On Political Obligation 9780300245417

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o n p o l i t i c a l o b l i g at i o n

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judith n. shklar edited and with an introduction by samantha ashenden and andreas hess

On Political Obligation

new haven & london

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Copyright © 2019 by the Estate of Judith N. Shklar. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948869 ISBN 978-0-300-21499-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Judith N. Shklar’s Lectures on Political Obligation, by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess  ix b erkeley lecture Conscience and Liberty  1

lecture 1 Weizsäcker and Bonhoeffer  15



lecture 2 Antigone 25



lecture 3 Crito 38



lecture 4 Friendship 50



lecture 5 The New Testament and Martin Luther  60



lecture 6 Divided Loyalties  70



lecture 7 Honor and Richard II 82



lecture 8 Tyranny 94



lectures 9–13 Hobbes and Modern Contract Theory  105 Lecture 9  Thomas Hobbes  105 Lecture 10  John Locke  108

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Lecture 11  David Hume  111 Lecture 12  Jean-Jacques Rousseau  116 Lecture 13  Kant and Regicide  119



lecture 14 Hegel and Ideology  121



lecture 15 The Positive State  129



lecture 16 Obedience 138



lecture 17 Military Obedience  145



lecture 18 Loyalty and Betrayal  154



lecture 19 Civil Disobedience in the Nineteenth Century  166



lecture 20 Civil Disobedience in the Twentieth Century  176



lecture 21 Conscientious Objection  191



lecture 22 Consent and Obligation  202



lecture 23 The Bonds of Exile  204



Appendix I: Why Teach Political Theory?  213



Appendix II: A Note on Sources  220



Index  224

acknowledgments

the editors would like to thank the Pursey Library staff at the Harvard Archives for their careful assistance, and the estate of Judith Shklar for permission to publish this work. We would like to thank Birkbeck College (S. Ashenden) and University College Dublin (A. Hess) for making available funds for travel and research. We also thank Joseph Reisert and Richard Katskee, two of Shklar’s former teaching fellows, for supplying us with additional lecture and course material. Two anonymous reviewers read our proposal at the outset and provided us with encouragement and insightful suggestions. We were helped in our efforts by the editorial staff of Yale University Press, and in particular by Jaya Aninda Chatterjee and Susan Laity. We thank Susan Laity especially for her meticulous editing. For secretarial and technical support we are indebted to Jennifer Sullivan (University College Dublin), Simon Abbott, and Imran Islam (Birkbeck College).

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introduction:

judith n. shklar’s lectures on p o l i t i c a l o b l i g at i o n

Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess

Why should we obey or disobey the government? Most people ask these questions when they are faced with incompatible loyalties, but some raise them when law and private conscience are in conflict. Can individual liberty ever be consistent with political obligation? —Judith N. Shklar, “Political Obligation”

The Lectures and Their Context Questions of political obligation are at the heart of political theory. They deal with power, authority, right, collective decisions, rule over oneself and others. When is one bound by collective decisions? On what basis rests this obligation? What are its limits? Looking at the grounds given for political obligation by any political theorist provides a key to the core of his or her argument. This is perhaps one of the main reasons why Judith Shklar chose to frame her course on moral reasoning chiefly as a course on political obligation. It offered a prospect from which to look at the kernel of some of the most significant and enduring problems of politics, and it provided the opportunity to investigate these problems in an open-textured and comparative manner. This book contains Judith Shklar’s Harvard lectures on political obligation, delivered in the spring of 1992, just before her untimely death in September of that year. In the university’s 1991–1992 Courses of Instruction, “Political Obligation” was listed as a core course within a broader Moral

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Reasoning program, aimed mainly at undergraduate humanities and social science students. Apart from their Socratic teaching style, which shows a gifted teacher thinking on her feet, what is so remarkable about these lectures and what distinguishes them from Shklar’s previous courses is the insight they provide into her own mature intellectual endeavor. However, in order fully to appreciate this late turn and how the lectures on political obligation fit into it, we have to understand how Shklar saw her own role as a teacher and what she had to say about the relationship of teaching to research and writing. Such an understanding necessarily reveals also some of Shklar’s reservations regarding the publication of lectures. For Shklar, political theory was “the elucidation of common experience” (Legalism, 28). Teaching political theory involved a number of requirements, one of which was to show love and passion for the subject; another was to aim not to bore students with classic texts but use those texts to help students discover the intellectual surplus that can be gained from studying them: “For the teacher there has to be an enduring intellectual incentive, for the student, something more genuine than mild entertainment. To teach this literature as if it were a precious gift that one gives to every new generation of students, one must really want to read it over and over oneself, because each reading reveals new possibilities, new perceptions, and new ideas” (“Why Teach Political Theory?” Quotations from Shklar’s lectures are taken from the texts in this volume). Against turning the classics into a repetitive exercise and therefore into a banality, Shklar stressed that it was crucial “to encounter, in an intense way, the intellectually wholly other, and to discover how superior to the present and the familiar the utterly remote can be.” To that end it was important to convey to students “the conviction that a complete person must be able to think intelligently about government, and that the only way to rise above banality is to learn to think one’s way through the works of the great writers on the subject and to learn to argue with them. To see how political ideas fit into the republic of letters generally, into the political systems within which they took place, and finally to see what is dead and alive within this accumulated wealth of psychological and social speculation is to be intellectually transformed, and to have something completely and immediately relevant to think about at any time of the day.”



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As to prioritizing so-called research and one’s own work over teaching, Shklar maintained that such a distinction was anomalous: “Teaching students is as much one’s own work as anything can be, and research is something that natural scientists do. Very little if anything that a political theorist does can be described as an addition to factual knowledge about the world, as experimentation or as discovery. It is therefore pretentious and silly for us to talk about a conflict between the demands of research and teaching” (ibid.). Shklar finds it rather more helpful to distinguish between two types of teaching, that which is directed face to face, and that pursued indirectly through writing. She comments that “both are psychologically necessary for a full scholarly life because they make different demands upon the teacher. To address an indeterminate and anonymous audience of readers is very different from talking to visible students. . . . Still one is teaching political theory, because in one way or another, one writes to instruct one’s readers. The greatest difference in writing rather than talking is that one can concentrate entirely on getting it right.” Writing becomes then in the end an act “of self-clarification and self-education,” independent of whether it be a matter of “placing texts in historical context, a conceptual analysis, an explication of a text, or an argument about a set of ancient issues in the light of current experience.” Shklar concludes: “The issue thus cannot be whether to teach or to write, but how to engage in two ways of teaching simultaneously or alternatively.” The lectures published here are practical demonstrations of Shklar’s teaching philosophy and provide a rare insight into her own workshop, particularly her intense and meticulous teaching preparation. Nevertheless we have to stress an important caveat here: Shklar herself had voiced reservations about publishing lectures or presenting lectures in publishable form. Observing the practice of some of her colleagues who managed to turn their lectures almost instantly into readable prose, Shklar was reluctant to follow suit. She thought that presenting lectures in such a manner had the potential to erase the distinction between direct and indirect teaching. She feared that the public presentation in speech and print would come to dominate teaching and the effect on the learning process would be to close students’ minds instead of opening them. In the worst case, the teacher might turn into a kind of guru or intellectual pop star, admired by his or

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her uncritical disciples. To avoid such risks Shklar preferred to think of the direct and indirect forms—teaching and writing—as two related, yet different kinds of operation. As to her own practice she observed: “I . . . like many other scholars, must keep the two kinds of teaching completely apart. If I do not, my lectures become well-turned little essays and are hard to follow. Moreover, my better lectures, which do serve the needs of undergraduates, no longer seem to me fit for publication after I have given them.” Similar concerns could certainly be raised in relation to the lectures pres­ented here. But against such objections we maintain that to regard the Political Obligation lectures solely as fascinating teaching material, which they certainly are (more about this in a moment), would be to under­ appreciate what we have before us. As indicated above, the lectures not only present Shklar in action, they also represent an important phase in her thinking about how obligation and loyalty are conjoined and where their limits lie. In other words, the Political Obligation lectures show that her love for teaching political theory had indeed enabled her to develop a distinct perspective—so much so that some of the material gathered for teaching purposes turned out to be a potential source for essays, as her later drafts on obligation, loyalty, and exile show. The Political Obligation material held in the Harvard Archives differs from all the other teaching material in the Shklar Papers. Her early course on legal theory, for example, was important for her book Legalism, yet there is hardly any resemblance between the Legal Theory syllabus, her various lecture notes, and the finished book. Similarly, the course material and notes linked to the course she co-taught with Stanley Hoffmann, Political Ideologies, hardly reaches the intensity and richness of the Political Obligation lectures and notes. Seen retro­ spectively, the reasons for this seem obvious: Shklar was on to something new, and her thinking had matured. Even before The Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship were published (in 1990 and in 1991, respectively) Judith Shklar had started thinking about her next project, which would address some of the issues she had only touched upon in passing in these two books. Rejecting notions of American exceptionalism, The Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship had been, together with other essays related to American intellectual history, attempts to understand and explain some of the peculiarities of how



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American democracy was conceived. American democracy developed, she maintained, in contrast to European liberal democratic models based on what Isaiah Berlin termed “negative liberty.” Shklar insisted that democracy in America was based neither on an imaginary struggle for recognition between master and slave, as Hegel had suggested, nor on throwing off a preexisting sedimented authority, but rather on a real struggle for positive liberty and rights, as the battle for emancipation from slavery clearly demonstrated. She insisted that the fight for a meaningful American democracy did not in the least resemble those conceptualizations that Berlin had denounced as being totalitarian in aspiration, if not in existing Communist practice. Shklar criticized Berlin for dismissing all notions of positive liberty because of actually existing socialism and its overdrawn positive claims (reprinted in the posthumous Redeeming American Political Thought). To be sure, Shklar’s own liberalism of fear, as outlined in the essay of the same title (collected in Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers), had never been based on entirely negative conceptualization and argument. Yes, cruelty and the fear of it needed to be avoided at all costs. That had led her to ranking other vices as being of secondary importance. However, such ordering just stated the obvious—namely, that vices such as hypocrisy, betrayal, misanthropy, and so on were multifaceted and not on a par with cruelty and fear. Shklar’s argumentation in The Faces of Injustice followed a similar line of reasoning. While she appeared to be reluctant to adopt any systematic grand theory of justice, such as the one suggested by her friend and close colleague John Rawls, or to promote a way forward based on rights and legal proceedings, as pursued, for example, by Ronald Dworkin, she argued that the question of what could realistically be demanded from citizens in a democracy could still be answered by relying on positive notions of liberty and rights, yet without pursuing a systematic and all-­encompassing approach or anything resembling a grand theory or design. American Citizenship resumed where The Faces of Injustice had ended. As Shklar argued in her chapter “Voting,” belonging to a political community (as expressed in the right to take part in elections and be able to vote), the right to have an independent income (to provide for oneself and one’s dependents), and having some social standing (as explained in the second chapter, “Earning”) were essential to a functioning modern democ-

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racy. What was still missing, though, and what was neither explained nor discussed in either The Faces of Injustice or American Citizenship, was the question of what could be realistically expected from citizens in liberal democracies in terms of obligation and loyalty. Trying to answer these questions Shklar became increasingly interested in the theme of exile, mainly because the exile’s precarious position helped throw into relief some of the core problems of political obligation: When exactly is the point reached that forces somebody into exile, and can the point of “exit” be clearly demarcated or spelled out? In terms of obligation and duties, what are the differences between a dictatorship and a democracy? How much obedience and loyalty can be demanded in a functioning democracy or, in fact, from any political community? How do a democratic state and personal conscience relate to each other? Does a community have priority over personal concerns and doubts? In raising these questions we cannot rule out some personal motivations on Shklar’s part. Having been an exile, and having seen herself as a marginal figure despite occupying the rank of distinguished professor at Harvard, she had always been skeptical about moral masquerading and other forms of political pretentiousness. Shklar despised heroes and followers, be they Che Guevara copycats, conservative and liberal free marketers, or narcissistic celebrity academics. For Shklar, who had been lucky enough to escape the totalitarian threat, such role-playing was not what was required in difficult times and in the attempt to combat cruelty and fear. Shklar argued for something more serious. What was needed, apart from functioning institutions, was a political psychology that would provide moral antennae for citizens and that liberal democracies could rely upon. In many ways, Shklar’s entire work can be understood as a search for such a modern political psychology, ranging from her trilogy on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu (Men and Citizens, Freedom and Independence, and Montesquieu) to her phenomenological descriptions and discussions of some of these psychological features and dilemmas in her later work, such as Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice. Old republican virtues, so she argued, belonged to the past and could not be simply resuscitated; at the same time, modern liberal democracy could not do without some reliable psychological “software” on the part of its citizens.



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That biographical elements played a role in shaping Shklar’s interests is revealed in the letters she and Quentin Skinner exchanged just before Shklar was to leave Harvard for a visiting professorship at Cambridge in the autumn of 1993. In the correspondence, as well as from the remaining notes and manuscripts that date from the same time, it becomes clear that she would have used her stay in Cambridge to teach mainly on the subjects of obligation, loyalty, and exile. In spring 1992 she had presented a paper on the theme of exile at the University of Wisconsin, and while preparing for Cambridge she mentioned in a letter to Skinner, who had invited her, that “I might begin with a couple of lectures on the way exiles have been considered in the history of political thought, then go on to my ordinary language thing about the forms of political obligation . . . and then try to deal with some real cases. Here the choice is overwhelming. Individual or groups?” (“Memorial Tributes,” 58). In a postcard to Skinner she reported that she was looking forward to a summer break during which she would “be thinking about exile and baby-sit in the garden” (Hess, The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar, 196). (Shklar had recently become a grandmother.) The recipient was left to wonder about his correspondent’s efforts to think systematically about the phenomenon of exile while also reflecting about herself as an exile. We will never know exactly what kind of book Shklar had in mind or how the finer distinctions of her argument would have developed in a full manuscript. We do not have such a book. What we have instead, between an early talk on the subject titled “Conscience and Liberty” given in June 1990 at Berkeley (the first essay in the present volume), in which she first publicly announced her intention to address the topic of political obligation more thoroughly, and her last essay, “Obligation, Loyalty and Exile” (dated June 1992, HUGFG118, box 10, now published in the posthumous collection Political Thought and Political Thinkers), are the Harvard lectures on political obligation that are published here for the first time. Our justification for publishing these lectures is threefold: First, the lectures and notes indicate at least roughly the direction Shklar’s ar­gument on exile and obligation would have taken. They cannot be a substitute for the planned book, but they contain at least an array of arguments Shklar would have used to develop a more sustained thesis. In other words, the lectures

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on political obligation provide the missing link between her last two books, The Faces of Injustice and American Citizenship, and the intention of writing a political theory from the vantage point of exile, something that Shklar was working on in her last few months, and of which her late essay “Obligation, Loyalty, Exile” is the only text that reached maturity. The second reason for publishing these lectures and notes lies in the fact that Shklar was a gifted teacher who often used Socratic methods for teaching purposes. As editors we have done our best to show “vintage Shklar” in action: an experienced teacher who discussed cases and moral dilemmas in the past and present in accessible language, with plenty of historical examples and illustrations that made it easy for a nonspecialist to follow and understand the choices involved. As we pointed out earlier, that these lectures were on the subject of political obligation and are therefore at the core of any political thinking makes them especially attractive. Finally, generations of American and European political and social theorists, humanist scholars, and people who opted for other professional paths studied at Harvard and sat in Shklar’s lectures and seminars. Many of them have described her lectures as a formative experience. These lectures therefore offer readers an opportunity to see how Shklar’s mind worked and why Shklar is today remembered as one of the great teachers and political theorists of the late twentieth century, despite her not having delivered a grand theory or an all-encompassing system.1 As the lectures demonstrate, Shklar was a fox, not a hedgehog. It was the process of thinking through 1. Not only Shklar’s teaching assistants have communicated that impression; a number of former students also remember how inspiring Shklar was as a lecturer. One of them notes: “The lectures reflect the experience of being in Professor Shklar’s class. Obviously they cannot capture the distinctive sound of her voice, with her Latvian-accented English and her always energetic, firm, and at certain moments dramatic delivery. They do capture her characteristic modes of thinking and argument, her effortless interweaving of classical texts of political philosophy and appropriate literary and artistic works, her signature focus on political psychology, in the sense of what it means to try to see the world and live in the world from the standpoint of particular values and commitments, as well as her typical way of ending a presentation not with an elaborate concluding argument but with a striking closing sentence. Listeners would sit there absorbing that sentence and thinking before reacting. That was what she wanted—not a big applause line at the end” (Rogers M. Smith, personal communication to the editors, 5 December 2016).



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moral choices that mattered to her—not finding everlasting valid answers or creating watertight philosophical systems.

Content and Structure Judith Shklar’s “Political Obligation” course was a new core course at Harvard in 1991–1992; it was taught as part of the Moral Reasoning program that had been on offer since the academic year 1979–1980. Together these courses must be seen as a cross- and multidisciplinary attempt to consider moral dilemmas and choices from various viewpoints and academic disciplines, ranging from theology and philosophy to politics, economics, and education. In Harvard’s 1991–1992 Courses of Instruction the purpose of these courses is described: “The common aim of courses in Moral Reasoning is to discuss significant and recurrent questions of choice and value that arise in human experience. They seek to acquaint students with the important traditions of thought that have informed such choices in the past and to enlarge the student’s awareness of how people have understood the nature of the virtuous life. The courses are intended to show that it is possible to reflect reasonably about such matters as justice, obligation, citizenship, loyalty, courage, and personal responsibility” (HUC8500.16, Box No 10). A list of the lecturers who have offered Moral Reasoning courses at Harvard over the years contains a virtual Who’s Who of the social sciences and humanities: among others we find here Stanley Cavell, Harvey Cox, Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Hoffmann, Stephen Holmes, Harvey Mansfield, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Sandel, Amartya Sen, Michael Walzer—and Judith Shklar. By the time she came to the Moral Reasoning course Shklar had already spent more than four decades at Harvard’s Department of Government; thus she came very late to this program. A look into the official Courses of Instruction from previous academic years tells us that she taught her course on political obligation only once. As to why Shklar suggested the course on political obligation to her Harvard colleagues for this particular academic year we can only speculate. What is clear, though, is that it enabled her to tackle a range of linked topics that were central to political theory from a distinctive perspective; and the topic coincided in part with a change in pre-

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occupation and epistemological interest. Teaching the course would enable her to take her fair share of the teaching load, yet it would also allow her to teach something new and exciting.2 At a talk she gave at Berkeley almost two years before giving the “Political Obligation” lectures at Harvard, Shklar had hinted at the possibility of offering such a course: “I promised I would not too long from now give a course on Political Obligation for what we call ‘the Core.’” As she elaborated in the Berkeley talk, she was curious about an “unexpected discovery.” What had surprised her was an absence: “The usual reasons for bringing up the obligation to obey or to disobey is a conflict of loyalties. . . . I ran through the history of the argument, . . . [and] I was flabbergasted by just how rarely conscience actually appears.” She was particularly interested in the distinction between America and other countries: “One place and time when it [conscience] does come into its own is in pre–Civil War America in the course of the struggle to abolish slavery. . . . I inevitably had to think of liberty, since that was what was at stake for the abolitionists, which means inevitably for us yet another look at Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts. The conclusion I came to was that the distinction he draws between the two types of liberty has little relevance to that part of our history and to our most typical way of thinking about liberty, that is ‘rights.’” A few lines later Shklar concludes: “Mostly it turns out to be less a matter of conscience than of divided loyalties, which is important if we want to separate out conscience from other grounds of moral or political action on the part of groups or of individuals.” Retrospectively, we can see that the rest of the Berkeley lecture sounded very much like a prospectus for the course on political obligation she would teach two years later. An idea and rough outline of the course, which hinted at the range of topics and thinkers to be covered, was given in the Courses of Instruction. 2. Over many years Shklar taught a joint core course on political ideologies with Stanley Hoffmann, and for 1991–1992 she was listed as offering courses on “Topics in the History of Political Thought” (Government 2020), which covered European political thought from Locke to Kant, and “Political Concepts” (Government 2030), in which basic terms of political discourse were read and discussed. The university’s 1991–1992 Courses of Instruction also listed “Readings in Ancient and Medieval Political Theory” (Government 2026) to be given in the academic year 1992–1993 (HUC8500.16, Box No 12).



