The Jewish scholar Judith Shklar argued that liberalism—the belief that individual liberty and equality are inherent goods—could protect citizens from the state’s overreach. But she also understood that liberalism itself could be dangerous. Blake Smith revisits her work in Tablet:

To be alive is to be afraid,’ Judith Shklar declared in her 1989 essay, ‘The Liberalism of Fear.’ Since her death in 1992, it has become a key text in contemporary political theory, and its author the subject of a growing field of Shklar Studies. Shklar is best known as a defender of the American political tradition against radicalisms of the right and left, and ‘Liberalism of Fear’ provides a compelling justification for our system of limited and democratic government as the best means of protecting us from ‘physical cruelty’ perpetrated by agents of the state. But cruelty is far more complicated than it might appear. Those who fight to eliminate the obvious cruelty of brutality and violence can be no less cruel in their own subtle and sinister ways.

“In her brilliant book Ordinary Vices, published five years before ‘Liberalism of Fear,’ Shklar argued that we need to be afraid not only of physical cruelty committed by officials and police, but of the ‘moral cruelty’ committed by those who claim to hate oppression. Drawing on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche—whom she considered one of the most dangerous enemies of liberal democracy—Shklar warned that liberalism can degenerate into a cult of victimhood that permits our sadistic desires to be passed off as unimpeachable virtue. As the United States is confronted with (often violent) protests against police violence and an increasingly strident and intolerant political culture of racial ‘wokeness,’ Shklar’s argument that liberalism is endangered by both physical and moral cruelty is of urgent relevance. We have much to fear.

In other news: What’s going on at the National Book Critics Circle? “The turmoil that roiled the National Book Critics Circle, one of publishing’s pre-eminent awards bodies and institutions, last week continued throughout the weekend and into Monday morning as concerns over matters of race and privacy continue to split the organization’s board of directors. As of Monday morning, at least 13 members have resigned from the typically 24-member board.”

Speaking of publishing, Anthony Grafton writes about the “lectors” and “correctors,” as they were called, of the early modern book trade: “What, then, did correctors and readers do? The account books of some of the great firms survive, and they provide firsthand evidence. The surviving ledger of the Froben and Episcopius firms, for example, records the wages paid to employees from 1557 to 1564. Each list of employees begins with a corrector or castigator: clear evidence that these learned employees, whose names appeared before those of the compositors and pressmen, enjoyed a certain status, which was higher than that of those who worked with their hands. Each list also includes a lector, whose pay is usually half that of the corrector or less. Sometimes the document states that a given corrector or reader received payment for other activities as well. In March 1560, for example, the lector Leodegarius Grymaldus received payment both for reading and for two other named tasks: making an index and correcting a French translation of Agricola’s work on metals. In March 1563 Bartholomaeus Varolle was paid for correcting but also for preparing the exemplar, or copy, of a thirteenth-century legal text, Guillaume Durand’s Speculum iuris, and for drawing up an index for the work. Correctors did many other things as well. They corrected authors’ copy as well as proofs. They identified and mended typographical and other errors, to the best of their ability. They divided texts into sections and drew up aids to readers: title pages, tables of contents, chapter headings, and indexes. Some correctors composed texts as well as paratexts, serving as what might now be called content providers.”

Lincoln Allison remembers the magazine New Society: “Friday 5 October 1962 was my sixteenth birthday, but is better known for the coincidence that the first James Bond film, Dr No, was released that day and so was the first Beatles single. Some people have portrayed it as the day that the Sixties really kicked off, but I was unimpressed. I thought that The Beatles was pathetically corny as the name of a group and that Love Me Do was just a stereotypical pop song. Having read the Ian Fleming novel, I didn’t like the casting of a balding Scotsman with a speech impediment as James Bond (couldn’t they have waited?). But something else happened that did have a much greater impact on my life: the first issue of a magazine called New Society was published.”

Parul Sehgal reviews a new translation of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: “Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881?”

Brian Allen surveys Goya’s drawings: “Goya is a pivot between an old world of absolutism, whether of kings or church, and a free-for-all, modern world.”

A history of Britain’s common seamen: “Early in the 19th century, there were some 260,000 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are mostly nameless – or nameless to history. Even on surviving muster lists, seamen’s identities can be hidden behind pseudonyms. Some of these – George Million or Jacob Blackbeard, say – express a degree of wish fulfilment. Others are more whimsical: a Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar could be found on board the Calcutta-bound Tyger in 1757. To join them was to enter another world, with its own laws (the thirty-six Articles of War, read to them every Sunday, besides whatever strictures a captain thought fit to apply), its own rituals and its own argot. ‘All seemed strange,’ one former ship’s boy recalled of his first days on board, ‘different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep, and never properly awake.’”

Photo: Pérouges

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