Judith N. Shklar

A political philosophy classic from one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century, After Utopia was Judith Shklar's first book, a harbinger of her renowned career in political philosophy. Throughout the many changes in political thought during the last half century, this important work has withstood the test of time. In After Utopia, Shklar explores the decline of...

How can we distinguish between injustice and misfortune? What can we learn from the victims of calamity about the sense of injustice they harbour? In this book, a distinguished political theorist ponders these and other questions and formulates a new political and moral theory of injustice that encompasses not only deliberate acts of cruelty or unfairness but also indifference to...

The seven deadly sins of Christianity represent the abysses of character, whereas Judith Shklar's ordinary vices—cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy—are merely treacherous shoals, flawing our characters with mean-spiritedness and inhumanity. Shklar draws from a brilliant array of writers—Molière and Dickens on hypocrisy, Jane Austen on snobbery, Shakespeare and Montesquieu on misanthropy, Hawthorne and Nietzsche on cruelty, Conrad and Faulkner...