After Utopia: The Decline of Politcal Faith

by Judith N. Shklar

A critical and creative analysis of the decline of political philosophy in an attempt to understand the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical and political thinking.

Originally published in 1957.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Political Science, Book Club

309 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1970

About the author

Judith Shklar was born as Judita Nisse in Riga, Latvia to Jewish parents. Because of persecution during World War II, her family fled Europe over Japan to the US and finally to Canada in 1941, when she was thirteen. She began her studies at McGill University at the age of 16, receiving bachelor of art and master of art degrees in 1949 and 1950, respectively. She later recalled that the entrance rules to McGill at the time required 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. She received her PhD degree from Harvard University in 1955. Her mentor was the famous political theorist Carl Joachim Friedrich, who, she later recalled, only ever offered her one compliment: "Well, this isn't the usual thesis, but then I did not expect it to be." Eventually she became his successor.

Shklar joined the Harvard faculty in 1956, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard's Government Department in 1971. During her first year in the job, the Department permitted her to stay at home with her first child while writing her first book. When it came time for her tenure decision, the Department dithered, so Shklar proposed a half-time appointment with effective tenure and the title of lecturer, partly because she had three children by then. In 1980, she was appointed to be the John Cowles Professor of Government. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann once remarked, “she was by far the biggest star of the department.” Hoffmann also called her "the most devastatingly intelligent person I ever knew here."

During her career, Shklar served in various academic and professional capacities. For example, she was active in the committee that integrated the American Repertory Theater into the Harvard community.

Throughout her life, Judith Shklar was known as "Dita." She and her husband, Gerald Shklar, had three children, David, Michael, and Ruth

Reviews

[Frederick Frankel · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been many years since I read this book, but I still remember the wide vistas this tour of modern intellectual history opened up to me. Basically, it provides an overview of some of the most important writers who grappled with the failures of the European Enlightenment. They are mostly either exponents of some form of Romanticism, or what she calls Christian Fatalists. Why did this book have such a fascination for me? I think it is that, as the product of a standard American education, I had no idea that ideas such as these even existed.

Included are discussions of Wordsworth, Heine, Goethe, Heidegger, T.S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, and Christopher Dawson.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this book is a bit of a Rorschach test. I read it after reading Sam Moyn's new book on Cold War liberalism. I was pretty critical of that book, but it made me want to read Shklar (I also found her famous liberalism of fear essay compelling). Shklar's argument is that the Western world has reached an exhaustion and fatalism in political ideas because it has abandoned Enlightenment radicalism, the core of which she defines as “the idea that man can do with himself and with his society whatever he wishes.”

This is largely a response to the collision with totalitarianism in the mid-20th century and the massive disillusionment this caused with ambitious or utopian political theory. She traces the history of Enlightenment radicalism and its critics, including the Romantic and the CHristian fatalists. All of these groups, as well as events like world war and genocide, chipped away at the idea that human beings can use reason to create a perfect world.

She seems uneasy at this, as do thinkers like Sam Moyn, but to me this kind of intellectual chastening is a good thing, a form of hard-earned wisdom. Even very smart people of the left cannot know the direction or laws of history (if they exist at all), and the idea that you do know these things can and has been a source of tyranny and great violence. I kept reading a long and saying "and why is this a bad thing?" to many of her points about the decline of utopian radicalism. But SHklar is too sophisticated a thinker to portray these changes as all good or all bad. She obviously feels similarly chastened by the experience of totalitarianism, which was personal for her as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. But she also feels that a sense of possibility and optimism for creating a better world are slipping away with this tide. She has a great profile of neo-liberal thinkers like Hayek (whom she calls the "conservative liberals") who totally gave up on the idea of the state or collective as an engine of public good, turning instead to the market as a new god. In this sense, as Moyn argues, Shklar anticipated the rise of the neoliberal era, and the intellectual wandering of much of modern liberalism, in the disenchantment of the postwar era and the abandonment of the Enlightenment.

