“As Different as Two Liberals Can Be”? Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar

• In Event: In Search of Judith Shklar’s Liberalism

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify the affinities and differences between these two postwar liberal theorists, and to work out how the liberalisms–and intellectual style, sensibility, and practice–of each are related, and might be brought into mutually illuminating (and, perhaps, corrective) conversation. I compare them in light of the following themes: their political positions and putative identification with “Cold War liberalism”; their use, and views, of the history of ideas, especially the Enlightenment and Romanticism; their orientation to and views on moral psychology and political ethics; the role in their thinking about liberalism of ethical pluralism; and their accounts of liberty, and the bearing of these accounts on their understanding of the type of politics and/or citizenship involved in liberalism.

Author

• Joshua L. Cherniss, Georgetown University