Abstract
This book is the culmination of a long-term research interest of Andreas Hess (University College Dublin), the life and thought of political theorist Judith Nisse Shklar (1928–1992). The strength of Hess’s account is the seriousness with which he treats the ‘and’ in the phrase ‘life and thought.’ His book highlights the interrelatedness of Shklar’s biographical experiences and her political theorizing. In particular, he emphasizes the sustained relevance of the theme of exile in Shklar’s writings. Hess’s main argument is that the experience of exile, of being an outsider, decisively informed Shklar’s theorizing in content and in style. Exile appears as a theme of virtually all her writings, sometimes hidden, sometimes directly addressed. And regarding the style of theorizing, Hess characterizes Shklar’s position in US academia as ‘optimal marginality,’ a term he borrows from Neil McLaughlin (2001). An individual has optimal marginality when the individual uses her or his position outside both ‘established heterodoxies and . . . sectarian minority positions’ (p. 13) to create unique and innovative works. This is what is meant by the book’s subtitle, Exile from Exile: although forced to leave her birthplace, Shklar did not let the exile be the only factor determining her life. Beyond merely lamenting her fate, she transformed the experience of being a stranger into an intellectual capital that allowed her to approach things on untrodden paths (see also Hess, 2017).
Shklar was born Judith Nisse in Riga to a German-speaking Jewish family (Chapter 1). Her ancestors had accumulated considerable wealth, but much of it was lost in the events around the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although anti-Semitism had already been present in Latvia in the years before Judith’s birth, the hostile situation continuously deteriorated, and with the Nazi seizure of power, the Nisse family began to seek options to leave Riga. They managed to flee to Sweden on false passports. When the Nazi armies began to threaten Northern Europe, they took a chance on leaving for North America by passing through Russia and Japan, a high-risk trip that in the end brought them to the new continent in 1940. They settled down in Montreal, and upon completion of a Protestant school, Judith entered McGill University, where, under the influence of Rousseau scholar Frederick Watkins, she became fascinated with the history of political thought. She also met her later husband Gerald Shklar, a student at McGill’s medical and dentistry school. After they had completed their master’s degrees, the couple were accepted by graduate schools in the Boston area (Judith at Harvard, Gerald at Tufts), where they moved to in 1950.
Probably like all scientific careers, Shklar’s relation with Harvard was not without problems (Chapter 2). Difficulties arose from the culture of male dominance prevalent in universities at that time as well as from more Harvard-specific frictions originating in controversies over the direction of departments or interpersonal problems among the people in charge. Shklar also felt that her biographical experiences implicitly set her at a distance to many of the people she encountered at Harvard. Juggling motherhood (the couple’s first child was born some months after Judith had successfully defended her PhD dissertation in 1955), a new position as an instructor at Harvard, and her intent to turn the dissertation into a book proved challenging. However, Shklar succeeded, and her first book, After Utopia, appeared in 1957 with Princeton University Press.
In its emphasis on the dangers of totalitarianism and ideological narrowness, After Utopia already bore some signs of Shklar’s forced emigration. Yet, Hess proposes, her own experiences with exile were still too recent and close to allow for a more thorough assessment of the role of political theory after (and against) totalitarianism (pp. 57ff.). This happened more profoundly in her second book, Legalism (1964, Harvard University Press). Here, she was concerned with the fine line between morality and law, a manifest problem at the time of the trial against the former SS officer Adolf Eichmann, as evinced in the debates surrounding Hannah Arendt’s reports from the trial, collected in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Yet, as Hess argues, Shklar’s theoretical treatment of the relation between morality and law was ‘more refined and certainly more scholarly’ than Arendt’s (p. 70). However, Shklar’s book received significantly less public attention than the one by the New York-based philosopher, who, one must add, was 20 years Shklar’s senior and had been commissioned by the New York Times to follow the trial (cf. Ashenden and Hess, 2016).