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There we read under the heading “Moral Reasoning 42. Political Obligation”: “Why should we obey or disobey the government? Most people ask these questions when they are faced with incompatible loyalties, but some raise them when law and private conscience are in conflict. To consider how these confrontations have been perceived since antiquity, the course considers both philosophical and literary texts, including works by Sophocles, Plato, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Thoreau, and T. H. Green, as well as recent U.S. cases involving conscientious objectors and current debates about obligations to constitutional governments” (HUC8500.16, Box No 12, Courses of Instruction 1991–92, 33). What was to be discussed in these “Political Obligation” lectures were lessons from the past that might inspire deeper reflection and contribute to self-awareness in the present: examples of moral choices in changing contexts, ranging from personal interaction and the duties of friendship in smaller political communities such as the Greek city-states, to the rise of organized religion and the changes this implied for individuals in terms of obedience and obligation, to the emergence of modern states and modern political ideologies and the new definitions and pressures that those brought with them. To spell out the dilemmas that individuals had to confront in different political communities and at different times and to discuss a wide range of individual responses is an enormous didactic task, as Shklar knew well. It is therefore not by chance that she opened her lectures with a modern example of moral decision making under the Nazi dictatorship (“Weizsäcker vs. Bonhoeffer”). She then took a big leap back to classical Greece to reflect on moral dilemmas as they presented themselves and were discussed in their own times. The lectures which followed deal with the rise of organized religion (Judaism, Christianity, Protestantism, state religions) and the moral decision making and dilemmas it involves, and modern contract theory and Enlightenment philosophy and the tension these create between obedience and loyalty (Hobbes to Hume). These led her, finally, to the question of moral choices that arise in the age of ideologies and with the rise of the modern “positive state” and democracy. Shklar’s lectures closed with reflections on the bonds of exile—exile being the precarious condition in which

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citizens are forced to attempt to make sense of and justify to themselves what loyalty means under modern conditions. As three former students of Shklar have pointed out, the lectures have a number of arcs that link different time periods with one another through thematic bridges or bonds.3 Shklar was always attuned to the different historical, social, political, cultural, and religious contexts of specific arguments and examples. For example, the classical and early modern thinkers were confronted with different challenges and dilemmas from those of the moderns, and they thought differently about obedience and loyalty. And yet there remained some common concerns and questions, which linked the different parts of this course to one another: What can be demanded from any citizen and, in turn, from a political community? How does an individual citizen decide which side to take in the face of cruelty, fear, and other adverse conditions, and in order to avoid the worst? What distinguishes modern conditions from classical times? Was not modern democracy invented to replace traditional forms of obedience and the stark moral choices involved and to make room for choices within a democratic polity, bound by voluntary political loyalty and obligation? In her lectures on political obligation Shklar does not engage intensely with contemporary thinkers or paradigms, mainly because the course had a different purpose—to introduce undergraduate students to some of the classic texts of moral reasoning—and because Shklar was keen on sticking to her own rules and objectives when it came to teaching. But occasionally Shklar’s position as a defender of a new liberalism without illusions shows through: her examples and particularly the final lectures make clear that she was not entirely happy with what some of her contemporaries had to offer. To advocate a return to classic republicanism would not be feasible; the rise of modern individualism had simply crowded out any common vision of what the central virtues should be. At the same time the liberalism of Isaiah Berlin, based on negative liberty, would not do justice to modern democratic experiences and struggles for positive liberty and

3. We thank Brian Reed (University of Washington), Joseph Reisert (Colby College), and Michael Mosher (University of Tulsa), who each independently drew our attention to this feature of Shklar’s lectures in personal communications.



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recognition (the American case seems to have been particularly instructive here). Equally, rights-based approaches such as the one suggested by ­Ronald Dworkin seemed deficient, since they would never be able to spell out comprehensively what political obligation in a democracy entails without risking being prescriptive. Finally, communitarian proposals like that of her colleague and friend Michael Walzer were too community oriented, so much so that their advocates could not imagine situations in which it was of primary importance to support the individual citizen and his or her conscience against a community, even the most perfect community in the world. There was, after all, perhaps something worth learning and rescuing from older deliberations on moral decision making ranging from Socrates to Thoreau. It is not just by chance that in Shklar’s discussions the theme of the precarious condition of exile comes to play a particularly important role, for it marks the limits of obedience and loyalty. Democracy is another game changer: a modern understanding of sovereignty means that the people consider themselves now as authors of their own law. Obviously, this affects obedience since it implies self-mastery and recognition of oneself in the collectivity. This is Rousseau’s solution to the problem of self-rule, and Shklar’s appreciation of Rousseau as a thinker surely resides in part in his keen recognition of the problem of obligation and his attempt to deal with it head-on. But Shklar is also aware that Rousseau’s preoccupations and horizon were necessarily time bound, as he developed his theory before what Shklar calls the Age of Democratic Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of the Positive State, including its modern ideologies, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In modern democratic states individual consciousness and opposition face new challenges and dilemmas—hence Shklar’s fascination with Thoreau’s argument about civil disobedience, the question of conscientious objection in wars that are fought by modern democracies, and the discussion of the individual’s obligation (and its limits) under nondemocratic conditions.

About This Edition The “Political Obligation” lectures were given twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, starting on January 31, 1992, and ending on April 22. In addi-

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tion to the lectures, students had to attend twelve sections (seminars) led by teaching fellows. The purpose of these sections was to give the students the opportunity to discuss the material covered in the lectures, to encourage them to read further and deepen their knowledge under the guidance of tutors, and to help them prepare for the assessments. Readings for the course were held in reserve in Harvard’s Hilles and Lamont libraries; additionally, a source book or reading packet was made available through the Core office. We have not found official numbers concerning how many students attended Shklar’s course, but judging by the number of teaching fellows involved (ten, two of them Head Teaching Fellows: Jon Fullerton and Joe Reisert) and the number of sections offered (twelve), the course must have attracted close to two hundred students. Grading was strict. Any essay that teaching fellows judged to be worth an “A” had to be returned to Shklar to be confirmed. By all accounts few papers, if any, passed that hurdle. A handout consisting of study questions, take-home exam questions, and mock exam questions was made available that reflected the breadth of themes and topics covered in the course. Shklar had a fine sense of irony, something that was not always appreciated or fully understood by students or teaching fellows. Among the final exam study questions two examples in particular deserve a mention here: “Henry David Thoreau has risen from the grave to challenge Michael Walzer to a debate on the topic, ‘Resolved: There can be no morally serious civil disobedience without an expressed commitment to other individuals.’ Walzer will speak first, followed by Thoreau, and then Walzer is entitled to a brief rebuttal. John Rawls has agreed to be the adjudicator. Present this debate and then write Rawls’ critique.” This question was followed by another one that reads, “Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, and Peter Singer were having a dinner in hell one night, and the question arose as to whether each had registered to vote in the November 1992 presidential elections. Construct a hypothetical conversation in which each writer justifies his decision and responds to the arguments of the other two” (Moral Reasoning 42—­Political Obligation, Final Exam Study Questions). Table I gives the syllabus for Shklar’s Political Obligation course, showing the order of the lectures and topics, while Table II indicates which top-



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Table I. “Political Obligation” Course Syllabus

Lecture 1: Introduction (Weizsaecker and Bonhoeffer, Memoirs) Lecture 2: Antigone (Sophocles, Antigone) Lecture 3: Crito (Plato, Crito) Lecture 4: Friendship Lecture 5: The New Testament and Martin Luther (Gospels of Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, and Saint Luke; Romans; Timothy; 1 and 2 Peter; Martin Luther, Treatise on Secular Authority) Lecture 6: Divided Loyalties (T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral; Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State; Martin Luther King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”) Lecture 7: Honor and Richard II (Shakespeare, Richard II; Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies) Lecture 8: Tyranny “A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants” Lecture 9: Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, De Cive) Lecture 10: John Locke (Locke, Second Treatise of Government; Samuel Langdon, “Government Corrupted by Vice and Recovered by Righteousness”’ the Declaration of Independence) Lecture 11: David Hume (Hume, “Of the Origin of Government” and “Of the Original Contract”) Lecture 12: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, On the Social Contract) Lecture 13: Kant and Regicide (Speeches by Morrison and Saint-Just; Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice) Lecture 14: Hegel and Ideology Lecture 15: T. H. Green (T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation) Lecture 16: Obedience (Ignatius of Loyola, “To the Members of the Society in Portugal”; Thomas O’Gorman, Jesuit Obedience from Life to Law; David Knowles, From Pachomius to Ignatius; Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey; Stanley Milgram, “The Compulsion to Do Evil”; Emerson, “Self-Reliance”) Lecture 17: Military Obedience (Keijzer, Military Obedience; Kleist, Prince Frederick von Homburg; Wouk, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial) Lecture 18: Loyalty and Betrayal (Grodzinz, The Loyal and the Disloyal; Korematsu v. United States) Lecture 19: Civil Disobedience I: Nineteenth Century (Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”; Wendell Phillips, “To Vote or Not to Vote”; Susan B. Anthony, “Statement to the Court”) (table continues)

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(Table I continued) Lecture 20: Civil Disobedience II: Twentieth Century (A. Phillip Randolph v. Wayne Morris; Martin Luther King, Jr., “Three Statements on Civil Disobedience”; John Rawls, “The Justification of Civil Disobedience”; William Sloan Coffin, Jr., and Morris I. Leibman, Civil Disobedience: Aid or Hindrance to Justice?; Jeb Magruder, “Testimony”; Garner v. Louisiana) Lecture 21: Conscientious Objection (Quaker letter; Roger Baldwin statement; John Rawls, “Legal Obligation and the Duty to Fair Play”; Michael Walzer, “Conscientious Objection”; United States v. Seeger; Welsh v. United States; Gilette v. Louisiana) Lecture 22: Consent and Obligation (Peter Singer, Democracy and Disobedience; M. B. E. Smith, “Is There a Prima Facie Obligation to Obey the Law?”; A. D. M. Walker, “Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude”) Lecture 23: The Bonds of Exile (not given to students but mentioned to teaching fellows)

ics were discussed in the sections.4 In preparation for the lectures and the sections Shklar’s teaching fellows were given the task of writing additional information, such as time lines, basic biographical information, and references on the board. Shklar also provided her teaching fellows with instructions on how to grade student essays. In Shklar’s own lecture notes, which can be found in the Harvard Archives, two types of texts can be distinguished: copies of properly writtenout lecture notes (which form the basis for this edition) and abbreviated lecture notes: shorter notes with key words and headline-style arguments in which sentences were not fully written out. A comparison between the two types of notes makes clear that the shorter notes were compiled after she had fully written out each lecture. We consulted with Joseph Reisert, Shklar’s head teaching fellow, and think that the abbreviated notes might actually have been what Shklar had in front of her while lecturing. The 4. We list in parentheses the main texts used; however, since these texts and names are merely indicative of the ground covered in the lectures we have left them out of the bibliography. We are most grateful to Joseph Reisert, head teaching fellow of the “Political Obligation” course, who supplied us with copies of the course outline and various other documents, and to Richard Katskee, also former teaching fellow, who supplied us with copies of the reading material for the course.



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Table II. Topics for Sections

1. Crito and Friendship 2. Luther and Divided Loyalties 3. Richard II 4. “A Defence of Liberty” 5. Hobbes 6. Locke and Hume 7. Rousseau 8. Obedience and Military Obedience 9. Green and Loyalty 10. Civil Disobedience 11. Civil Disobedience and Conscientious Objection 12. Reading period: review section

shorter version, consisting mainly of a list of keywords and key phrases, would have allowed her to elaborate and improvise while lecturing. As an experienced lecturer Shklar knew that reading out a lecture from a manuscript would be tedious for both listeners and speaker.5 Among the Shklar Papers in the Harvard Archives we first encountered only a dozen fully written-out lectures together with some additional but more fragmentary and what seemed more condensed lecture notes, all marked “MR” and “MR2,” but no course syllabus. Some detective work, consisting mainly of establishing cross-references in the lecture notes available in the Shklar Papers, gave us a rough idea about the overall logic of the course. However, it was only by finally tracking down and commu 5. Richard Katskee, one of Shklar’s teaching fellows, mentioned in an email to the editors that he remembered the “Political Obligation” lectures being recorded on cassettes. However, all efforts to locate these tapes have so far proved unsuccessful. A comparison between the recordings and the two different sets of notes would allow us to answer the question of which notes Shklar used to deliver her lectures. That Shklar generally preferred to lecture from keynotes instead of from a fully written text is confirmed by one of her former students, Rogers M. Smith: “When preparing a new course, she would write out all the lectures, then reduce them to notes that she would use when lecturing, instead of reading the full text. She explained that method to me and I used it when starting teaching my own courses a couple of years later” (personal communication to the editors).

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nicating with Joseph Reisert that we were able to identify material missing from the Harvard Archives: a copy of the proper course syllabus plus additional information such as course instructions, exam questions, time lines, background information, and suggestions for further reading, all of which enabled us to make a more comprehensive reconstruction of the “Political Obligation” course. Access to new material and the opportunity to compare it with the documents and texts available in the Harvard Archives made the editorial task of reconstruction easier. However, some gaps remain. The full texts for Lectures 9 to 13 (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant) and Lecture 22 (Consent and Obligation) remain missing, despite all our efforts to locate them. What we have included instead consists of notes and some additional board material on each topic so that the reader can get at least a sense of both continuity and the course of the argument. As to why these full texts are missing we can only speculate. There is a strong possibility that in the case of lectures 9–13, which covered mainly contract theories, Shklar relied on other notes from previous courses (such as the one on the Enlightenment that she had taught for years). There is some question about to how the course was intended to end. For Lecture 23 (The Bonds of Exile) we have a fully written-out text, whereas we have only notes from the board material for Lecture 22 (Consent and Obligation). We know that Shklar announced to her teaching fellows that there was a possibility she would discuss the theme of exile toward the end of the course. This volume does not end with the lecture notes on Consent and Obligation but finishes with the additional lecture on exile as the last lecture. This seems appropriate and a more satisfying read since “The Bonds of Exile” contains a discussion of both obligation and exile. What you, the readers, have in front of you follows scholarly standards but is not a critical edition. We have tried to make the text as reader-friendly as possible, which has meant consulting different versions of the lectures (for a full list of the sources see Appendix II), a first round of careful editing, correcting obvious misspellings, completing unfinished or abbreviated sentences, and taking out short remarks or hints intended only for the students present on the day the lectures were given. We decided not to highlight these minor corrections and additions in the final version. The



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readability of the text would have suffered if it were marked by numerous square brackets for minor additions or littered with dots to mark minor omissions. The exceptions to the rule are Lectures 9–13 and Lecture 22 for the reasons already discussed.6 In relation to the additional information Shklar provided to teaching fellows and students that would have allowed students to identify key authors and other figures and events in an instant, we decided to stay faithful to the pedagogical nature of the lecture. Instead of offering lengthy annotations that would only distract readers and take away attention from the flow of the argument, we opted for simple editorial footnotes. These notes are mostly, but not entirely, based on Shklar’s own handouts, such as board notes and bibliographical hints, and on other information given to her teaching ­fellows. Short of full transcripts of any tape recordings that might exist or the discovery of the full texts for the lectures on Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant and the lecture on Consent and Obligation this edition of Shklar’s “Political Obligation” lectures is the most authentic reconstruction of the course available to date. They show, as Judith N. Shklar has pointed out, what political theory is all about—the elucidation of common experience.

Bibliography The Harvard Archives contain the papers of Judith N. Shklar (3.5 cubic feet in ten containers). These include some of Shklar’s correspondence, her lecture notes and teaching material, speeches, drafts of published and unpublished papers, and other important material. They contain in HUGFP 118.8 correspondence and other records, 1971–1983 (2 boxes); in HUGFP 118.40 speeches and other papers (1 box); and in HUGFP 118.62 lecture notes and course materials (7 boxes). The material that stems from the Shklar Papers and that we draw upon in this volume, such as unpublished notes, drafts, and lecture notes is not listed in the bibliography but is identified in the text. Hess, Andreas. The Political Theory of Judith N. Shklar: Exile from Exile. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 6. For those interested in a full set of both Shklar’s original lectures and notes and in our detailed editorial changes, we have supplied both to the Shklar Papers located in the Harvard Archives.