My first critique, though, is: which Enlightenment? Shklar seems to treat the essence of the Enl. as the French Revolution and radical French thinkers like Condorcet and Rousseau. But the historical Enl. was a multi-faceted, dynamic, and even contradictory movement of thinkers trying to reform or revolutionize societies in more humane and rational directions. The Scottish and American Enl., I would argue, combined a healthy skepticism of human nature and the limits of collective action with a belief that society could be improved, both morally and economically. So my first impression of this book as a historian is that it's odd to say that modern liberals abandoned the Enl.; rather, I think they moved toward healthier and more realistic facets of the Enl after seeing the consequences of some of its more radical lineagues.

My second critique, is that the book is oddly divorced from the politics of the era (this is a problem with Moyn's book as well). Ok, so many liberals were turning from radical Enlightenment principles at the level of thought. But what were they doing at the political level? This was, after all, the era of the New Deal, post WWII welfare states in Europe, liberal internationalism, the breakdown of imperialism, and eventually the Great Society. Liberal politicians and activists in this era were hardly utopian, but they sure weren't full-on pessimists, and they passed reforms and new programs that drastically changed how Western societies worked. Anyways, this book kind of floats at the level of ideas without connecting to the politics of the era.

These critiques aside, this book has a lot of wisdom and insight, as well as brilliant dissections of Romanticism, Christian fatalism, neoliberalism, and socialism in this era. I will certainly revisit it, as I think it's one of the better (and more concise) works of 20th century political thought I've encountered.

[barb howe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me tell you why this book might resonate with you now more than it ever did before. Shklar wrote this in the 1950s. The world had just gone through not one but two unprecedented world wars plus we had the Holocaust and invented the atom bomb. It was a little hard for people to still believe in one of the basic tenants of liberalism: that Enlightenment era idea that human history gets progressively better. The 1950s were a prosperous time in the US and lots of regular people were happy but those who study political philosophy were full of despair for that reason. Had humanity made so much progress only to die in a gas chamber or the trenches? How could we reconcile that horrible lived reality with our Enlightenment era theories of liberalism? That’s the question Shklar is trying to answer in this book.

The Romantics are those people who rebelled against the Enlightenment with all its emphasis on reason and rationality. They despised utilitarianism and thought humanity had lost its aesthetic sense. More poetry and passion, less science and reason, they said. Ultimately romanticism evolves into fatalism. Humans are just animals, living like animals, controlled by our animal instincts. Romantics think the idea that humans can build better, more peaceful and civilized societies is hogwash. We can’t change our nature. (For the Christian version the argument adds on that because of original sin, we cannot improve ourselves. This is the way God made us. There’s nothing we humans can do about it.). It’s the opposite of the Enlightenment idea that we can improve ourselves and build a better human society through science and reason.

Shklar says we’re entering a new era of romantic fatalism. We’ve thrown up our hands in despair. We no longer even try to do political theory (that part of political science that imagines human ideals).

Not much has changed in this respect since Shklar wrote these words. Most of us don’t try to imagine better worlds; we’re just trying to survive in this one. We choose our politicians based on who looks better on the screen, who best appeals to our gut instinct, not our sense of reason and rationality. That’s politics in the 21st century. It’s all about political rhetoric (propaganda), pomp and circumstance. There’s little substantive debate about which ideas are actually the best policies; we just go with what *feels* right, facts be damned.

If you’re wondering why this is the state of politics in the 21st century I recommend checking out this book written 75 years ago. Not much has changed.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't stop babbling about it.

[Steve Greenleaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judith Shklar:

"The state of the world today encourages the growth of unhappy consciousness. It is now the most prevalent of all intellectual conditions, and the one to which the most imaginative and subtle spirits are drawn. And who is to say that they are "wrong"? To be sure, they can offer no coherent account of nature, man, history, or society. They do not even try, for the defeat of the spirit lies in just this: that everything has become incomprehensible. But, then, the strange as this of “the world" is constantly pressed upon us. The romanticism of defeat is the simple submission to the "otherness" of nature and society. All that the unhappy consciousness can do now is preserve its own integrity against the encroachments of a hostile world. Its shortcomings, both practical and intellectual, are obvious enough, but one question remains. Is anything else possible?" 163

