.
In discussing various historical cases, Shklar writes that “we find over and over again that once a person becomes involved in or decides to rebel against an established regime, that person may find that he or she is carried along by events in a world that has lost its contours and predictability.” Where the current moment may carry us no one can say with any certainty, but we are clearly in a moment of great peril, where questions of obligation are paramount, and clear thinking is necessary.