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“Memorial Tributes to Judith Nisse Shklar, 1928–1992.” Unpublished brochure. Shklar, Judith N. American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. ———. The Faces of Injustice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. ———. Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ———. Legalism: An Essay on Law, Morals, and Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. ———. Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ———. Montesquieu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. “Why Teach Political Theory?” in Teaching Literature—What Is Needed Now, ed. J. Engell and D. Perkins, 151–160. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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Berkeley Lecture: Conscience and Liberty

let me begin with a confession. I promised I would not too long from now give a course on Political Obligation for what we call “the Core.”1 Normally this is the last subject that I would want to talk about at Berkeley or, to be specific, before any audience which included my old friend Hanna Pitkin.2 What has brought me to it is not despair or recklessness but an unexpected discovery, and with it an odd set of reflections on liberty that caught me very much by surprise and that I want, rather tentatively, to pre­ sent to you for comment. I am not one to waste an opportunity for some real exchange of ideas, especially as I am at work and undecided about these ideas, rather than having them all worked out. This will therefore be less an elegant paper than a first try at thinking two problems through. The first thing I want to show is that conscience is a very rare and a very odd ground for either obeying or disobeying public authorities. The usual reasons for bringing up the obligation to obey or to disobey is a conflict of loyalties. Being a historian, I ran through the history of the argument, Talk given at the University of California, Berkeley, 22 March 1990. 1. Shklar refers here to Harvard’s core courses for undergraduate students. Included in the core were various Moral Reasoning courses. 2. Hanna Pitkin is a political theorist best known for her work on representation. Pitkin had published a two-part article, “Obligation and Consent,” in American Political Science Review 59, no. 4 (1965): 990–999, and 60, no. 1 (1966): 39–52, which Shklar would have read or at least known about when she was preparing her lectures on political obligation.

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which I will presently repeat, but I was flabbergasted by just how rarely conscience actually appears. Now, one place and time when it does come into its own is in pre–Civil War America in the course of the struggle to abolish slavery, about which I have been thinking and writing for some time now. And as I reflected on its bursting upon our political scene, I inevitably had to think of liberty, since that was what was at stake for the abolitionists, which means inevitably for us yet another look at Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts.3 The conclusion I came to was that the distinction he draws between the two types of liberty has little relevance to that part of our history and to our most typical way of thinking about liberty, that is “rights,” which I believe derive their real significance from the struggle and the transformation of the Constitution it brought about. I do not mean to slight the great Mr. Locke, but from the first, and certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was the institution that defined liberty for some and fueled natural rights theory for others. When I began to think about women and men who ask themselves the question “Should I obey?” the first image in my mind was the one you find in most current philosophical literature on the subject, a heroic figure standing up all alone who says, “This is wrong, I won’t stand for it,” or, on mature reflection, “I must obey.” Heroic they are, but as I went on to explore the history of arguments that women and men have given for standing up for what they think is right against public authority or a policy I found this to be the case only very rarely. Mostly it turns out to be less a matter of conscience than of divided loyalties, which is important if we want to separate out conscience from other grounds of moral or political action on the part of groups or of individuals. Let me begin conventionally enough with Antigone.4 As you may recall she insists on burying her brother, whom the king, her uncle, will not allow to be buried because he was a traitor. As we listen to her she insists on her obligations as a sister and on the duties of 3. Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 inaugural lecture at the University of Oxford, was published soon afterward by Clarendon Press. Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British historian of ideas who had made Oxford his home. Berlin and Shklar were both born in Riga and later met a number of times at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. 4. Shklar refers here to the heroine of Sophocles’ play of the same name. For a detailed discussion of Antigone’s role and importance see Lecture 2.



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kin to bury their dead. It is deeply bound up with religion. And it is not at all clear that this is a case of conscience so much as a case of conflict between civic and religious values. Of course we see it her way, but is she asserting an inner voice or a recognized ritual duty? In her aloneness and personal courage we think that we hear the voice of something very personal, but it may not be that at all, and I think Hegel was right when he saw her defending a familial religiosity against political encroachment. I do think we hear that voice in Plato’s Crito when Socrates refuses to escape from the death penalty by an unjust sentence.5 He speaks of his daemon, an inner spirit that commands his assent on such occasions, and I believe that this is the first time someone isolates conscience as a peculiarly nonreligious, simply human moral impulse and tries to explain its primacy for him. Socrates says it is neither convention nor law, but rather his decision to go to his death. And he gives reasons. Some have said that he is only defending the dignity of philosophers by dying nobly, being more heroic than Achilles, as he had said in the Apology,6 but the two are, of course, not incompatible. I’ll stick with this as the first appearance of conscience in a philosophical text, not least isolated in its rejection of the claims of friendship that Crito makes so movingly, and which I am in danger of misrepresenting as mere conventionality. It is a tour de force to underwrite obedience out of gratitude and duty with something as personal as one’s own daemon. Heroes, in epic poetry and in biblical narrative, of course, often defy the powers of kings and overlords, but they do not speak as Socrates does of an inner voice not attached to anything outside himself. What I did find out about them and my other examples was that they were engaged in a conflict of loyalties of one kind or another. Even when confronted with the Lord’s anointed kings, God has a prior and greater claim upon these characters’ loyalty. The counsel of Nathan and David, probably the most often-cited biblical characters in Carolingian Europe, puts the claims of faith squarely against those of rulers, yet it is not a matter of personal conscience, but of obedience to another, and primary, a­ uthority— 5. Crito, in Plato’s dialogue, was the friend who tried to prevent Socrates from accepting the Athenian citizens’ guilty verdict in his capital case and to escape into exile instead. See Lectures 3 and 4. 6. The Apology is Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense before the Athenian citizens.

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another ruler, in effect. The struggle between the church and the state is in principle interminable because it entails a conflict of loyalties. Even if from Saint Paul to Augustine, and even to Luther, Christians were enjoined to suffer the secular powers humbly and unquestioningly, it was not as a matter of conscience but because politics was so insignificant and humility was so great a Christian virtue.7 Obedience as a sign of humility has nothing to do with politics; it is a matter of suffering the scourges of the secular world in their most extreme manifestation. In a case of clear conflict between rival organizations it was obvious who had the greater claim. We may think of promising as a pretty personal commitment, but the oaths that were so central to obligation from the Middle Ages on, and to which we are still addicted, were in no sense like that. They were made to God and were guaranteed by him, and those who really believe this, like Claus von Stauffenberg in our century,8 have a terrible time in trying to decide what God demands of them: their oath to a ruler or their duty to God directly. It may be, as Eliot presents Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, a matter of the honor of God and the honor of man.9 And horrible doubts about self-deception and temptation haunt those who are genuinely torn by these conflicts of obligation to two divinely sanctioned powers, one embodied in the church the other in a ruler. A further complication is added when one has to decide which among several is the true church. When Luther said his “Here I stand,” he was acting upon what he took to be the unmistakable orders of God, not his personal inner voice as such. He was defending the true church against its betrayers. There are other loyalties involving honor. The honor of the nobility is something that no king can kick around forever, even if he is the Lord’s anointed and even if treason has acquired an especially odious name, with Judas Iscariot in mind and when oaths to God are involved. Remember 7. For a detailed account of Christian notions of obedience and disobedience see Lecture 6. 8. Claus von Stauffenberg was a German army officer from a noble family. As a fervent Catholic he became one of the central figures in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot failed, and Stauffenberg was executed the following day. See Lecture 1, in which Shklar discusses the issue of obedience and resistance to the Hitler regime. 9. For a full discussion of Archbishop Becket’s case and his objections to King Henry II, see Lecture 6.



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Shakespeare’s Richard II.10 He is an awful king, he brings all his troubles on himself, but no one refutes his claim that he has a right to the crown that no one else has, and when he is killed Bolingbroke vows to go on a pilgrimage in repentance, though he never does. It is not even clear that Richard II qualified as a tyrant to whom all oaths would be dissolved and all loyalties abrogated. That could only occur if he were a follower of the anti-Christ or had utterly betrayed his coronation oath in a truly scandalous manner. As late as 1775, in the election sermons of the New England clergy one still hears accusations against George III that picture him as a classical tyrant who has made war upon his wholly submissive and good subjects in America and who has fallen into Romish corruption. Nothing less would allow them to appear rebellious, which they were not, in fact; it was the ruler who had betrayed them. They had remained obedient to the laws of God and nature. This was not an aristocratic honor claim any longer, but the latter could come very close to being real expressions of conscience. In the course of the wars of religion in France one does find in some writers, notably Montaigne, a rediscovery, in the very conscious imitation of Socrates, of a moral claim that in disgust at the violence of fanatical sects asks, “What can I believe?” and answers, “Myself” and my friend. And as my friend, to be my friend, can never do anything I would not do, there can be no conflict between me and my friend, my other self, if he should dis­obey the king. But Montaigne still talks in the voice of honor and friendship between men of honor.11 So while he is as alone as one can be, he is not as isolated as Socrates was. Still it is typical of a morally upright person in a blood-soaked world, much like ours. I mean this century, not here and now. It is neither loyal nor disloyal to voice this personal conscience, but we are likely to choose friends over princes in case of conflict. This is the disenchanted world already, which may well be the one where conscience flourishes, though Montaigne could still appeal to a caste- and class-rooted notion of honor. Am I being eccentric in seeing conscience in isolation from religion? Probably yes, but not because I want to in any way ignore the importance of

10. For a full discussion of Shakespeare’s Richard II see Lecture 7. 11. Michel de Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French politician and essayist. The views of his contemporaries are discussed extensively in Lecture 8.

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religion to arguments about obligation—on the contrary—but because here I want to do some classifying, to get my own ideas clear, and to see whether one can identify pure conscience as distinct from conflicts of loyalty, including loyalty to God. As I said, there is a hint of it in the turmoil of religious warfare, but as you know, the more typical response was to legalize the whole question of obligation in the formal contractual paradigms, which have revived in our own day. The early modern generation of social contract theories was first enfeebled by Hume’s devastating criticism and then more significantly by the rise of modern ideologies after the French Revolution, in which the demands of the future—that is, the promise of history—­ replaced arguments about obligation.12 Even Hegel’s defense of obedience is grounded in obligation, and it was he who significantly made it his business to single out conscience as irrational and egotistic nonsense.13 Obligation really only returned, in England at least, when it finally became clear that the government was going to have to be an active social services provider and a modest redistributor in order to deal with both the new wealth and the suffering of industrial economies. I think particularly of the idealists such as T. H. Green who made serious arguments for the obligation to obey the modern state, which by definition did its duty.14 Unhappily, since 1914 these have also been states engaged in unceasing war, so that for many a person that obligation could not hold because unconditional military service was the very thing that the liberal democratic state could not demand. Some people come up with “just war” doctrines, but some do not, and they are the ones most likely to claim conscience as their guide. As you know, the law in this country recognizes this claim. But I’m not now at all interested in the law and its present vacillations. What does strike me is that it is really only in the twentieth century, when social justice made moral rather than historical claims, that obligations to society became a respectable topic of philosophical discussion again, and that when the welfare state became the warfare state it returned to where it should have been all along—in front of our eyes as a big and dif 12. See Lectures 9–13. 13. See Shklar’s discussion of Hegel in Lecture 14. 14. T. H. Green was a British social reformer and political theorist. For a discussion of his role and impact see Lecture 15.



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ficult question. And more for those who live under acceptable governments than anyone else. That does not, of course, imply that fascism and Nazism did not eventually thrust the issue of obedience to the forefront. I merely want to say that philosophically it had arrived there already. In America it had never quit. That was due to the great anomaly of American politics: the prevalence of chattel slavery in a modern constitutional state that professed to be based on natural rights. For American abolitionists religion was often very important, but often it must be said that it was a church with a single member, as in the case of William Lloyd Garrison.15 And in Thoreau we do have the pure man of conscience, which is why he has become so important today, when conscience is no longer tied to religion and does not represent another social loyalty. Such claimants are in many ways disruptive and politically rarely successful people. They are very hard to defend. They seem egotistical, hyper-individualistic, a throwback to a heroic past now transmuted from war to morality. Did not Socrates compare himself rather favorably to Achilles? What could a Rousseau offer except to say we have divine instinct and that is that? What if it’s just yours; what sort of claim is that? The classic answer is Thoreau’s “Why not?” Why is a collective voice more valid, except that it is more powerful? I cannot see why Michael Walzer, for instance, says that a claim for “we” is inherently superior to one made in the name of “I.”16 We are just as often wrong, only more audible. Why is my conscience less relevant than a group ideology when I refuse to do what seems to me patently evil? If I have a duty to myself, then this is what that means. Is it a form of self-perfection? Perhaps it is, but whom am I supposed to perfect if not myself first of all? The case I am going to present is not along these lines at all but is part of our history considered in terms of liberty. There is a good possibility that in some cases conscience perceived as a form of self-liberation can justify itself as a necessary step in the liberation of others. Its justification then 15. William Lloyd Garrison was a New England abolitionist. For a discussion of American abolitionism, Thoreau, and civil disobedience see Lecture 19. 16. See Shklar’s discussion of civil disobedience in Lecture 20 and her “The Work of Michael Walzer,” in Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 376–385.

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becomes liberty as a spiritual as well as a political good. It does not answer all the questions, but it is an interesting possibility, and I’ll try it out on you. I am less interested in making a case for the abolitionists here, since I take it for granted that they were right, than in investigating the thorny problem of conscience when you do have a lot of choices, and when there is a government you do not want to overthrow entirely or hurl into turmoil but you are convinced that in some extremely central way is absolutely and completely unjust, not just a little wrong—that is, it enforces slavery. What I am concerned with is that a theory of liberty which I think is right nevertheless does put some difficulties in the way of conscience. The conscientious person as I have described her does not say, “I should be free to do as I choose.” She says, “I am right, and I am oppressed not because I am going to jail—which I expected to do—but I would feel, and do feel, oppressed because even in jail I am forced to do something I regard as evil.” Even the person who sews cotton sacks in jail may feel implicated in slavery. And it is oppression as being implicated in not being able to get out of doing what is regarded as a serious evil that is so problematic. In New England the underground railway people felt that way. Every time they put on a shirt they knew that a slave had picked the cotton. What they felt they were subjected to was a denial of what is now called “negative liberty,” and it is to this topic that I now want to turn, because it is really about the relation between conscience and liberty. As you know, since 1958 most talk about liberty has turned around a very famous essay by Sir Isaiah Berlin called Two Concepts of Liberty. Before I turn to it, a debt and a story. The text has been much criticized and yet canonized. Why? Due to the mood of a time: the Age of Ideologies. Also Berlin gave a very clear definition of negative liberty and defended it ably against all alternatives. Negative liberty consists in our ability to do what we wish without constraint by others. It is not what we do or why we do it, but the fact of not being hindered, or, as he put it later, having open doors. Against this he posed positive liberty. This comprises the victory of the higher over the lower self, the feeling of being liberated from lower passions in favor of an inner sense of freedom. This he rejected. He argued this was used by educative and authoritarian regimes to constrain us, to make us into new beings, or to allow us to withdraw, like Epictetus, who claimed that since he



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was rational he was free in his chains, while the tyrant was the real prisoner. This just devalues real liberty, in an athletics of moral anti-politics. Clearly, Berlin wanted to secure the definition of liberalism in its long struggle versus totalitarian regimes. His was a case against fanaticism at a time when the prestige of the word liberty was appropriated by the most repressive governments, the age of Orwell’s 1984. In this context it was important to get things right, to provide a narrow definition, not subject to vacillation and misrepresentation. No fudging! The liberty of liberals consists in not being interfered with. My liberty is as great as the space in which I may act as I choose, most especially with no interference from public powers. Nor will it do to say this is of no importance to poor people; they do not like being pushed around—this is just one more privation. Most critics have objected that this is too narrow, that surely at least some ideal of self-development, of freedom to do something for oneself is part of individual freedom. To be left alone is too empty. To this Berlin’s defenders have cried, “Slippery slope!” But there is no argument that cannot be twisted or be set rolling down some unwanted path. Slippery slope arguments are slippery too. A more adequate defense, and one Berlin himself offered, is that politics is about choice, and that one has to get things right for that, as in politics no single harmonizing good is possible. Public health, education, raising the standard of living, security, encouraging the arts and sciences, protecting the environment: all are worthy ends, but they are not liberty, and they limit our freedom. They may also make liberty more likely; however, while they can be the conditions of liberty, they are not liberty itself. This is clearly a design for a pluralist society, since so many fundamental choices confront us. As such it has been close to American hearts. Pluralism is not something we sneeze at. Yet is pluralism enough? Is it in and of itself enough to ensure toleration and liberty? Surely not. Moreover, a plurality of values and our acknowledgement of them does not privilege freedom simply. We still have to choose. By calling things by their right name Berlin has made it clear that we must indeed choose. But the fact of many choices is not necessarily an incentive for liberty or even an argument for it. I would like to suggest that when we make these choices our conscience, as I have described it, not as a conflict of loyalties but as a personal conviction, may be involved, and we may then have to

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look at the question of negative freedom again. But not in the horrific form that Berlin paints it. On the other hand I do not want to follow most of his critics, either, who simply ignore his definition of positive liberty, define it in some other way—as self-development or whatever. Instead I want to make a case for the higher self in politics under some circumstances and argue that it can be a genuine form of liberty and one which is necessary to sustain negative liberty at its best. Moreover, I think a strong notion of rights renders the distinction irrelevant. For while Berlin is right to remind us that national self-determination is not negative liberty, self-government can also mean that “I am master in my own land” in a way that is not at all nationalist but refers to being able to be an active citizen and to have some part in the decisions that affect me and mine. Is the opportunity to take part in politics not a part of liberty in a sense that is not positive as a victory over one’s baser inclinations or as the rule of reason, but as a way through an open door? If I want to rule myself to as great a degree as is compatible with a like aspiration on the part of others, then I have moved beyond the distinction between negative and positive liberty. Here I think lines get blurred. “I want to be my own master” and “I do not want to be interfered with” are not very distant demands, after all. I do not deny that a perversion of the desire for self-mastery can lead to illusions of liberty, but what cannot? In politics negative liberty can also be turned upside down. Not being interfered with can mean total immobility in politics, since every change interferes with someone’s expectations, even when that would significantly increase the liberty of many other persons whose liberty is not a question of negative or positive liberty at all. This is something Berlin actually recognizes, though he cannot do much with conflicts between negative liberties. I cast these doubts upon Berlin’s negative liberty to show that in politics nothing is as pure as it is when we just define things to get them clear, but what I really want to suggest is that his dichotomy is not all that relevant to U.S. history and the historic choices we have had to make.17 17. Shklar had written earlier on Isaiah Berlin’s limited notions of negative liberty. Here she restated some of those arguments but also elaborated further. See Shklar, “Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States,” originally published in French in 1990, translated in Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 111–126.