One of the fun things about having a lot of books (and I do) is that you are subject to a degree of serendipity when you choose one, having so many that I’ve not yet read. Also, many of my books are packed in a hot, dark, crowded storage unit which I can now access at best once a year, and even then with a limited amount of time to ponder selections of what to pack to take to our next venue. So when I unpacked here in Bucharest, many of the selections came as a bit of a surprise. My goal was to grab a lot of my books on 20th-century European history (we had moved to Europe). I guess that it was with this in mind that I tossed in Judith Shklar’s After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957). I recalled the book because I read it before, in the fall of 1975. John Nelson assigned it for his class on “Contemporary Political Theory.” I’m not sure what I thought of it then, and enough time had passed that loved it or hated it, I would be like a new book to me. (I read a whole lot that semester, which is another story for another time.) Whatever I thought of it then, I can say now that I quite admire it.

Shklar’s aim is to explore the decline in political faith after the Enlightenment, which, roughly speaking, was right after the turn of the French Revolution into a blood bath that eventually brought Europe the figure of Napoleon. Of course, the Enlightenment had critiques before then, such as Rousseau, but the reaction to it reached full bloom after Rousseau and Napolean--each in his own way--critiqued it. So while the Enlightenment had great faith in the power of human reason, after the revolt against the Enlightenment, many elites began to doubt the ability of reason to construct a political system that capable of achieving its ends. While the Enlightenment movement was marked by optimism, intellectualism, and anarchism—in short, Reason—its heyday didn’t last long. Romanticism developed as a counter to Enlightenment, with individuality as its highest aim. But the movement was also marked by a sense of despair at the course of human events. Hegel dubbed this the “unhappy consciousness,” and he also provided us with the idea of the “alienated soul.” This trend continued throughout much of the 19th and into the 20th-century, with attitudes of pessimism and despair marking the work of many artists and thinkers. Some tried to buck the trend, but the list of prominent thinkers and artists who fit into these categories is a who’s who of leaders in thought and the arts. Of course, some tried to defy the trend, and as Shklar notes, because of these efforts, “today we have excessively intellectual poetry and philosophy that calls for more life.” (On the poetry end, try some Jorrie Graham is you don’t believe her.) Terms like “pessimism” and “fatalism,” “mass” and “crowd” come to the forefront of discourse.


Romanticism cultivates an anti-politics that seeks to defy any social controls. Shklar argues that this morphs into the existentialism of Sartre and others like him: philosophical self-transcendence, historical despair, and aesthetic anarchism are existentialism’s inheritance from the “Romanticism of defeat.” Of course, in the political realm, nothing could prove less promising. As Shklar observes, “at first sight, nothing could seem less promising than an attempt to devise an ethic of isolated individuals.” She goes on: “[E]xistentialism has in its preoccupation with victimhood come to deny the reality of all those human relationships upon which systems of morality is explicitly or implicitly based.” (134) Although to be fair, this is much more true of Sartre than of Heidegger and some others associated with existentialism. (This shortcoming applies as well, I think, to a sympathetic critic and proponent of a more upbeat existentialism like Colin Wilson, who, so far as I can tell, seems to have largely ignored the social and political implications of our existential situation.)

Shklar also explores what she terms “Christian fatalism,” and those who developed “Christian social theory,” which, in short, holds that society and polity are failing because religion (specifically Christianity) has fallen out of favor in Europe (virtually all of the thinkers that she considers are European). But these thinkers provide thin fare, lacking any real explanatory power to back up their contentions. In the face of fascism and totalitarianism, merely alleging a decline of religious faith and practice doesn’t provide a satisfactory account. (She mentions Reinhold Niehbur briefly in a footnote, and I would have liked to have learned more about her perception of this work, which seems to me to go beyond that of the “Christian social theorists.”)

In all of this, even liberalism and socialism lose much of their drive. Shklar briefly discusses Tocqueville, Mill, and Acton, but on the whole, she doesn’t find much optimism in the liberal project, or the socialist alternative, either. (She is perceptive, however, in identifying the Mount Pelerin Society of Hayek, Friedman (Milton), et. al as a platform for promoting a traditional liberal politics and capitalism.) Her treatment of “conservative” liberalism is dated; when she writes this, Bill Buckley is just launching National Review, and of course, things have spun from that starting point in startling ways.

