A politics of healing in place of a liberalism of fear

21 Nov, 2023

Judith Shklar famously suggested that liberalism must be modest in its value commitments, because holding utopian ideals is incompatible with making the avoidance of cruelty the highest value. Once we realize the heights of cruelty that can be reached in political life, we must recognize that it is too great a risk to adopt any political value other than avoiding such cruelty.¹ Instead we institute a "liberalism of fear" that is dedicated to the dispersion of power and the preservation of a large, apolitical private sphere.

The view seems to rest on a form of idealism: it takes it that what makes great cruelty politically possible or likely is a political ideology in which some values are held above the avoidance of cruelty. But we could reject this idealism.

One alternative would be psychologism: that great cruelty becomes possible because of the psychic wounds of would-be perpetrators.² On this view, the imperative of avoiding great cruelty would counsel not a liberalism of fear, but instead a politics of psychic healing. We would focus on making people whole so that they would not be inclined to turn their destructive impulses on each other. It's not obvious such a politics is possible or what it looks like, but it seems obvious to me that it is not the same thing as the liberalism of fear. In fact, it might be the sort of thing that Shklar would have criticized as dangerously utopian. But it proceeds from her premise that the greatest task in politics is to prevent the deployment of great cruelties. It differs instead in its theory of change.