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In the United States, liberty takes the form of rights, and this is overwhelmingly due to slavery since the middle of the nineteenth century. For us liberty is to be realized against obstacles, not just the open door. It is a demand to governments to act to protect the liberty of one group against another. It takes the form of positive action to assure liberty. Rights are not conditions of liberty; they have independent value. This is not liberation but a constant process that recognizes that we have a past of enslavement and an impulse to perpetuate it in various guises, against identified groups—initially, black slaves. It is a liberty expressed in rights, and whoever claims them knows that liberty exists in counterpoint to slavery. There is no question but that the choice between majority rule and minority rights is the choice, yet it is not just a choice between justice and freedom, but also between two freedoms, that of the master and that of the slave. It may also involve an inner struggle between two parts of ourselves. To think that the conquest of one’s base impulses must end in totalitarian rules is a perversion of positive liberty, as Berlin admits, in fact. It is not a threat to freedom, but, as I shall try to say, an inspiration to it. Let me leave that difficulty for a moment to go to the next topic. If I do not feel free without having a say, I may also not feel free if I am forced to do what I think is wrong. I am not unfree only if I have to do something I do not want to do; I may feel that what oppresses me is a moral burden. If I am forced, in short, to do something my conscience abhors and which subjects me therefore not to external constraint but to the torment that comes from having to do something wrong, and which causes me to feel self-revulsion, remorse, and so on—in short, I face inner oppression. This was what a lot of abolitionists experienced in the nineteenth century in America, and it makes Berlin’s distinctions in some sense inapplicable to America. They were implicated, embroiled in the systematic enslavement of others, and they could not extricate themselves from this evil. They suffered a deprivation of positive liberty. That is what evoked their conscience, in fact. In some ways the most extreme defenders of negative liberty in our history were the slave-owning planters of the pre–Civil War era. Rights was their favorite word. As every serious observer from Burke on noted, they had an intense sense of the value of liberty because they saw what it

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meant to be without it all the time.18 To be free was the very essence of their identity, as opposed to that of their slaves. Every abolitionist remarked upon the fierce passion for personal liberty among the masters. As soon as they were challenged in any respect they cried out that they were being enslaved. Whether it was tariffs, taxes, representation, or territorial disputes, they at once saw their rights in jeopardy, and the cry “We are being enslaved” was a constant feature of their rhetoric, as it was of the incipient labor movement in the North where the cry of “wage slavery” was beginning. It was the specter that haunted them all, but which also defined their liberty. To be sure, the chief use of negative liberty was to enslave the black population. But even if they were less free to speak and read than northerners, they felt free, and they certainly were their own masters. How can one say to people who enjoy such liberty that they are not free? Let’s face it, no one ever had more negative freedom than the slave owners within their domain. They had worries, debts, concerns over censorship of abolitionist mail and patrol service, to be sure, but also enormous spheres of discretion. It is, of course, an idea of freedom in which the wolves eat the sheep in a morally unregulated state of nature, but it sure is genuine negative freedom. Consider, after the Dred Scott case there is a whole people who have no rights any white person need respect.19 If that is not freedom, nothing is. As it turned out over a hundred years later, the masters ceased to have a monopoly of negative liberty, and the doctrine of the equal protection of the laws and a number of other changes redistributed negative liberty to all citizens. Were the masters forced to be free? Yes, and in Rousseau’s sense. 18. Edmund Burke was an Irish-born English politician, political theorist, and author of Reflections of the Revolution in France who took issue with Richard Price, Tom Paine, and the French Revolutionaries’ notion of the rights of man. Despite his polemic against the rights of man as conceived by the new revolutionaries, Burke was a keen defender of acquired and guaranteed rights such as that of an Englishman. Burke abhorred slavery and was an abolitionist before it became popular in Britain. 19. Dred Scott was an enslaved African American who had lived for some time in one of the free American states. He demanded that his rights be acknowledged like those of any white American citizen. In a landmark decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1857), the Supreme Court ruled that neither enslaved nor free African Americans had the standing of citizens, claims to citizenship, or the right to sue in a federal court.



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They had talked more incessantly of rights than any other part of the American public, and they were now being made, unsuccessfully for the most part, to live up to their professed public commitments and to the laws that they had certainly supported when these applied only to themselves. As you know, the freeing of the slaves was not the original object of the Civil War, but its byproduct. It was never popular, and after the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s it was the courts, not the most majoritarian institution, that preserved some modicum of the rights of the black population. There were always, however, people who demanded abolition now. Most were, as I noted, religious, even William Lloyd Garrison, who had quarreled with every Boston congregation because of their lack of zeal; but his was a God-centered morality all the same. Lincoln and Thoreau were another matter. The latter was not at all religious, the former probably was, but it was not part of his political reasoning. For both, positive liberty was crucial. Lincoln grew up in the temperance era. He believed in voluntary, not legislated sobriety, and gradual, not sudden abolition of slavery, which he thought simply wrong. The argument is what interests me here. Both alcoholism and slavery are limits on our freedom and in the same way: because they limit our moral capacities. In one I am enslaved to my passion and in the other to a master. Surely, you say, these are not the same at all. But Lincoln thought they were. There was no difference in his mind between being a slave to a passion so compelling as to reduce my choices and having to do what another person commands; not only because I am left with few choices, but because in both cases an evil overwhelms me. To end either requires self-conquest. For Thoreau the self-imposed slavery, worse than a southern overseer, he said, was self-enslavement to the division of labor, to the ridiculous life we inflict upon ourselves, not on each other, when we go around amassing objects we do not need. We work so we can pay the hospital bills we get because we have worked ourselves into a lot of illnesses. Is his a call for positive liberty? I suppose so. But there is more. Is a government that enslaves anyone good enough for me? For a man with a conscience, smart, well to do? Why should I take it? I am being forced into doing wrong, and I won’t bear it anymore. I am not paying taxes to do wrong. If I do I am not free. I am being interfered with by enforced im-

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morality. Negative liberty was ample in Concord. It was the burden of conscience, the higher self, that sent Thoreau to jail. Were the masters the only ones who were forced to be free? In fact the majority of Americans were forced. They were being forced to do what a minority thought to be right when they were forced to redistribute freedom. There is nothing about negative liberty that says it has to be shared. It is just mine. It is that belief in rights that renders the outcome of the Civil War an act not of enforced negative liberty but of a just distribution of liberty under law. It seems to me that this is not an easy case for Berlin’s concept of negative liberty. Sure, one must separate negative liberty from its conditions. But what are those conditions? And is negative liberty itself not merely a condition for other things, such as are demanded by positive liberty? The classic answer in America, and the right one I believe, has been the theory of rights which combines the two liberties, and demands the abandonment of the monopoly on negative freedom held by the slave owners and others. The presence of ex-slaves forced the extension of rights in amendments and court decisions. It is, of course, not the whole story. The rights orientation of the masters was in the end their greatest ideological contribution to negative freedoms in spite of themselves. Nevertheless, I wanted to focus on rights as a moral notion, because they unite the two liberties in themselves. The right itself is not the only exercise of my negative freedom but also a claim against those who would oppress me and others. It demands positive action to constrain oppressors, and it does so because it is wrong to oppress others, and because government exists to prevent such oppression. The law that demands such action is itself, however, an expression of positive liberty in the sense that it is immoral to sit and do nothing when a human being in our midst is abused. The violation of another is an affront to my conscience. If we do not act to assert the negative liberty of all, our conscience is going to bother us. Or at least it should, and when it does we will not feel as free as when it is at rest. We will lack positive liberty.

Lecture 1: Weizsäcker and Bonhoeffer

i chose weizsäcker and bonhoeffer because their backgrounds were just about identical. The grandparents and parents of both were high-­ ranking academics and officials, both were believing Protestants, and while Bonhoeffer was younger, one of his brothers had been killed in the First World War, in which Weizsäcker had fought as a young naval officer.1 Both were patriotic Germans, both thought the Treaty of Versailles unjust.2 Neither was very interested in the internal politics of the Weimar regime, and both thought that Hitler and the Nazis were a disaster for Germany. But one also thought that Nazism was so evil that he ought not to cooperate with it, and once the war broke out that he should resist its war aims and destroy it. Weizsäcker, on the other hand, supported it to the last hour. What reasons did they offer for their conduct? Weizsäcker had no choice but to account for his actions because he was hauled before an American War Crimes Tribunal and condemned to two years in jail. Upon release he The lecture was originally titled “Weizsäcker and Bonhoeffer: Why Did One Obey and the Other Resist Hitler?” 1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and member of the Confessing Church, which was critical of the Nazi regime. He was arrested in 1943, put into a concentration camp, and executed in the last days of the Second World War. 2. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) was the peace agreement that was supposed to settle accounts between the warfaring parties after the First World War. As the main aggressor, Germany had to bear the weight of war reparations, a heavy financial burden, particularly in the context of the world economic crisis that was soon to follow.

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wrote his Memoirs to defend his conduct.3 And it is on that account rather than what he said at the trial that I am relying here. He was, by the way, defended at his trial by one of his sons, Richard, who was a lawyer and who is now the president of Germany.4 I shall say something about Weizsäcker’s character later, but I want to begin with his own reasoning. After the war he had to leave the navy since it had to be all but abolished, and so he joined the Foreign Office. On his account the roots of all the evils in the international world were due to the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of the Allied powers and then the statesmen at the League of Nations in Geneva to do anything about it. The trouble was that there were no great men, such as those who had assembled at the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. For Germany this meant that it had a right to abrogate all these treaties because it was a community that was prevented from fulfilling its cultural mission. And the rules that must guide nations cannot be the same as those that bind individuals. So you have a man here who believes in great men and in the primacy of the national interest. Bismarck was a hero to him, as to most men of his background. When Hitler came to power Weizsäcker was not going to resign his post in the Foreign Office or go on strike to save a constitutional system for which he had very little respect, and as this was the legally appointed government he thought it only right that it should appoint Party members to some of its foreign posts. What did worry him was the incompetence of the Nazis. They were of course not from upper-class families such as his and those of the rest of the Foreign Office; they were uneducated and far from well-bred. When he came home from Geneva he saw the destruction of Jewish shops and did not like the brawling and attacks on property. These, he decided, were dangerous revolutionaries, but he added that the Jews had brought it on themselves, because under the Weimar Republic they had 3. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Memoirs (London: Gollancz, 1951). Weizsäcker was a German naval officer and member of the Nazi Party and the S.S. He served as secretary to the German Foreign Office from 1938 to 1945. For her critical historical evaluation of Weizsäcker’s role in the German Foreign Office, Shklar relies mainly on Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse: A Study of German Diplomats Under the Nazi Regime (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976). 4. Richard von Weizsäcker served as president of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1984 to 1994.



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“overdrawn their account”—that is, occupied too many important positions in government and business. These feelings again were widely shared and did not imply any sympathy with Hitler. They just meant that an injustice done to a group other than one’s own was not as inexcusable as if it were done to one’s own. It was radical and therefore unfortunate, but not the sort of thing one ought to speak out against vigorously. It was not, to be sure, right, but it was explicable and understandable. Weizsäcker was at that time posted in Norway, and it was there that it occurred to him for the first time that he should resign. But he decided not to do so because he wanted to act as a buffer between the Nazi government and the old, traditional Foreign Office. He feared that there would otherwise be dreadful personnel changes. The real shock came, however, not over that issue so much as that Hitler and his advisers simply ignored the advice of the experts at the Foreign Office. What Weizsäcker hoped was that Hitler and his Nazis would go away like a bad dream. Until then he would, as he put it, “stay at his post” and try to do his best to maintain good relations between Germany and other nations.5 Which is, of course, what Hitler needed him for, but that did not fit in with his sense of his mission, so he managed not to think about it. There are several interesting aspects to this account. First of all, Weizsäcker thought of his civilian duty as exactly the same as a military commission. He was, after all, an old naval officer, but he could have known the difference easily enough, especially as some generals of the army did resign. So the notion of staying at his post like a sentry may have made sense to him, but it was not really persuasive. Secondly, there is the very legitimate principle that the civil service is supposed to serve every government equally impartially. That is why the District of Columbia is not a state. In a constitutional democracy with an effective electoral system this is absolutely essential. One needs a sort of special ethic for public servants, and at its center is that they must do their best without bias for the elected government of the people. They must obey their superiors; they must be loyal to their departments and officers, and to their government in general. 5. See this and similar formulations in self-defense in Weizsäcker, Memoirs, 118– 120.

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It means that to some extent they must put their personal opinions on hold as part of their very special obligations. “You have a right to protest,” it is said, “but you do not have a right to be an intelligence officer,” for example. The U.S. federal government does protect whistleblowers in principle, but not very effectively. Clearly Weizsäcker was extremely loyal to the Foreign Office. It was the entire focus of his sense of duty. And it was to preserve its traditional class and expert character that he wanted to stay there and serve it. The question is, though, whether he knew it to be either useless or in the service of a very unscrupulous regime. He did think of that when he decided not to resign. And one could resign—certainly Weizsäcker could, and he never said that he could not. Cowardice, fear for his family are never mentioned and in the last two years of the Second World War he asked to be transferred to the Vatican, which was granted, so that he sat out the end in perfect safety. The task he now says he set himself was to prevent war, and to prevent the Nazi Party members sent abroad to various embassies from interfering with the Foreign Office personnel. He also assumed that Hitler could not last forever, especially after the so-called Night of the Long Knives, when he had most of his old Party comrades killed. Of course, this made Hitler much stronger. And in any case he approved of the aims of Hitler’s foreign policy; he just minded the crude and clumsy way that it was carried out. He was all for an end to German disarmament, and he was deeply moved by the annexation of Austria. What did upset him was professional and class resentment against the New Man, of whom the new foreign minister, Ribbentrop, was an appalling example: a wine salesman, unstable, and ignorant but fanatically loyal to Hitler and trusted by him. It was in Weizsäcker’s eyes his duty to educate this dreadful man. The latter was a lot shrewder than he realized, of course. When in 1938 the question arose whether to promote Weizsäcker to be the permanent head of the Foreign Office, state secretary as it was called, Ribbentrop was for it because, he said to Hitler, “this man will obey.” In short, Ribbentrop saw well enough that obedience as such was the moving principle of Weizsäcker’s career.6 6. This is obviously not how Weizsäcker saw himself. Shklar here draws mainly on Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse.



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Weizsäcker had known that by staying on he would have to make “concessions” to the Nazis, and he did. He joined the Party and the S.S., Himmler’s outfit, in 1938, when the idea of the neutral civil service was abolished. He also kept urging all the younger members of the Foreign Office to join the Party, even though, as he said, he knew that the “glorification of brutality” was its main doctrine. He never joined the resistance, though some of those young men did and were executed for it in 1944. Weizsäcker thought resistance wrong, and even more so rejected those who hoped that a war would destroy Hitler. He regarded war as a catastrophe that was utterly wrong, but he did stay on during the war, finally as ambassador to the Vatican, until the bitter end, so he did not quit when peace was no longer a possibility.7 Let us assume that his devotion to peace was an afterthought. After all, he applauded all of Hitler’s aggressions, just not the way they were carried out. Still he knew that this was a dreadful and destructive regime, and he did think about resigning. Why did he not do that? He does not claim danger. So fear is not an issue. Nor do I think that he was a simple opportunist. He did have a set of loyalties in place that reinforced his obligations to the state, even Hitler’s Third Reich. What were they? His first loyalty was clearly to Germany as a historic entity, as a nation. It had a culture and a territorial integrity to defend. He thought that the maintenance of Bismarck’s Germany as a great European power was his duty as a naval officer and then as a civil servant. He had no particular loyalty to the Weimar Republic, which he served, nor to Hitler, whom he also served, but he felt that he was obligated to “stay at his post” because as a public servant he had undertaken a special obligation to maintain the country and the people to whom he was profoundly loyal. By loyal I mean a whole set of emotional attitudes, involving in his case class, group, and national feelings. He was loyal to the class from which he came and wanted it to run the foreign service; he was loyal to the Foreign Office as a whole, and he felt that in this he was serving the German state and its interests, which had a permanent existence quite apart from whatever government was in power at any given time. There is no sign that he had any loyalties to anything beyond the state and his class. His wife, he tells 7. As Weizsäcker claims in Memoirs, 120ff.

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us, was upset about the repression of the church, but he says nothing about himself in that regard. Nor does he claim that he did not know what was going on in Poland and in eastern Europe. He knew exactly what Himmler was up to. Indeed, he says that this was a criminal regime, but it did govern Germany effectively, and he was certain that his duty to his country obliged him to serve Hitler since he had from the first been obligated to obey the government. He was serving the state and that meant, for him, obeying the government. Loyalty only fed obligation, so we should not think that the fact that a man or a woman has loyalties that go beyond the existing law or government of their country means that they will stand up to a government that they regard as wrong; on the contrary they may, as Weizsäcker put it, “stay at their post.” Now Weizsäcker said that he thought that in deciding what to do under this government everyone should follow his conscience. And I think that really is what he did, which will have to make us think very seriously about conscience and how it works. His was not, I think, simply flawed; it was based on his specific role, and that is what guided him. We should take him quite seriously and think dispassionately about him and his mindset. It was exactly this mentality that Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected. But do not think that you will be easily drawn to this undeniably heroic figure. He did resist, but with deep reservations, and he did so for only one reason, that his faith as a Christian demanded it of him. And he was absolutely certain that nothing less than such an absolute devotion to the example of Christ could bring one to stand up to the rulers of one’s country. In many ways Weizsäcker’s mindset was not alien to him, and that is why he felt so intensely that only a devotion to a divine example could sustain one in opposition to state and nation. Bonhoeffer came from a family all of whose members rejected Nazism from the first because of its violence and because of its anti-Semitism.8 They were a family of officials and university professors, by no means all 8. Shklar relies here mainly on two Bonhoeffer collections: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. E. Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1972), and True Patriotism, ed. E. H. Robinson, trans. E. H. Robertson and J. Bowden (London: Collins, 1973). Additional information stems from Larry L. Rasmussen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990).