Shklar provides a description of liberalism that is worth pondering:

"Liberalism is a political philosophy, romanticism is a Weltansuang, a state of mind which can adapt itself to the most divergent types of political thought. The basic problem of liberalism is the creation of an enlightened public opinion to secure civil rights of individuals and to encourage the spontaneous forces of order in society itself. It has nothing to say about defying convention, except to extend legal protection. The liberal sees the rights of individuals is based on justice or utility. The romantic makes a virtue of self-expression as an end in itself, and sees individuality as necessarily involving an opposition to prevailing social standards. The liberal fears majorities, because they may be too powerful to be just, and too ignorant to be wise. The romantic is revolted by their docility, their indifference to genius, there are undistinguished emotional life. The liberal sees only the dangers of power abused. That the state may not interfere with society is a concept of an entirely different order than the idea of a man's first duty is to develop an original personality. Majority rule and minority rights are two central themes of political thought; the unique individual and his enemies, the masses, never enter its considerations. The romantic does not offer society anything but his defiance. Liberalism, on the other hand, attempts to regulate the relations of the individual to society and the state, and of these two to each other, by law." 231-232.

In the end, Shklar seems a bit despairing, but her concluding words betray a sense of what thinking and acting politically should entail. (N.B. She published this work before her fellow Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt, published her groundbreaking re-thinking of the possibilities of political life, The Human Condition (1958), which takes a positive view of politics.) Shklar writes:

"The fact is that a curious situation exists in which everyone talks about or around politics, but no one really cares – at least, no one is sufficiently concerned philosophically to be capable of renewing the traditional political theory. Yet everyone is perfectly aware that it is in the realm of political life that our present condition and future life are largely determined. Politics impinge upon every moment of our existence, and yet we are incapable of synthesizing our experience into a theoretical picture. It is not only the civic consciousness of the Enlightenment but the entire tradition of political theory that is it at a standstill. 269.… The fact is that intellectually there is no escaping politics. Romanticism is surely not political in its initial inspiration, yet ultimately it too is forced to concern itself with questions of politics, even if only to exploit or to bewail. Indeed, the disgust with omnipresent political activity is the greatest incentive to romanticism."


Yet, despite her bleak assessment, it seems to me that she closes on a faint note of optimism, or perhaps it’s just determination, a sense that we can find our way out of this predicament, which, although written 60 years ago, rings all too familiar:

"The answer to the quasi-politics of despair would be a new justification of some form of politics as culturally valuable and intellectually necessary. Yet such a thing is beyond us, even after all the countless failings of Christian fatalism and romantic despair--the two most extreme expressions of much general opinion--have been demonstrated. . . . Paradoxically the fact remains that many people could never be satisfied by despair or by gloomy contemplation of the apocalypse. To a great extent the success of these attitudes is due to the absence of a satisfactory secular social philosophy. 270-271.
. . . .
The grand tradition of political theory the began with Plato is, then, in abeyance. A reason skepticism is consequently the sanest attitude for the present. Even skepticism is politically sounder and empirically more justifiable than cultural despair and fatalism. For neither logic nor history is in accord with these, and this even when no happier philosophies flourish." 271-272.

Shklar's work is, of course, a history and appraisal of the works of high art and intellect within a mostly European tradition. Against this trend, many others were moved with an optimism fueled by amazing technological changes and increasing wealth. And while some despised politics, others jumped head-long into the fray. Some came away jaded or disillusioned, but others, liberals, Marxists, and all manner of different philosophies and outlooks, did not sit on the sidelines and despair. Of course, some of those who were active became authoritarians, fascists, Leninists and Stalinists, and Nazis. And the "masses"? They went about their lives in the midst of all of this economic, technological, social, and political change, wondering how it worked, but primarily concerned with the immediate circumstances of their own well-being and that of their families. Thus, Shklar's story is only a part of the whole, but it's nonetheless important and well-told, and one that still resonates with the world around us today.

[Pablo]

Qué interesante tratamiento del existencialismo como romanticismo tras la conciencia malograda. Lec. ob. filosofía. Shklar es una de las pensadoras más relevantes a leer / releer.