Despite favorable – even fawning – propaganda in Western media, the U.S./E.U.-backed regime in Ukraine tramples on traditional liberal values of tolerance and pluralism, notes James W Carden.
By James W Carden
The overnight train from Kiev to Slavyansk gives a passenger, if nothing else, ample time to read and think. On a return trip to war-torn eastern Ukraine in March, I took the opportunity the 13-hour journey afforded to re-read Judith Shklar’s seminal essay, The Liberalism of Fear.
Written in 1989, at the time of what in retrospect looks like an era of unhinged, to say nothing of embarrassing, American triumphalism, Shklar, unlike many of her contemporaries in the academy (particularly Francis Fukuyama who published The End of History? in the National Interest that year), took a sober accounting of her time. Shklar warned, quite presciently, as it turns out, that “anyone who thinks that fascism in one guise or another is dead and gone ought to think again.”
The neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol on a banner in Ukraine.
The Liberalism of Fear essentially seeks to answer the question: What is the baseline requirement for a good society? What is the absolute precursor it must achieve without which it would be impossible to achieve democratic norms, pluralism, cultural freedom, and a market economy (be it democratic-capitalist or democratic-socialist) to develop?
In a biographical essay on Shklar, written after her untimely death in 1992, the philosopher Seyla Benhabib wrote that for Shklar, cruelty “was the chief vice, the summum malum, that liberalism must avoid.” In singling out the corrosive effect cruelty has on society Shklar was, according to Benhabib, “calling attention to the accompanying sentiments of fear, degradation, and humiliation that would ultimately make a liberal polity impossible.”
Shklar’s liberalism of fear has no positive program, it is essentially negative; as she herself notes, her liberalism resembles “Isiah Berlin’s ‘negative liberty’” though “it is not exactly the same.” What the liberalism of fear is also not, as she makes clear, is utopian. Then what is it?
According to Shklar, the liberalism of…