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religious. They were unusually close to one another. One of Bonhoeffer’s brothers and two of his brothers-in-law were also executed by the Gestapo in the last days of the war. That does not mean that all were directly involved in active resistance. In fact, only Dietrich was. But they were all aware of the plot to kill Hitler in July 1944 and thus implicated. What exactly did Bonhoeffer do, and why did he do it? When Hitler came to power the Protestant churches, mostly Lutheran, split into three parts. Some became German Christians who identified closely with Nazism; others were the neutrals who obeyed the Nazis in all respects but stayed out of all political involvement as much as possible on the grounds that it was not the church’s business. And then there was the Confessional Church, which did take a stand on the expulsion of baptized Jews. The ecumenical movement meant a great deal too. Bonhoeffer’s starting point was that Christianity transcended all national boundaries. And so he traveled to America and England in the thirties. He even traveled to Switzerland during the war to keep in touch with churchmen abroad. The trip to Switzerland was made to save a few Jewish friends, but also to get in touch with the World Council of Churches to signal that he and his immediate friends hoped for the defeat of Germany and its redemption through suffering. The trip to Sweden was to try to get the Allies to offer to negotiate peace with a new German government should the plot against Hitler succeed. Otherwise the army would not act. The Allies, probably wisely, refused. Unlike the military and other plotters Bonhoeffer was not interested in getting easier terms for the Germans; he thought that they should be made to pay for what they had done. He returned to Germany even though his American, Swiss, and Swedish friends begged him not to, because he felt that he must suffer with the Germans. It was originally a response to his very few fellow Confessionals who had a strong sense of the church as a community and fellowship. Some were inclined to concentrate on a purely spiritual life and purity of the faith in evil times. Others, rather fewer, had a strong ethical sense, and it is these whom Bonhoeffer eventually, after some hesitation, joined. When the war broke out many volunteered for the army or accepted the draft to be with and serve the soldiers in need of religious sustenance. They did not go as chaplains, just as soldiers, and many believed that the end of the world was at hand because of the evil

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around them. The army was their sacrifice. Others tried to find civilian employment to avoid fighting. Bonhoeffer hesitated, but while he did he tried to help others as they made their decision. In the end he joined the intelligence unit allied to the Abwehr,9 which was the hiding place of the conspirators against Hitler and protected upper-class dissidents like Bonhoeffer. To take an active role required him, in fact, to alter his church-­ centered theology to a world-oriented one. He had begun by believing that the church existed to preach the word of God and administer the sacraments. He now came to believe that the church did not matter—that to be a Christian was to pray and to be righteous, which must mean to join Christ in his suffering. Since Christ was God as a man, to relive his life was the only genuine expression of faith open to human beings on earth. Where the Germans as a people and the church as an institution had both preached obedience to the law of the state or the Law of God or both, he came to reject the notion of obedience as in itself un-Christian and unfree. To be a free and responsible person was to look history in the face and ask oneself, What is right under these circumstances, or what does it mean to imitate Christ under these circumstances? To judge others it was not important whether they acted out of Christian faith or not. If they acted well they were free, responsible persons. This came to him as he had his first prolonged contact with people from the lower classes in prison, and it provided him with an entirely new set of reasons for resisting. He hated heroic gestures, and he disliked anything in the way of martyrdom for himself. To the end he was sure that his high connections would get him out, and he did not mind placating the Nazi authorities in minor matters. After the war began this was a strategy to cover the conspiracies. Before it was a matter of not bothering about trifles but preserving the integrity of the true church in its refusal to cooperate with the regime. Perhaps this inordinately articulate but unformed man gradually came to understand what made him resist when almost no one except his immediate family really did. He had thought that it was the ecumenical and Confessional Church, but that could not be the deepest ground 9. The Abwehr (“Defense”) was the German military intelligence service from 1920 t0 1945.



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because neither his brother nor his brother-in-law was part of the church. In the end he understood as he tore off one layer after another that it was a matter of personal integrity understood as prayer: that is, the example of Christ and doing the right thing. Like Weizsäcker he never claimed that he did not know what was going on, but he judged violence against innocent people and the destruction of a whole population to be wrong to a degree that demanded action, not, as he often repeated, as a means to his own eternal salvation, but first as a matter of the fellowship of the church and then as a disciple of Christ. He began by believing unconditionally in the universal bonds that tie Christians, and then, in the face of war, in the need to be with those who would have to bear the burden of their crimes; “a debt had accrued for every German that would have to be paid off” so he would not give up his citizenship or leave. He thought himself a patriot. “The ultimate question for a responsible man is not to ask how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live.”10 He had ceased to be interested in personal purity; he looked only to civil morality. He was breaking civil and even divine law, for he did not shirk from violence, though he hoped for grace. Conspirators do not have clean hands from the Christian perspective; he was lying and plotting several assassinations, but that was not the point. He looked at the situation from the point of view of the victim, and this had become his point of reference. Prayer and doing justice succeeded the intense communion of shared belief that had structured his life before the war. Conspiracy was an act of repentance for not having done more but also for being part of a class and a nation that did nothing to prevent and much to promote Hitler. “The form of Christ in the world” is the only resort for a person who is confronted by a state that is in violent conflict with human “necessity.” He was, after all, faced with a regime that was bent from the first upon destruction. In such a state of affairs neither tradition nor convention nor anything but personal responsibility is left—in his case, that of Christ’s example, but that was to be seen in all who acted as Christ did, whether they prayed or not; “this-worldliness” had replaced the church as the focus of his adherence. 10. The quotations are from Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers.

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What is so fascinating is that, given his total awareness of what was going on and what it meant, he was not more aghast at the blindness of his church, his class, and his nation. He was not: his large and close family all acted as he did, but that is not all. He was in prison for almost two years before he was killed in a concentration camp, and he never seems to have felt lonely or to have despaired. From this I conclude that it was a mixture of faith and character that made him so upright as well as resilient. The reason that I have gone to such length to discuss Bonhoeffer’s theological development is to show how tremendously complex the life of the individual is who decides that he has a duty to reject the laws of the state in which he lives and in which all his personal ties have been formed. It was not the danger at all but the enormity of what he was doing that required constant thinking and rethinking of his actions. One could speak at first of loyalty to the church fellowship, but then it was something else: loyalty to the example of Christ.

Lecture 2: Antigone

obligation may lead to conflict. It implies, on one hand, the duty to obey the law, to keep promises, to follow social rules generally, because society depends upon our doing so and because it is inherently right and the condition of justice. On the other hand, the difficulty is that we may have grounds for believing that the rules are not right. Much of this course will deal with why people have made that claim and what arguments were then put forward for either obeying or disobeying the laws or the existing government. That is not all. We may have loyalties that are simply in conflict with the demands of the rules: loyalty to the gods, to families, to friends, to affinity groups, or even to an ideal of human perfection. It is fortunate that at the very dawn of our intellectual history a play was written in which many of these themes arise: Sophocles’ Antigone (441 B.C.).1 Drama in Greece was not like our theater. These dramas were open-air public events and also religious rituals. The stories originated in familiar myths but were given specific treatment by exclusively male poets. Masks, dancing, and music were part of the performance. They perhaps resembled our opera; they were terrifically powerful. Indirectly the gods were always 1. For her discussion of the tragedy Shklar relies, apart from the Sophocles text itself, on B. M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964); I. L. Lindforth, “Antigone and Creon,” University of California Publications in Classical Philology 15, no. 5 (1961): 183–260; and C. W. Oudemands and A. P. Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity (Leiden: Brill, 1984).

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present. They have planned the entire course of events, and they are often malevolent and appear to enjoy human suffering. Families are cursed for some infraction on the part of one member, and the rage of the gods is brought down on one generation after another. Given that everything is determined by the gods and by their quarrels with one another, what room is there for human responsibility? Plenty, it appears. Like actors in a play we can perform our part well or badly. It is not so much what we do as how we do it. We can behave fittingly or inappropriately, and the gods and other people hold us responsible for it, punishing or praising us. Politics is almost always involved in a tragedy because it is about heroic individuals who are of necessity aristocrats, kings, or great nobles. No one else matters, except as background. These are men who rule, and their ethical problems are those of powerful men. The great fault of such men is hubris: excessive pride, immoderate willfulness that defies the gods, enrages them, and ends in disaster for the defiant male. So the moral system that we confront in Greek drama is in many ways remote from our own, which does not mean that we cannot see its power or feel its impact. Usually there is one hero in a play, or at most two heroes. They are called protagonists, and all of Sophocles’ heroes have certain characteristics which make them tragic. Not only are they doomed by the gods; they have personalities that bring them down. They are intransigent and inflexible, they will not listen to reason, they refuse to change, they are passionate and morally and intellectually unbalanced; the mockery of the world does not move them because they think of themselves as equals of the gods. As such they are utterly alone, and their despair at the end is terrible. They are autonomous— that is, a law unto themselves, which is what the word literally means in Greek. All of this marks the two central figures of Antigone. There are three main interpretations: A2 is good and true and C3 is a villain; C is right and A, though noble, is wrong; both A and C are right and wrong and undo one another. I am inclined to think, as do many contemporary scholars, that the last is correct; but most readers have preferred the first interpretation, and some very clever philosophers, notably Hegel, 2. Antigone. 3. Creon.



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have held the second view. You should therefore feel perfectly free to make up your own mind. Whatever you choose to think you will be in fine company. There are no acts in a Greek play, but between each episode a chorus comments upon the actions we have just seen or introduces philosophical and religious reflections that pull us back from the main events of the drama and allow us to rise above them momentarily. The chorus does not necessarily express the view of the dramatist; in the case of Antigone we are told that the chorus consists of the chief citizens, the elders of the city of Thebes—but they too are not involved directly in the struggles of the main characters. From the first we know that the two girls whose conversation opens the play are the daughters of Oedipus, who had unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. When he found out what he had done he blinded himself and left the city; his wife, Jocasta, killed herself. Antigone, Ismene, and the two brothers who have just killed each other are all the children of this incestuous, and therefore cursed, marriage. Antigone opens the play by recalling these facts and raging against the hostility that must haunt her and her family. Her gentle sister is just numbed. Antigone then reveals her plan. The king of Thebes, her uncle, Jocasta’s brother, has decreed that one of the slain brothers, Polynices, shall not be buried and that his body is to remain exposed to be consumed by birds and beasts. Anyone who tries to bury him will be stoned to death in public, the usual punishment for people who have committed polluting crimes. The other brother, Eteocles, received a state funeral, because he had defended the city against his brother, who had been a traitor, having married a princess from Argos and joined its army against Thebes. He had a good reason to do so: he and his brother were supposed to alternate yearly in ruling Thebes, but Eteocles would not step down when his term was up. Nevertheless, treason it was, and traitors were reviled, and refusing to bury them was not unknown. Antigone, however, intends to bury her brother and asks her sister to help her. Ismene refuses and offers four reasons for not going along with Antigone’s scheme. First, they are the last living members of their family and they are defenseless. They will be destroyed if they disobey the law and the king. Second, they are women, unfit for battle with men. Third, they are subjects of the king, Creon, and should obey him. She will ask forgiveness of the dead, but

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she will obey because it is her obligation, her duty to do so. Fourth and finally, the whole country is against this project. No one is interested in helping them. They would be going against the entire public. To this Antigone replies in scorn that Ismene has cast aside the principles which even the gods honor: first, the dead have a greater claim on her than the living; second, she loves her brother, and she is ready to suffer and to die for him. Hers is a “holy crime,” which sounds like an impossibility, but it does not seem so to her. She never denies that she is a lawbreaker. Against Ismene one can say that she is cowardly, unprincipled, and a mere survivor, but one might also consider that she is right. It is a hopeless enterprise. Women in Greece were not supposed to have any public voice; they were entirely domesticated and no one would listen to them. And not only is Creon a legitimate king, he has the city behind him. She will do her duty to the dead by prayer, but she is not obsessed by loyalty to the dead. And from the first that raises the fundamental question: How valid is the loyalty which leads us to reject the law? Is Antigone too devoted to the dead? Are not the living more important? She is asking Ismene to die with her in order to serve the already dead. Does life have no claim on her? Does she give Ismene the answer she deserves or just dismiss her harshly? At this point the Chorus enters and tells the story of the brothers and the war and celebrates the end of war. They welcome Creon, a new king for the new conditions. Creon now appears, and he seems like a pretty competent ruler. He has a perfectly legitimate hereditary title to rule, and he proposes to take the advice of the elders. Moreover, he does not intend to put his personal friends ahead of the interests of the city as a whole. He has, in fact, just shown that he is no tyrant. He is a king fit to steer the ship of state. A tyrant was traditionally a usurper who spurned advice and favored his friends at the expense of the city—just what Creon says he will not do. And with the fatal exception of not listening, he sticks to that. A terrified sentry now appears to tell him that someone has spread dust over Polynices’ body and that no vultures now approach it. The leader of the Chorus suggests that this may have been the act of a god. This implies that the elders are uneasy about the decree. Creon, however, rejects the suggestion. The gods do not honor criminals. No, it was all done for money— for a warrior like him, the basest of motives. There are malcontents who



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spurn him in the society, and they have done this. And he plans to punish them. The Chorus returns to offer a magnificent hymn to human ingenuity and intelligence, ending, however, with the observation that those who rule without justice, who do not adhere to the laws pledged to the gods, are doomed to homelessness. In short, we may make ourselves masters of the earth, but if we defy the gods we will be quickly exiled. The sentry brings Antigone before Creon, having caught her in the act of performing the burial rites over her brother. Creon asks at once whether she knew of his decree, thus giving her a chance to plead ignorance, a chance she haughtily scorns, as she had told Ismene she would. She then makes her most famous speech. Is she declaring simply that there is a higher, unwritten law of justice, made for all time by the gods, to which any merely manmade law must give way? She has been obeying the higher law, and she is not going to be stopped by fear of a mere man. Ever since Aristotle drew attention to it this speech has been taken as the first and perhaps the finest expression of the notion of a higher and more universal law than the laws men make. There is, however, more here than that. First of all, Antigone does not only call on Zeus, but on the gods of the netherworld, among whom justice dwells, according to her. She ends with the thought that her life is so troubled that she longs for death. She clearly is devoted not just to her family but to one set of gods, those of the netherworld, and they are not the only gods. Creon’s reply is what you would expect. “She is bragging about her defiance and if I let her get away with this rebellion she is king and I’m a woman.” Gender is definitely involved here, and Antigone does not recognize it. She goes right ahead and mocks him by telling him that his subjects are scared to speak out, but they agree with her. She is not ashamed to be loyal to her brother in front of them. In pointing to support in the city for her piety she is probably right. She has, however, now added another reason for her ­action—love of her brother—rather than simply obedience to the divine law. This is not just family loyalty, though that remains a claim and a powerful one; she has added personal feeling. To this Creon replies, “You may love the dead and die, I live for life.” And there is considerable validity to this, as there was when Ismene said as much right at the beginning. Certainly a ruler has to preserve and nourish prosperity, life, not death. Ismene

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now reappears and wants to die with her sister, since she does not wish to live all alone. Antigone rejects the offer. Ismene, she argues, belongs to the living, while she wants to join the dead. In this she is certainly right, as lsmene’s next move shows. For Ismene proceeds to remind Creon that Antigone is engaged to marry his son Haemon and that Haemon loves her. She speaks for life and marriage indeed, but Creon says roughly that it does not matter; Haemon will find another bride. Here the dark side of Creon comes out strongly. In response to Ismene’s life-affirming view, he shows himself brutal and cynical. Any woman will do for procreation as long as she does as she is told. Love is irrelevant. To be sure, royal marriages have always been political alliances rather than love matches, but that is not what Creon says; he is just violent. The Chorus now grumbles about the gods, who mislead men and put them into a state of mind which leads them to self-destruction. We see their point at once. For Haemon comes before his father and begins gently, obediently, lovingly, and reasonably to dissuade him from carrying out his sentence of death. Killing Antigone will bring disorder to the city, and Creon ought not to defy the nether gods either. Creon rejects this perfectly reasonable argument in exactly the same inflexible way that Antigone had brushed off Ismene at the outset of the drama. A man who cannot keep order in his family cannot keep order in the state. Antigone rebelled and must suffer the decreed punishment. He cannot let her off to please a son. “Obedience to authority saves lives” because cities are always in danger and embattled. Evidently Creon sees government in life-and-death, military terms. That is one source of his rigidity, but he has here gone beyond stubbornness: he has defiantly said, “Let her pray to Zeus,” I don’t care. And in the end he and Haemon part enemies. “You are a mere slave to a woman,” he jeers at his son. And the boy shouts, “I’ll never see you again.” If Antigone is too devoted to her family, Creon appears to have rejected the claims of reason and of love simultaneously. To be sure, he has a point that rulers are not supposed to give in to personal feeling in enforcing the law, but he is not just moved by political wisdom; he is being harsh for its own sake, because the public would approve of his yielding, of humanity, and he turns his back on them. He repeats his rejection of Antigone’s cult of the death gods. But on being reminded by the Chorus, he lets Ismene go free. He



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also decides not to have Antigone killed by stoning, which might turn out to be polluting. She is to be locked up in a rock hollow with enough food to keep alive. If she wants to die it’s up to her. The Chorus intervenes with reflections on the power of Eros. They may have Haemon in mind, and also the danger of Creon’s defiance of so powerful a superhuman force. He has openly thwarted Eros, and he is sure to cause trouble. They may also be thinking of Antigone because she too laments that she will not be a bride. And she compares her fate to that of Niobe, a doomed goddess. The Chorus reproves her for that presumption at once, and she gets angry and bewails her loneliness and exile in this world. The Chorus half blames her and half the gods, who have wished the family curse on her. But they do reproach her for her temerity. The power of Eros may also refer to what Antigone says in her defense. Not only is she returning home by dying, she will there rejoin those she loves. If she had been a widow she could have found another husband. Had her child died she could have had another. But as her parents are dead she cannot have another brother. “That is why I honored Polynices. Having never loved nor had a child, I go alone and desolate to the only place I have.” This adds power to Antigone’s character. She is impelled by two forces, religious loyalty to the dead kin and love, pure Eros. But should we love the dead? Or is the fatality of the children of Oedipus so immense that she accepts it as her fate that the grave is the only place for so polluted a family? She cannot be anything but a stranger in the world of daylight. So when she has been led away, still proclaiming her loyalty and devotion, the Chorus recalls several others who have suffered the same fate, thanks to the will of the gods. That is how matters are for the Chorus, and they do not judge. This sets the scene for Tiresias, the blind seer, who comes to warn Creon. Creon admits, as does the Chorus, that Tiresias has always been right, and Creon knows that he should listen to him, but he does not. Tiresias warns him that the temples are polluted by Polynices’ remains. Creon is walking on “the razor’s edge” and must watch out. Creon rejects this and goes back to his earlier taunt that people, including Tiresias, have been bought off by his enemies. All they want is money. This gets Tiresias really angry, and he now warns Creon that he will lose his son. The nether gods will take their revenge if he persists in his policies and refuses to listen to reason. The

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Chorus recalls Tiresias’s powers of foresight and urges Creon now to bury Polynices and release Antigone. These are the chief citizens of Thebes, and Creon is clearly in serious trouble. And at last Creon sees he must give in. Wearily he agrees that one has to maintain the existing laws. With this remark he recognizes that his decree and his enforcement of it went beyond the bounds of law and tradition. At that moment he also ceases to be a hero, as Antigone never does. That diminishes him by comparison as he goes off to open the cave in which he has locked Antigone, but a messenger tells us he is too late. When he gets there Antigone has hanged herself. Haemon lunges at him, but kills himself instead. The play ends with his wife, Eurydice, hearing of her son’s death, also killing herself. Creon cries out, “I am nobody. I am nothing.” He was unjust, and the gods have made him pay. I have given a rather simple account of the play, and as you can see its complexities are just enormous. What are we to make of it? The majority of commentators have argued that Creon is a classical tyrant, a villain and an oppressor, and that Antigone is a pure, courageous defender of the eternal rules of justice, and she dies defending the good and the right. She is an example to all who are confronted by evil rulers and should resist and struggle against them. No obligation can limit pure goodness, nor is any owed to pure evil. Creon is the equivalent of Hitler, and Antigone is one of the rare and noble examples of courageous defiance of the force of destruction. Most of us are time-servers like Ismene and the Chorus, a bunch of craven courtiers, and while Haemon means well he is futile in his efforts at persuasion. Nothing works except defiance and sacrifice. Indomitable courage is what political evil calls for. Above all she has followed her conscience, and that is what matters most. Against this black-and-white view stands Hegel, who permanently changed the way we read the play.4 According to him this is a confrontation between two equally right claims. Antigone stands for the values of the clan, the family, for a woman’s special duty and sphere to defend and nourish its men and also to tend the family deities, who are the deities of the netherworld. The relation of brother and sister is, moreover, one of special purity because she preserves a bond that ties family, feeling, 4. Hegel discusses Antigone in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts (first English translation, 1835).