Whereas Chapters 1 and 2 of Hess’s book offer rich biographical details and emphasize the context in which Shklar wrote her first academic texts, Chapters 3 and 4 are more focused on the theoretical content of her writings after 1965. This change in representation style parallels a change in the pace of her life, from the experiences of flight, adolescence, and career insecurity to a settled and stable family life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hess contends: ‘A different form of presentation is needed to do justice to the two different worlds and time periods’ (p. 14). It is clear, though, that the changes in her life did not imply a rupture in Shklar’s theoretical concerns. There is the continuity of the theme of exile, to which we will return later. Moreover, Shklar returned to a writer she had engaged with during her studies at McGill, Jean Jacques Rousseau (Chapter 3). Her book Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory, published in 1969 by Cambridge University Press, was the first in a series of studies of classic European authors. Books on Hegel (Freedom and Independence [1976]) and Montesquieu (Ordinary Vices [1984], Montesquieu [1987]) followed. Shklar’s interest in these studies was to make them fruitful for the current debates, to excavate forgotten ideas, and explore their potential to inform current political theory.
In the late 1980s, Shklar began to address more directly topics in American social and political thought (Chapter 4). Hess suggests that as someone who still felt like an outsider, she had earlier refrained from addressing these topics. She might have felt that her position of optimal marginality would suffer from challenging questions that were at the center of her discipline’s debates. Again, an intellectual confrontation with the writings of Hannah Arendt provided Shklar with a point of entry. Despite her admiration for Arendt, Shklar was unsatisfied with the reductionism and bipolarities of many of the arguments put forth by Arendt and other scholars. Two books document Shklar’s thinking in this period, The Faces of Injustice (1990) and American Citizenship (1991).
It is in these later writings that the theme of exile is most prominent, and Shklar’s position as an exile from exile has its most direct impact on the course of investigation (Chapter 5). In a paper published posthumously, she stresses that although exile had always been a dreadful experience, the contemporary situation is even more challenging, because countries grew more restrictive regarding asylum. People lose their legal status as citizens, and no other country offers them (partial) replacement. Furthermore, there is no potential for the building of a positive collective, either on the part of the refugees or on the part of those observers outraged about the situation: ‘neither can they join a liberating force . . . nor is it possible to identify fully with the many refugees’ (p. 186). Hess continues: ‘Shklar argues that if one conclusion can be drawn from the modern experience it is that cultural and national cohesion remain much overrated ideas, eventually preparing and prolonging the conditions on which old and new injustices thrive. Access to citizenship might not be the solution to all problems but it remains a first important step toward preventing injustice’ (p. 186).
Hess is among the few persons who have worked intensively on Shklar’s papers that are stored in the archives of Harvard University. Due to his expertise in American (and European) social thought, he fabulously succeeds in convincing the reader that Shklar has a lot to offer and that we would be well-advised to reconsider her works more thoroughly (cf. Matthews, 2017). Beyond that, he provides important insights into how the critical experiences that come with being forced into exile can be transformed into a recurrent theme in their intellectual (or, for that matter, artistic) output. The genre denomination Hess uses, ‘intellectual portrait,’ is highly appropriate; a claim that can be justified best by contrasting Hess’s book with what one would expect from an intellectual biography. The task of an intellectual biography is to follow the themes as they emerge in the life of the person under scrutiny. A focus on a single theme, like exile, in the description of a whole intellectual career would certainly bewilder the reader – life, even intellectual life, usually has more variation, and any reduction to one single theme appears artificial. The very genre of the portrait, in contrast, not only implies this artificiality, it uses it as a means of intellectual analysis. The epistemic value of a portrait emerges exactly from this artificial reduction, which allows for seeing great lines in the overly complex heterogeneity called life. In creating a portrait, the author has more freedom to decide about the dimensions, proportions, and indeed the themes he or she wishes to emphasize. Of course, the portraitist must be selective, and the reader must trust the portraitist’s choice of theme, and the intellectual portrait certainly entails a series of risks, among them exaggerating the uniqueness of its model, to uncritically accepting its self-presentation, or working with insinuations that only insiders can decipher. But Hess’s book shows that if well-crafted, this comes with the intellectual reward of a better understanding of the theme and its presence in life, work, and learned discourse.