n>“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. Read Full Article »