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instinct, and tradition to the city where he must act as a citizen and soldier, which she is not. Creon is just as right. He defends the rational, conscious powers of human political conduct. Here we act on our own, and the upper gods only symbolize the values of conscious lawmaking and purposeful human projects, social and intellectual. And while Antigone’s purity and courage are to be adored and admired, historically, Creon was right. He stood for a great step forward, for progress and the recognition that we create our laws and act on premeditated plans. True tragedy on that view is not a deadly conflict between right and wrong but one between two rights; and in that case, Creon has a slight edge, because he represents the manmade world of conscious rationality, rather than the dying religiosity of ancestor worship and familial piety. Antigone had to resist and Creon had to enforce the law. Nevertheless in the contest between two obligations, one regressive and religious, the other progressive and rational, it is clear that the second obligation is greater: Antigone should have obeyed. The tragedy is that, acting in that place and time, she could not possibly have done so. That is her tragedy, but from the voice of philosophy looking back, her obligation is clear. She was wrong. Once the question was opened speculation flowed freely, and this is what sets the problem for you, because many other considerations now enter. Hegel may have the wrong standard, after all. Is it relevant that historical hindsight reveals what could not have been known then and now passes judgment on the past? Has there been progress? And is the state really the voice of public rationality against the individual? Does religion, because it is not rational, have less of a claim on us than politics? Think it over. Instead we may want to look more closely at the conduct of the protagonists. There is much to be said for seeing Creon as a hero parallel to Antigone. They are two forms of heroism confronting one another. Neither is purely political or purely religious, but each has both politics and religion in mind. Antigone serves the nether gods, and she stands for the archaic primacy of the blood clan against the newer, Athenian city, in which public law and deliberation have displaced the primacy of blood ties. Creon speaks for that political order and also for the gods that protect it, chiefly Olympian Zeus, the god of justice. Their clash, moreover, reveals that both are heroes. Both

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end by disparaging the gods in setting themselves up as their equals. Neither one listens to reason, moderation, or love. One rejects a sister, the other a son. Both are reckless. Each does have an ideal, hers of family loyalty, his of good government of Thebes. But there is a difference. He is deflected by egotistic vengefulness, she by an excess of love for the dead brother. If she appears to be moved by an appalling death wish, that is her response to her family’s fate. His affirmation of life is not like Ismene’s, simple and loving, but a glorification of power, his own and his city’s. He does not, in spite of Hegel, make or express a more general human claim. We cannot easily impute it to him. Antigone may love death and the dead, and her loyalty may be misdirected, but she harms no one but herself, and in the end, given how mad both brothers were, to refuse to bury one was unjust and ritually unacceptable to the gods. Tiresias does not warn her against her action; she is, after all, perfectly clear-eyed. She wants to die. Creon is deluded and only acts when it is too late. That does not settle the matter of Antigone’s rebellion. She is by far the more admirable of the two heroic figures, but was she right to march to her death out of loyalty to her dead brother? It was not religion or even a death wish only; it was love that moved her. She was not preventing the pollution of the city—she never made that a ground for defying the decree. She just throws it in Creon’s teeth that many citizens side with her against him. Hers was not a public stand. It was a mixture of fatalism, loyalty, and love. Certainly it was not conscience as we understand it, something individual. She was obeying a law, as she says over and over again. It is not the law of the rulers, but that of the netherworld, that is the only difference. Is she doomed? Ismene is Oedipus’s daughter also, but she does not act out that script. She is loyal, with the utmost courage, to her last living sibling, to her sister, and she loves her as much if not more than Antigone loves her dead. She alone seems to affirm life and renewed procreative family life. Certainly Creon does not. Politics rests on a disciplined family; it is power all the way for him. Ismene does defy him in the end, but no more than Antigone for public reasons. Moreover, to his credit, Creon knows innocence when he sees it, and does not kill her too. She is the sole survivor. In this third view, there is no clear answer to the conflict between obligation to the law and personal loyalty. Nor is it easy to judge between the two political



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and religious principles that the protagonists defend. If these were simple the play would not rivet audiences, and indeed we would not have been struggling over the questions it raises for well over two thousand years. There are many other tellings of this story. Two modern ones are particularly interesting because they are completely political. Alfieri’s is just as ambiguous as Sophocles’,5 which is odd, because he was a passionate hater of tyrants and loved individual liberty. He rejoiced in the French Revolution until it went bad. Then, written during the German occupation of France, there is Jean Anouilh’s interpretation, which is so cynical that it makes me uncomfortable.6 This by no means exhausts the versions, but I shall tell you about these two because they are modern interpretations of the story and point to different ways of thinking about the fundamental challenge that Antigone’s and Creon’s conduct poses. In Alfieri’s 1782 play Ismene is replaced by Polynices’ wife, and she is just as eager as Antigone to bury the corpse. The funeral is not, however, Antigone’s main purpose. Oedipus is still alive, and she is determined to avenge his exile in some way, though she fully recognizes his ghastly sin and the curse it has put on his children. It is rebellion against Creon as a usurper and a tyrant as such that is thus a primary political motive for her. Creon emerges as a very complicated figure. Half his speeches are taken right out of Machiavelli’s The Prince, explaining why he has to be devious and harsh in order to establish a new dynasty and to secure the throne for the son whom he loves. He has in fact issued the decree against burying Polynices solely to entrap Antigone. He knew what she would do, and it gives him a pretext for punishing her and getting rid of the last claimant to his throne. When his son protests and he sees that this might cause trouble he comes up with a much less painful scheme. Let Antigone marry Haemon, who adores her, and thus Oedipus’s claim to the throne will disappear as his daughter becomes queen to the next ruler. Again he is secured in his throne. And the city certainly does need such a reign after the recent turbulence and war. Unfortunately, Antigone refuses, out of loyalty to her father. He was driven from Thebes, and she must demonstrate her loyalty to him by showing 5. The Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri’s five-act tragedy, Antigone, was written in 1782 and revised in 1789, the year the French Revolution began. 6. Anouilh’s Antigone was first performed in Paris in 1944.

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nothing but unyielding hostility to Creon and his son. This is what noble pride and family solidarity demand. She therefore prefers to die rather than to live but persuades her sister-in-law to return to Argos to bring up Polynices’ son. The end is more or less the same as in Sophocles. Here the conflict is one between political realism—the necessities of a new, barely legitimate government—and the demands of conscience. But that conscience does not cry out for political justice or for freedom against the tyrant, but for the rights of a father who, though an outlaw, has yet a claim to the throne and to his daughter’s undying loyalty. The conflict between love and political duty is also much sharper for Haemon and Creon—the latter shows his love for his son openly—and for Antigone and Haemon. This is a different world from that of Greek heroes. Here the struggle between loyalty and politics is clear and the question it poses is about how far government can be compromised by the demands of personal love, loyalty, and family ties. Creon is a usurper, a schemer, but when he says he has to be cruel to be just, he has a point. He also has to be harsh and sly to keep order and defend Thebes against Argos. Against this Haemon pleads for love and Antigone for her need to die to remain true to her accursed family. Again, who is right? And how much do motives matter in politics? Creon’s are not unworthy; does that matter? Neither are Antigone’s; does that matter, either here or in Sophocles? Alfieri does bring this very much to the front. In the second modern telling, Anouilh’s 1944 version, no one is right. All the characters are futile and mildly repugnant. And the conflict is not between right and wrong, but between men who act politically and women who reject politics as a disgusting game and the causes that men take up as ridiculous and nauseating. Literally they stink. Creon is much the most interesting character. He did not want to be king. He was really a patron of the arts and an intellectual. He was thrust on the throne by Oedipus’s and his son’s deaths and he does not particularly enjoy being king. But it is his job and he means to do his best. He has nothing but contempt for Antigone’s brothers, who were a pair of worthless scoundrels and playboys, and he cannot see why Antigone fusses over such brothers. We cannot see why she does either. She offers no reason except that she is here to defy, to say no to Creon’s conventional political world. She is not for anything, but she is protesting against the male world of politics. She also detests



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hope and moderation; they cannot satisfy her. Neither can the expectation of fulfilled love with Haemon. She is defying not this or that policy, but the masculine world of law and order and the reasonable disaster that it promises; it is all too tawdry for her. But when she is taken off to prison, she tells the guard she cannot imagine why she is acting in the way she is, and she writes Haemon a love letter asking his forgiveness. Creon is childish, as Anouilh says, and so is she. It’s a silly story. Oppressors are ridiculous and so are resisters. Above all, political causes and ideals are absurd. No question, Ismene is the only sane person around, and if Haemon were sane he would have married her. This is an Antigone in which politics and anti-politics confront each other, and while we are much more likely to side with the latter, we must face a degree of pointlessness in defying politics merely because they are “cheap kitchen smells.” If there is anything political in Antigone’s rebellion, it is aristocratic fastidiousness, not conscience. This does not mean that it may not play a very significant part as an incentive for disobeying the law, especially the law of democratic governments. I close with these two modern plays, partly to illuminate the complexity of the moral and religious world of Sophocles’ tragedy, but also to show the limits of a purely political view of the moral universe. In Alfieri the conflict between political realism and traditional loyalty is visible, but in Anouilh we get pure contempt for all politics, so that even to oppose it is inevitably to get soiled by it; there is really no difference between Creon and Antigone. They deserve each other. Count me out, in short. The real contest between Creon and Antigone is more tangled, however, and that is why she remains one of the great women heroines of all times. Not because she is simple, but because she is not.

Lecture 3: Crito

the line “i to die and you to live” is what Antigone says to Ismene in their encounter in front of Creon, and Socrates, of course, must have known the play; he was in his late twenties when Antigone was first performed, and it was famous from the first. We can see why he would identify with her; he too could have saved himself by bending and by placating his opponents, but refused to do so. He was just as unbending and with the same result. By telling the democratic jury of Athens that they were either, like Ismene, spineless, or possibly unjust, like Creon, he was not endearing himself to them. From the opening words of his defense he treated them with scorn and sarcasm. Clearly he was every bit as defiant as Antigone had been. His reasons were, however, quite different. Antigone may have worshipped the gods of the underworld too exclusively, but no one claimed that they and her blood kin had no recognized ethical or religious claims on her. Socrates, however, invokes a semi-divine authority that is all his own, unknown to his fellow citizens, and bases his defiance upon its inner voice, a private oracle all his own. We would call it conscience, and we think of it as something we all share. The Athenians did not, however, know of such a universal internal force. Their gods were civic and public deities, and morality was a matter of externally validated local and possibly national rules, not of a private inner voice. In invoking it Socrates was a moral revolutionary of the first order, and those political thinkers who, like Hegel, think that the existing public law is the privileged party in a conflict with the moral

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values that private individuals may proclaim believe that the people of Athens were justified in putting Socrates to death. Since Socrates’ was the voice of a higher morality, in fact, he was also right, so the confrontation was one between two rights and was a real tragedy. In this again he resembles Antigone. Who was Socrates, and how did he come to be condemned to death? How did he respond to the sentence finally? Was he consistent and did his arguments make sense?1 We know a lot about Socrates, not only because he is the hero of most of Plato’s dialogues but because several other authors wrote about him, the most famous being Aristophanes, whose comedies give as much pleasure now as they did then. In one of them, The Clouds, Socrates is pictured as a phony scientist, a charlatan who misleads and bilks honest folk. The charge of impiety to the gods may have brushed off on him because he was identified with some of the advanced scientists of the time, but this is not entirely clear. In any case, when at his trial Socrates says that he has acquired a notorious reputation as a result of the comedy and will probably be judged accordingly, he certainly had a point. The reason why he was on trial was not due to his eccentricities, however, or the irritation he caused his fellow citizens by his habit of engaging them in conversation solely to prove to them that they knew less than they thought they did, though that cannot have added to his general popularity. He was on trial because he was associated with, and indeed revered by, a band of aristocratic youths, one of whom, Alcibiades, had betrayed and ruined Athens in its war against Sparta, and others of whom had been part of an oligarchy that had overthrown the democracy and governed Athens with a rule of terror for a year. That was 1. Socrates’ method of interrogating interlocutors to bring them to an understanding of his philosophy—today known as the Socratic method—comes down to us mainly known through the works of his contemporaries Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. Shklar draws in this lecture on Plato’s Apology as well as the Crito, and on Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); A. D. Woozley, “Socrates on Disobeying the Law,” in The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Vlastos (New York: Anchor, 1972), 299–318; and G. F. W. Hegel Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 2: Plato and the Platonists, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simpson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), 384–448.

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the Oligarchy of the Thirty, and unlike many decent people Socrates did not flee the city during their blood-soaked reign. The renewed democracy had, however, declared an amnesty, and Socrates certainly could not legally be tried on charges arising from anything he might have done under the Oligarchy. So the charges were trumped up, in what was evidently a political trial and a way to dissolve the antidemocratic, aristocratic discipleship group that coalesced around Socrates. The trial procedures of democratic Athens were not what we would regard as judicially acceptable. Any citizen could bring charges of public misconduct against another, and the jury consisted of five hundred citizens. There were no lawyers, and the rules were lax. The accused had a right to propose an alternative penalty to the one demanded by his accusers, and he was expected to bring in his family and friends to make emotional appeals to the jury. This last Socrates refused to do as being beneath his dignity. But in any case you can see that even as political trials go, this was a free-for-all. The charges were therefore apparently nonpolitical. First, he had shown impiety to the gods; secondly, he had corrupted the youth of Athens. The latter charge had evidently clear political implications even if worded vaguely. It cannot be said that Socrates answered either of the charges, but he did turn the tables on his accusers. He was particularly effective in telling them that they had never spent two minutes seriously thinking about what it means to corrupt the young. The point for us is not only Socrates’ defiant conduct at the trial but some of the things he said about the limits of his obedience to governments and courts. He told the court that he would disobey any order to stop philosophizing exactly as he had in the past. This was a penalty he had no intention of obeying, and he said so very plainly. Then he also told two stories about his past conduct. One was that under the democracy, the council of which he was a member had voted that ten commanders who had failed in the battle be punished as a group. He had voted against the measure being carried out, even though his fellow councilors threatened to execute him. But the measure was unconstitutional, and this was eventually recognized. What this story illustrates is less a refusal to obey than a refusal to go along. His inner voice stopped him from doing what he thought was wrong, and he certainly showed his courage



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and independence. He had already mentioned his courage in battle. Here we are dealing perhaps with adherence to fundamental law rather than to the pressure of immediate and illegal political passion. His refusal was not, however, an act of resistance to law, and Socrates does not say that it was. More telling is his second story. Under the reign of the Thirty he and four other men were ordered to arrest an innocent citizen, Leon of Salamis, whom the Oligarchy wanted out of the way. Socrates refused to obey and did not go along with the other four to fetch Leon. Here is a clear act of defiance against a government that is in power. The reason Socrates gives is that the order was unjust, not that it was unconstitutional, and one thing he refused to do was to unjustly injure another person. This was, indeed, very much against Greek popular attitude. Socrates constantly asserted that is was worse to inflict than to suffer injury. We cannot help but come away from reading the Apology thinking of Socrates as a completely independent person with no respect for authority as such, who only listens to his own private daemon,2 and cannot even bring himself to show enough respect for the members of the jury, his fellow citizens, to establish his innocence to save his own life. In one respect he does resemble Antigone, which is no doubt why he quotes her. He is not at all afraid to die. We do not really know what death is like, he points out. It may be a sleep, or we may meet up with all the previous generations, and he would look forward to that, especially the heroes of the Trojan War, with whom he identifies. How do we reconcile this defiant spirit with Socrates’ arguments in the Crito? And how good are the arguments he advances in that dialogue? Because there he does seem to be saying that under no circumstances is it ever right to disobey the laws of one’s country, even if they result in an unjust verdict of death. Before I go on to say more about the discussion in the Crito, there is one very important point to note: that injustice is being done to Socrates. He is not being forced to do an injustice to another person. He is the victim; he is not injuring another person. And that issue is not raised in the Crito. He is not discussing whether it is right to disobey a law or a 2. In the board notes that accompanied the lectures Shklar points out that Socrates’ inner voice—his daemon—tells him to accept the verdict, a decision that for Hegel becomes the birth of conscience.

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judgment that is unjust to another person, such as going to arrest Leon. Here it is entirely a matter of enduring an injustice done to oneself. The question is not whether one has to obey an order or a verdict that would force one to act unjustly toward another person or to injure other people. It is entirely limited to having to endure an unjust act committed against oneself. No other case is even mentioned. So in a way the discussion is limited. That is why I went over the two cases where Socrates refused to obey so carefully, because there he was being forced to injure other people unjustly. The real argument about obedience is in the Crito. We left Socrates a defiant and combative man. Now we find him sleeping like a baby in his cradle. His friend, Crito, who is very agitated, has been pacing up and down the prison, but Socrates has been fast asleep. We are clearly meant to understand that his expectation of death does not in the least trouble him. He tells Crito that at his age, seventy, he cannot be expected to be anxious, but Crito replies quite truthfully that lots of old people are unreconciled to death—and to being poisoned the next day, at that! But Socrates tries to calm him only by telling him that he had a very reassuring dream about a woman dressed in white who will obviously be taking him to a better place soon. Crito is not particularly impressed by this story, and I cannot see why he should be; it is merely meant to underline Socrates’ indifference to death. Crito now makes his proposal. He wants Socrates to escape from prison and flee abroad. There will be no difficulties; it has all been arranged by his friends. And he gives four reasons to persuade Socrates. The first is the most important one: that his friends love him and want to continue to live with him. That is the claim of friendship. The second argument is that Socrates is simply doing what his enemies want by allowing the sentence to be carried out. The third argument is that he is letting down his sons, who need him so they can be educated. And last, and obviously contrived, is the claim that his friends will be accused by the general public of having been lax in failing to save him. This is a “What will people say?” argument about public opinion. Of all the reasons given, this is clearly the weakest. And it could have been simply turned away by Socrates’ saying, “I doubt that anyone would blame you.” That is not, however, what Socrates does at all.



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He completely ignores Crito’s argument of friendship. He never even acknowledges that such an argument exists. At no point does Socrates make the slightest gesture of friendship to the grieving Crito. It is as if friendship were utterly insignificant. If Socrates feels any loyalty toward his friends he certainly does not mention it. At the trial he did say that they were very loyal to him, which proved that he had not corrupted them since they were capable of such friendship, but he does not seem to return their friendship, or at least he never mentions it, and Crito’s plea is ignored as if it did not deserve a response of any kind. Actually, Socrates at this point comes across as a perfectly awful man. Antigone died for her family, but evidently Socrates is not willing to live for his friends. The one argument that Socrates does pursue relentlessly is the least important: “What will people say?” Should we listen to the fickle public or to experts in making important decisions? This is an important issue, he says, and we have to listen to reason, not to the opinion of the many who are unstable and ignorant. The only question before us is whether it would be right or wrong for me to escape to Thessaly. Now at the trial Socrates had said that his wisdom consisted in knowing that he was not wise, unlike the rest of Athens, but here he clearly suggests that he is an expert on moral reasoning, or at least at being able to tell good from bad reasons for doing something. And he did want to convince Crito that what he is going to do is right because then he will agree, friendship or not, that this is what Socrates should indeed do. But let me repeat, the substantive claim that friends have on him is never mentioned: Crito’s most intense plea is just brushed aside. In this Socrates reminds us of Antigone, who is also deaf to the pleas of Ismene, who needs her as her last living family relation and friend. Socrates begins his argument as an expert by reminding Crito of their shared doctrine that it is never right to injure anyone. Would they be injuring the city if he escaped? Would they be doing so by breaking a standing agreement between Socrates as a citizen and the city as a whole? And he answers yes. First comes the generalizing argument: Would it not destroy the city if everyone disobeyed its laws and the judgments of its courts? This is the most common argument in such cases. “What would happen if everyone

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behaved this way?” Clearly all law and order would collapse. This is an argument about the consequences of Socrates’ action, and we ought to look at it in that way. There are all kinds of actions which are perfectly acceptable if one person carries them out but not if pursued by everyone. You can always take your money out of the bank; it is only wrong if you start a run on the bank by causing others to panic. Is Socrates, by fleeing, inciting others to do the same? Is it likely that his conduct will cause other convicts to attempt escape? It is highly improbable. Crito is suggesting a quiet escape from an unjust verdict; most people in jail have been convicted quite fairly as far as we know, and there is no evidence offered that they would or could escape as Socrates might. So in itself the generalizing argument, which is a utilitarian one, is not particularly convincing. There is no reason to suppose that by escaping Socrates would in fact be “destroying the law.” He then turns to a quite different argument—what we might call an argument of familial duty. It is taken for granted that children owe their parents a special duty of obedience and respect. Socrates now claims that the kind of obedience one owes one’s parents is owed to the city as well, for two reasons. First, it educated him as much as any parent. Second, and more important, it gave him life because its laws made the marriage of his parents, and family life in general, possible and beneficial. So the city is even more important to his birth and upbringing than his biological father. (I might note that his mother is not even mentioned.) How good is the argument of filial duty? Let us suppose that it is true that family and educational law really do have the importance that Socrates ascribes to them: Are adults obliged to obey their fathers unconditionally? They may owe them respect and support, and above all gratitude, but surely not unquestioning obedience. That is what a child may have to do, but surely that sort of obedience is the first thing that goes in adulthood. Yet Socrates asserts that it is a sin against one’s father and to one’s country not to do “whatever your city and your country command,” in war, in law courts, and everywhere else. Now Socrates is talking about the gratitude we should feel toward the laws that have made our education and development possible, and this is analogous to what we should feel for our parents. But do we have to express our gratitude by obedience? If it is an injury to dis­obey, then that might be the case, but not all disobedience is injurious, as we saw. We may



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indeed owe our parents gratitude, and we show it by kindness, attention, and even deference, but not by unconditional obedience. A good parent would not command an adult son or daughter to do something, in any case. So the notion that gratitude means unconditional obedience due to fathers and countries no matter what is on shaky grounds, because it is not a good analogy for an adult of seventy years. We do not owe that to fathers, and not to cities either, even if both have a good claim on our gratitude. Socrates may have felt uneasy here because he then adds a condition: Can this duty to obey be in accordance with universal justice? It is hard to make sense of this. He made no effort to persuade the jury during his trial. He clearly did not think it worth trying. So he may be saying that since I failed to persuade or did not try to do so, there is nothing for it but to obey my father-country. The duties we incur as family members are not chosen; they arise because we have a certain place in an existing group: our family, our locality, our neighbors. We owe them something special because they and we are tied by bonds which arise out of the inevitable conditions of life, like birth and place and closeness. We do not agree to be born and to go to school, but we do form ties that bind us and that arouse loyalties and duties to those who are close to us, as well as affective ties. Socrates said nothing about those ties, only about duties. Perhaps Socrates realizes that these arguments are not exactly unanswerable, so he tries a completely different tack. He now argues for the obligation of contract. He reminds Crito that he could, like any other Athenian citizen, have left Athens quite freely at any time during his life. There were no emigration restrictions, and he could have taken his property along. On the contrary, there were several colonies where he might have settled quite readily. But he did not. Instead he remained in Athens all his life, carrying on his philosophical activities. “You have chosen us,” his fellow citizens must say. “And in fact you said in court that you preferred death to banishment because you could not go on philosophizing abroad. By escaping now you are breaking your promises and covenants with us.” This is a powerful argument. Socrates has given what is called “tacit consent”—that is, he may not have signed a contract with the city, but by living and working there all his life when he could have left he indicated as clearly as possible that he had accepted its laws and procedures, and

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the judgments that would result from them. He cannot just reject them unilaterally because they have now turned out to be painful for him. This is a contractual argument, and it says you are obliged to keep contracts that you freely entered into and whose benefits you seem to have amply enjoyed until now. The question is, Did he, or does anyone, agree to a flagrantly unjust political act? Even if the city is what we now call almost just. After all, it was the most interesting place on earth at the time. Does obligation extend to obedience to unjust orders, decisions, official acts of any kind? We know that Socrates does not think so. He disobeyed when the Thirty told him to bring an innocent man to his death. But this time the decision does not make him unjust to another person; it only makes him suffer himself. He does not, however, draw the distinction in this way. He turns to himself as a special case, and some of the arguments are not at all convincing. “I will be laughed at if I leave the city now.” After what he said to Crito about not minding public opinion this is not a very acceptable argument. It seems it is all right if Crito and his friends lose their reputation by not helping him, but he must not make himself look ridiculous by escaping at this late stage in his life. He would appear in a disreputable light. His fellow citizens know that breaking his contract with the city would be a stain on him and that he would not be able to live a respectable life in Thessaly, which is a luxury-loving, corrupt, and lax city. It is not, however, his reputation alone that matters to him, after all. If he escapes it will reflect terribly on his children. He will be setting them an awful example, and it will not help their education. So he has come around after all to answering one of Crito’s original arguments: that he should stay alive in order to attend to the education of his sons. Socrates points out that living a disreputable life in a sort of Las Vegas presumably would not help their education at all. A law-abiding death would do more by way of setting an example for them. So he sums up his two sets of arguments thus: The first is that the city and its laws are his parents, his guardians, and he owes them a filial duty of obedience. The second is that he is returning wrong with wrong, evil with evil. Because the verdict against him is unjust, he is breaking his agreement to be an obedient citizen of Athens; if not in actual-



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ity then in intention he is destroying the law. By defying it he is saying that it has no claim on him and so is not law. Why does Socrates make such a barrage of not very strong arguments? There are two main suggestions. One is that this is the birth of conscience as a purely personal, subjective moral impulsion. He has no way of making other people understand the force of what he calls his daemon or personal oracle. But he knows that he is doing what it commands, that he does not suffer from its pangs and bothers now that he has decided to obey. Fundamentally he thinks that one should obey the laws of a generally just city, and the fact that his fellow citizens have turned against him is not a good enough reason to seem to disobey the judgment of a lawfully constituted court whose judgments in principle he believes one should accept. If there is injury done him he would still be injuring the city by refusing to obey, and he had spent all his life saying that revenge was wrong—that it was worse to do than to suffer injury. The question still remains, Would he really be injuring the city more by refusing to obey a mistaken verdict than by escaping? After all, is it ever right to let a city or an individual be unjust without doing something to stop it? Even if it happens to be you who is being treated unjustly? Is it not better to defy injustice under all conditions and in all cases? Here it really becomes a matter of calculation and guessing at consequences. Will Athens learn more by his death or by his defiance? What would really persuade them, as Socrates says one must try to do in cases of unjust public actions? He does not say so explicitly, but he may have felt that he owed his city the better lesson. By dying he would shame its citizens or at least cause them to reflect. If he went to Thessaly to live an unworthy life, they would say, “We told you so—this man is a charlatan who did corrupt our youth, and whom we were quite right to condemn.” If he dies a dignified death they will not be able to say this. That is why the argument about his reputation may be a very important one. He is following his conscience, and his reputation constitutes the lesson he believes he owes his city. This explanation of Socrates’ conduct from conscience is the one I prefer. There is another one which is a little different. It accounts for his behavior entirely and particularly in terms of his concern for the reputation of

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philosophy. He recognizes that he is an exception, because he is a philosopher. If he were to run away he would jeopardize the relation between philosophy and the city. He would prove that philosophers are disloyal, disobedient, and indifferent to the laws and customs of their cities, and that in the end they are so amoral, so atheistical and skeptical, that they will do anything to save their skins. By going to Thessaly he would put even his devotion to philosophy in doubt, since he would have no opportunity to practice it there in his accustomed way. So it is as a philosopher, not as a man and a citizen, that he refuses to go. I am not altogether persuaded by this argument. While it is true that Socrates said he would not go on living if he could not philosophize, and that it was impossible to do so in exile, it is only his particular way of practicing philosophy that would be i­ mpossible— that is, going around town interrogating the citizens, buttonholing them to show them that they were not as wise as they thought, and that they ought to be as skeptical and aware of their ignorance and uncertainty as he was. In short, if philosophy is identical with this sort of public investigation into common belief, then it was indeed impossible anywhere but in Athens. But surely there are other, less public and socially combative ways of philosophizing, and there is no need to court such a collision. Most philosophers, however offensive their doctrines, are just ignored. So we come back to Socrates as a unique individual, aware of his own moral uniqueness and his difference from other Athenians, and his final sense that the rules that he would impose on himself arose from his quite special mission and discovery. That at least makes sense of the contractual obligation and the final reputation arguments. The argument about what would happen if everyone did this and the duty to obey the city as a father and guardian do not, it seems to me, make sense. And the refusal even to respond to the plea of friendship that Crito makes is inexcusable. All this makes Socrates’ points in the Crito very unusual. He is not moved by loyalty. If any loyalty is involved, it is to philosophy as an abstract quest, and I doubt that this is what is moving him. He is responding to a wholly dissociated conscience, which he cannot even explain, because it is unique to himself, and it is thus as a matter of being true to himself that he decides to go to his death in the most dignified way. If he thinks of justice at all, it is that such an example has more to offer his sons and, we may infer, the



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Athenians as well, than a life in disreputable exile. Better a noble death than a dubious life. That also makes it impossible to generalize from his example, though, as we shall see, he has put a very enduring set of arguments on the intellectual map. Filial duty, contractual obligation, and setting an example are all here. So it is quite a dialogue after all.

Lecture 4: Friendship

last time i made much of Socrates’ indifference to Crito’s plea of friendship and family feeling. Today I want to examine the claims of friendship in more detail. I use the word friendship very expansively to cover family members as well as elective affinities, what we more usually call friends. I do so because in our time we no longer have to limit friendship, as we did in the past, to members of the same sex and to people who are not members of our nuclear family. Since marriage is now a free choice, both at its beginning and with divorce at its end, it is not so different from friendship as it was when this was not the case. Indeed, relations between grown children and parents can be friendships because there is now so much less dependence and social and political regulation of their relationship. This is true especially in America. However, even when friendship was construed more narrowly as a bond between males (women being normally ignored altogether), there were writers who realized that in a purely political context, friendship and family affection had much in common. But to say so much about who is involved when friendship is mentioned within the political order hardly begins to tell of the complexities of the idea of friendship. Before one can even start to consider how friendship and political obligation are related to one another, one has to take a look at what friendship means in the first place. And it is not easy. To illustrate these difficulties I shall tell you some true stories, but before

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I begin I want you to ask yourselves a question. If your dearest friend, a parent, or a spouse in our society committed an act of political betrayal, probably espionage or aiding an enemy in time of war or supporting an organization that plots the violent overthrow of the government of the United States, would you turn him or her in to the FBI? My first story is about Coriolanus, a Roman nobleman about whom Shakespeare wrote a play, though I shall stick to the account that Plutarch gives of him.1 He was noble and even generous but lacked discipline, according to Plutarch. Marcius, which was his real name, belonged to one of the most aristocratic families of the republic and was a renowned soldier. His victory over the tribe of the Corioli gained him his second name. What was unique about him was that having lost his father as a child he was intensely devoted to his mother, with whom he lived even after his marriage. All he did in his life was done to please her. His devotion to her was absolute. In politics, out of arrogance, he did everything he could to insult the people, and in this he gained the support of many young men from families like his own. Marcius, in fact, wanted to rise to some significant office in the state that required election. Instead of compromising, however, he became even more hostile to the people and their interests. What he did was designed to bring about a civil war by provoking his fellow citizens and treating them with disdain. In response the people’s assembly tried him on a charge of corruption in handling booty after a battle and condemned him. Marcius went home, kissed his mother good-bye, walked out of the city gates, and went right over to Rome’s worst enemies, the Volscians. In Rome itself the civil disorder he had ignited did not die down. Moreover, the Romans had every reason to think that Marcius would lead the ­Volscians in an assault upon them that would destroy the city. So the women of Rome implored his mother to plead with him. The argument she made to her son concerned gratitude, reminding him that Rome was his parent no less, indeed more, than she was. You recall that gratitude was one of Socrates’ grounds for obligation. What Plutarch found so utterly objectionable in Coriolanus was not that 1. Whether the Roman general Gaius Marcius Coriolanus, the main character of William Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name, is based on a real historical figure is still debated. The first-century A.D. writer Plutarch locates him in the fifth century B.C.

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he betrayed first Rome and then the Volscians. He found him intolerable first because he threatened Rome with civil war out of his pride and vanity and political folly. Then he was wrong again because his reason for abandoning the Volscians was his love for his mother, a private personal loyalty, not political or military reasoning. In both cases he showed a total lack of political understanding. His life was not simply the illustration of fatal flaws of character; it was also an addition to a long line of thought about the political implications of friendship. As far as Plutarch was concerned, friendship was a threat to the republic because it concentrates on particular individuals not on the city as a whole. The young men who admired and loved Coriolanus were a political faction, and they almost plunged Rome into a civil war. Then Coriolanus proved to be a poor general because he abandoned his charge in order to please his mother. What was the state of the arguments about friendship and political obligation up to Plutarch’s time—for by then most, though not all, of the chief arguments were already in place? Socrates’ indifference to Crito’s pleas were not a momentary aberration on his part. Quite the contrary. Plato thought, as did many subsequent thinkers, that friendship, erotic love, and marriage were incompatible with the best possible human life and with the duties of the best rulers. At best, friendship was a stage in the education toward self-perfection, inferior both to the love of one’s city and to philosophy. In an ideal republic the rulers, the guardians, do not feel any particular attachments. They have no personal property and no families, and they form no personal bonds with any other guardian. Men and women live and act together and they mate only for the sake of procreation under strict eugenic planning. This is the result of their entire education, in which they learn to concentrate all their striving on the pursuit of truth and in which their character is molded so that they care only for the art and science of ruling a city as a whole and rendering it happy and well ordered. The intensity of their moral and intellectual training, heavily tilted toward mathematics and logic, is meant to redirect all their emotions from the personal and specific to the rational and public; ultimately, at a certain age, to a life of pure contemplation. Here friendship is seen as an obstacle both to philosophic thought and to public activity. It is, however, not quite a matter of obligation. The guardians do not perform their public tasks because they



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have a duty to do so. They do these things because they have been trained to neither want, nor to be able, to act differently. Before they are taught to think they are already conditioned by a period of psychological training that makes it virtually impossible for them to behave differently. Obligation implies that the individual confronts her or his political duties and decides whether she or he should or should not perform them, like Antigone and Socrates. The perfect, friendless philosopher-ruler does not choose, he is. And one of the things he is, is immune to the disturbances of affection. He has been bred literally to be such a man or woman. The conflict that Crito presents to Socrates is thus avoided. It cannot even arise, because there is no friend to create it. This austere view was not limited to Plato. A substantial school of Christian theology held that to love our enemy and to love our neighbor, meaning all our neighbors or all humanity, absolutely precluded any particular friendship. We should love one another through our love for God, through Christ, but never directly. Preferential love is always a form of self-love, and it is self-deification. The only love that is genuinely Christian is one in which we love another for the sake of God—that is, we try to move him or her toward Christian faith. Anything else is idolatry. This relationship is not man to man but man to God to man. That was what Kierkegaard believed when he noted that “love and friendship are the very height of self-feeling.”2 The friend is another self, and to love another human being is essentially narcissistic. It goes without saying that to feel special friendship or loyalty to one’s state or country would be another form of idolatry. One must obey, but not as a matter of feeling, in the way that Socrates expressed a special loyalty to Athens. So friendship does not interfere with public life. One’s duty to God, of course, may. This was not a conventional view either among philosophers or Christians, but it is an important one, even if more than one writer no doubt came to object to it. We know of two who came to dominate the discussion 2. Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian and the author of a number of works, among them Either/Or (1843), Christian Discourses (1848), and (posthumously) Journals and Papers (1976). Kierkegaard’s work became an important source for modern existentialism. The quotation comes from Works of Love, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 58.

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for centuries, Aristotle and Cicero.3 It was, in fact, Aristotle who defined perfect friendship as two people who are as one: the friend is another self, “one soul in bodies twain” as a poet later put it.4 That is the definition of perfect friendship only, the kind that virtuous men engage in so that all their capacities and their understanding may reach full maturity in the mutual concern for each other. The point at stake was to refute Plato by showing that a good life for good men requires friendship, that without it life is incomplete. Aristotle also praises “civic friendship,” the disposition to care for one’s fellow citizens, without which justice is impossible, and when that occurs civil war is at hand. So there must be a degree of goodwill to prevent citizens from forming hostile parties. Finally, Aristotle also treats of affective and erotic friendship, and for these he has no great respect since they do not involve choice or reflection, just instinctual attraction. He has much to say about goodwill in a whole range of relationships, but what matters for us is his recognition that friendship is not only the rival but also the basis of political cohesion and justice. Moreover when he comes to discuss the sources of instability he looks more to the conflict between rich and poor than to affective relations as a source of trouble. Friendship as loyalty is a principle of cohesion. Friendship between virtuous individuals enhances the happiness of both, and lesser forms of friendship, for pleasure or profit, are neither morally significant nor politically all that important. They are not what cause regimes to collapse; injustice causes that. This is the political way to look at the matter. Friendship is, however, not adequate once one does find oneself in a state of constant civil tension, conflict, or even war, as Cicero and many since him have. Aristotle’s most enduring legacy was to have identified friendship as a peculiarly intense, spiritual relationship of one mind in two bodies. To that extent he also left the problem unresolved between so signif 3. The fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the first-century B.C. Roman writer and statesman Cicero’s “De amicitia” (On friendship) were two of the earliest Western works to treat the subject. 4. It is unclear to whom Shklar is referring here. The phrase has often been attributed to Diogenes Laertius, an early historian of Greek philosophy. Many other thinkers have paid tribute to his work and particularly to these words, among them Saint Augustine and Montaigne.



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icant a relationship and political duties. Cicero and his later admirers and critics could not afford to glide over the issue, and neither can we. More­ over, unlike Aristotle’s formulation, friendship in actual experience and in literature clearly has a deep affective element: it is not just a meeting of minds, but of hearts as well. And while most writers on friendship exclude spouses and other immediate family relations, there is no reason at all to do so. In America, one’s spouse is also likely to be one’s best friend, and it is equally clear that friendship between members of the same sex involves deep bonding, as do the friendships between members of the opposite sex, in all cases without an erotic bond, who might be partners in an enterprise or colleagues in a profession. In Cicero it is as usual still male friendship among politically active citizens of the same class, though not necessarily absolute equals, that is the focus. As in Aristotle, each one seeks the benefit of the other; there is real mutuality. But these are citizen soldiers, and their feelings are involved. That does not mean that they do not choose each other, but mostly such a choice is negative. What Cicero insists on is that one must drop a friend as soon as he changes for the worse, and for Cicero that is overwhelmingly true if he advocates bad public policies, especially those that might alter the fundamental character of the Roman Republic. You must immediately dissociate yourself from a subversive friend. This is not just a response to a time of civil strife, which it certainly was, but also to Cicero’s sense of the intense importance of friendship. It was a natural need and more significant a tie than those of kinship. Hence the difficulty of putting the republic first. It is only if friendship involves both feeling and understanding, personal and political bonds, that it becomes such a public problem. Significantly, Cicero singles out Coriolanus for censure because it was clear to him that without his young friends Coriolanus would have posed no great danger. Nevertheless, to limit friendship to mere mutual utility, to share less than one’s whole self, is to make life incomplete and impoverished. It is because friends act together both politically and privately that their bonds are so primary. It is a matter of perfect trust. This is not what makes politics important, but it is the element that makes politics emotionally satisfying. To act with one’s friend for the republic is perfection. To prefer him to the republic is absolutely wrong, and it is obviously a constant temptation.

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This is where the discussion has remained pretty well ever since, except, naturally, that many people disagree with Cicero’s conclusions, though they accept his account of friendship and its dilemmas. One solution that he did not consider worthy of a citizen was to withdraw from public life to cultivate friendship in a life wholly outside the public sphere. This thought was not unknown among his contemporaries. The Epicureans, who believed that one should live one’s life so as to minimize pain and fear, thought that the best way to achieve tranquillity was to avoid all civic activity and to cultivate personal friendships in the calm of private life. This also suggests itself to people living under arbitrary governments of various kinds, in which civic activity does not exist in any case. Lord Bacon, who lived in Tudor England, thought that friendship was of all things what we needed most; it alone could unlock and expand the human heart, but it was clearly a private matter.5 Kings, he noted, could not afford it because their favorites were bound to betray them. So again friendship and politics do not mix. Since kings are the only people who have political power and responsibilities in absolutist monarchical regimes, such as the one under which Bacon lived, they cannot afford to risk friendship. For the subjects of such kingdoms and for most citizens of a modern constitutional state such as Britain or the United States, a purely private life is always possible, and friendship among persons both of whom disdain or are excluded from active political participation is always an option. If it is a free and deliberate choice, then it may well be the way to avoid any possible tension between the demands of politics and those of friendship. Nevertheless, many people who have read Cicero regard this as a poor choice, because not only is a life without political activity incomplete, private friendship lacks a big ingredient, since the friends do not share political projects and are not joined in doing together what they regard as best for their country. On this view, they do not hate and love as only political agents can. If there are risks in this, then there are also rewards. The risks are numerous. A friend may betray you in order to advance her or his political fortunes, which is not in any sense bad for the

5. Francis Bacon, a seventeenth-century English scientist who served as Lord Chancellor under James I, was an advocate of modern science and scientific method. His “Of Friendship” was published in his Essays.



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state if political competition is regarded as the right and best way to achieve positions of leadership in a given political order, such as the United States. For us the more significant issue is that we are far from being as certain as Cicero in demanding that we reject friends who act against what we regard as the public good. The man who put it on the table for all subsequent ages was Montaigne. He had a special friend in mind who had written a very radical book against tyranny. Of him he said that they were in perfect accord on everything, and he certainly loved him. Why? “Because he was he and I was I.” 6 In other words, no qualifications about the meeting of virtuous minds or ennobling partnership. Affinity is a given. And Montaigne makes no bones about it; he is a friend before he is a citizen. Moreover, if his friend held an opinion he was bound to share it; they were a single mind, and so there could be no question of denouncing or rejecting a friend. If he thought it right I would agree, because that is what friendship is. Either you are a friend or you are a citizen first, and you must choose. That is more or less where we now are, because Montaigne’s view of friendship is our own. It is an accident, a colossal piece of good fortune for two people to become indivisible friends because they are what they are, because their entire personalities are made for this and no other friendship. Montaigne had an advantage over us. He lived under a thoroughly disreputable monarchy, and while he tried to perform the tasks a nobleman was supposed to undertake, he thought the minimum of obedience was all that was required. What if we live in a generally fairly just society? To say that friendship implies such a unity of minds that neither one of the friends could ever do anything the other would regard as wrong is to evade the question. If we are friends first and citizens second, then the very insignificance of politics would make it unlikely that we would allow differences of opinion and ideological disagreement to interfere with a friendship. These would simply not be important enough to matter. What if it came to serious political illegality, as I said: espionage, or also less dramatic forms of law violation, not violent crimes, of course, but serious infractions 6. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in Essays, book 1, chap. 28. In some modern translations the choice of words may differ: “Because it was him, because it was me.” See, for example, M. A. Screech’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1991), 212.

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of the law just the same; for example, of environmental codes, industrial regulations, tax payment? Do you report a friend to the Internal Revenue Service? The Environmental Protection Agency? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration? How does one decide? If your friend is another self, you do not turn yourself in. Wives rarely turn in their husbands. In short, it is not enough to think only of the importance of our obligations to the law. The value of friendship to human life and of any particular friendship has to be taken into account. If friendship is a mistake the answer may be simple, but if it is the one and only thing that can make life worth living then it is not so simple. Consider the most famous statement of the case in the twentieth century. E. M. Forster was a celebrated novelist.7 Friendship meant everything to him, not because he was homosexual but because he lived his life with a few kindred spirits whom he had known since his college days, and this circle held together by just those because we-are-what-we-are ties. He had been opposed to the First World War, but not the Second, and he appreciated that a democratic and liberal state such as the United Kingdom was better than all the alternatives. Yet he wrote, “I hate the idea of causes and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying a friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country—Love and loyalty can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do—Down with the State, say I, which means the State would down me.” Heroics aside, is it really so simple? Forster reminds us that Dante consigned Brutus and Cassius to the lowest level of hell for killing their friend Julius Caesar to save the Roman Republic, but then Dante looked to Judas Iscariot and judged betrayal in those terms. It is Judas who made personal betrayal a supreme sin, but without Dante’s references the claim of friendship is not grounded nearly so well as Forster seemed to think. Do we not always have to ask, What sort of state, what kind of friend, and, more abstractly, what is the value of a friend, and what are our obligations to all the rest of the citizens whom we do not know personally, and to the government we and they live under?

7. E. M. Forster’s best-known novels are A Room with a View and A Passage to India. His statement about friendship appears in “What I Believe,” first published in the Nation (16 July 1938) and reprinted in the collection Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).



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Let me turn to the citizens at large. One thing that we sense in For­ster’s outburst is an intense hostility to “them” out there, to the world that is not “us,” the threatening mass of one’s fellow citizens with whom one may have little if anything in common, with whom one shares no tastes, no values, and no interests. This kind of hostility can lead to friendship as well. Many a utopian commune is built just on those impulses, and that is why so many of them do not, in fact, last. It is an inadequate bond. No one revealed that more subtly than Hawthorne in The Blithedale Romance.8 They went there, a band of young friends, to lead a perfect moral life, but found it hard going as their relationships deteriorated under the pressure of work and sex. As they found friendship and mutual perfection inadequate to sustain them under these conditions they came to realize that friendship did not require them to flee from society, but fear of and hostility to the world as it was had been their driving impulse, and this proved insufficient to save them from a mass of disasters. What then should Socrates have said to Crito, if he had been willing to give the argument of friendship a serious chance?

8. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852) was set in a utopian community based on Brook Farm, where Hawthorne himself lived for a time.

Lecture 5: The New Testament and Martin Luther

there is no consistent new testament theory of obligation, and there were many differences among early Christians about how to respond to a hostile Roman state. The question of public authority became even more complicated when the Roman emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and made it the official religion.1 This meant that he and his successors took an active part in the organization and government of the church, and, as we shall see, that gave rise to conflicts that required new doctrines of obedience and resistance to secular princes. Today I want to deal with one strain of doctrine emerging from the New Testament that was developed by Saint Augustine and then taken up by Martin Luther and his earliest followers.2 This is not the only doctrine to be found in Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, or Luther, but it was a powerful and enduring strain 1. Constantine, emperor of Rome from 306 to 337, was responsible for the Edict of Milan (313), which called for a toleration of all who followed the Christian faith. He later proclaimed the Roman Empire to be Christian and established a new imperial residence in Byzantium (later named Constantinople). 2. The bishop of Hippo, Saint Augustine (354–430), was a theologian and philosopher. He outlined his theological position in his autobiographical Confessions and in City of God. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was an Augustinian friar and theologian who became the leader and spokesperson of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s influence stretched far beyond theological disputes into the cultural and political realms, mainly through his translation of the Bible into the vernacular.

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in Christian political thought, and it is a unique approach to the problem of obedience to public authority. The peculiarity of the doctrine, which I shall call “suffering the secular sword” is that, unlike Antigone or Socrates, Christians were called upon to obey Caesar—that is, whatever Roman emperor was in place—and by implication any ruler, not because princes have anything valuable to contribute to human life but because they are a punishment visited upon humanity, which deserves whatever evils occur because of original sin. Adam and all later men, and Eve and all women especially, having disobeyed God, were guilty and deserved punishment. If they were to be saved from eternal damnation this was due solely to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who had died to redeem them. This was for the early Christians likely to happen very soon, because they expected the world to end imminently. The doctrine of unconditional obedience is thus urged upon Christians because public authority is a matter of no importance for them. Should public authority become violent it constituted a test of the believers’ fidelity, or was understood as a punishment from God that might help them to improve. They could show humility, suffer silently for the sake of Christ, or simply live apart from the world and values of the mighty, but in no case were they expected to respond positively to the actions of the rulers of this world. There was little likelihood of that in any case. The Christians, Jews, or Gentiles were as a rule not important people and not involved in governing anyone or anything, and until the conversion of Constantine they were actively persecuted as subversive persons. The reason for this is precisely the Christian sense of the unworthiness of political power, especially in comparison with the glory of God. So they refused to bow down before the statue of the emperor and renounce Christ. This was, in fact, a test oath. If anyone refused to perform these acts of political reverence it was proof enough of that person’s disloyalty and subversive character, and a military power such as Rome, with many internal and external enemies, had to keep a sharp eye on such individuals. The appropriate response for a Christian was to pray and quietly accept martyrdom, which is a cruel form of capital punishment. In the period of the Reformation, Protestants often found that they had to deal with either hostile or unreliable or oppressive

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rulers, and their first response was to return to the earliest doctrines of obedience: despise, pray for, and completely obey the ruler.3 When political circumstances changed, the doctrines were also altered, but here it is my purpose only to indicate the historical circumstances in which this view of obligation first arose and in which it tended to flourish. Dealing with alien rulers was, however, not the only eventuality. What about obedience to Christian rulers, even if far from perfect ones? The New Testament and early Christians had certainly not foreseen such a possibility, but there it was, and it created problems. First of all the rulers might be faced with pagan subjects or with Christians who differed in significant ways about beliefs and right conduct from the ruler, even though each side thought that they were Christians. That happened soon after Constantine was converted to Christianity. Then, much later, in the Reformation, a king who decided to become a Protestant, like Henry VIII, was confronted by his Catholic subjects. These are but a few of the actual conflicts, but they gave rise to a very stringent and uncompromising doctrine of obligation to obey secular rulers. And it is this doctrine that I want to examine in at least three circumstances, starting with Jesus and his immediate disciples as recorded in the New Testament, then Saint Augustine writing under a Christian emperor as the Roman Empire was collapsing and authority was threatened at every turn. Then I want to look at Luther, who was, in his way, a great rebel, since he had successfully challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and of the priesthood in general because he preached the equality of all believers before God. He therefore had to reassure even those princes who agreed with him that spiritual rebellion in no way implied political disobedience, and when there was a peasant uprising he encouraged the princes to slaughter the rebels mercilessly. The historical circumstances of these three examples explain why a doctrine of unconditional obedience might have an appeal, but what I want to emphasize is the peculiar character of their shared attitude. It arises from the words of Jesus and Saint Paul in the New Testament. The fundamental peculiarity of the doctrine is that rulers

3. For background reading Shklar suggested to her students Edmund S. Morgan, Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 352–372.



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as individuals are rarely good—indeed, they are generally evil—but they must be obeyed not only because they keep order but because they are a punishment we need and deserve. Moreover, for true Christians they simply do not matter; Christians obey because they could not care less about rulers and their deeds and demands. There are three passages in the New Testament that are especially significant. The first is from Matthew 22:15–22. Jesus is asked whether one should pay taxes to the Romans who were ruling Israel at the time. The question was meant to be provocative, since many Jews who were rebelling against both the Romans and their local collaborators refused to pay tribute. But Jesus was not one of them. His rebellion was not political. So he said, “Show me whose picture is on the coin,” and of course it was the face of the emperor. “To him it must then belong. So give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Let the rulers have their insignificant money and devote yourself to what matters: to love God with all your heart and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Nor do the values of this world count. Rank is meaningless when humility unites the believers. The point of the story is unmistakable: obey because it is an insignificant matter. Just how insignificant comes out in the next passage I want to quote. It is from Luke 22:25–27. Here Jesus speaks to his disciples: “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; but rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.” He reminded them that he was as one who served. In short, the humble are to be honored and the world’s might is to be treated as irrelevant to the community of the faithful. The final and even more influential passage is from Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Romans. It appears that the apostle, Saint Paul, who was the first great Christian missionary to go outside the Jewish community to convert Gentiles, found some of the new Christians unruly and, perhaps expecting the end of the world soon, apt to neglect their ordinary obligations. In any event he called them to order, to abide in their social positions however base, even if they were slaves, to work and behave decently, and above all to obey the public authorities. As one of his fellow apostles put it, “Fear God and honor the emperor.” And

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this was a very hostile and persecuting emperor. Nevertheless as Saint Paul put it, “The powers that be are of God and one must obey them not only out of fear but for the conscience’s sake. For rulers are the servants of God sent by him to punish the wicked.”4 This is unconditional obedience without qualification, and it must be said that few paragraphs ever written by a human hand have had a deeper impact upon such a vast number of human beings. Saint Paul faced a persecuting regime, and for three centuries some Christians went to their death as martyrs, obeying the government in everything, except that they refused to give Caesar what was God’s: they refused to call him God and to bow down before his statue. But then they went to their deaths without protest. Most Christians, of course, made some sort of compromise or hid their beliefs successfully. Then, all of a sudden, without any preparation for such an event, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and not only did the persecution stop, but Christians were favored and entered the service of the emperor at court and in the army. Most Romans, to be sure, remained pagans, and when the empire suffered severe military defeats they tended to blame the Christians for having aroused the wrath of the ancestral deities and for failing to uphold the martial ethos for which the old gods of Rome stood. To this crisis Saint Augustine replied in part by reminding both his pagan and his Christian readers that the obedience of the true Christian was supposed to be so perfect that all he ever did was, in effect, follow the orders of every earthly authority. Whoever was therefore responsible for the ups or downs of the imperial power, it was not the Christians, who had, on the contrary, managed to soften the hearts of even the more violent of the Gothic invaders. What was the Christian citizen of Rome to do in Augustine’s view? If he was a slave he was to rejoice in his slavery and serve his master faithfully. The humbler he was the more likely he was to be saved. At the very least he was not as subject to temptation as his master. Second, he might strive for real freedom, which was not social at all. Freedom was freedom from sin, not from social oppression. This is just what Saint Paul had argued, 4. Shklar is paraphrasing Romans 13:1–4.



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and it remained accepted doctrine for centuries. Augustine’s real problem was how to integrate Christians into a state that favored them. What were the duties of Christian noblemen especially? Could they fight for the Christian emperor, rather than literally follow the demand that they love their enemies and turn the other cheek? Could they execute criminals? Could they exercise political authority as imperial officials? To all these questions Augustine answered yes. The duty to obey is now extended to a duty to serve the state in every capacity. The reason for it is also extended: peace becomes the true end and justification of the state. To keep peace one may even have to go to war, to stop an inveterate aggressor. To keep peace one may force recalcitrant heretics to recant or punish them. The burdens that this imposes upon the Christian soldier and civil servant are enormous. They must understand that they act in deep ignorance, thanks to sin. They must search their consciences constantly to make sure that their motives are Christian—that is, that they act out of pure obedience to the ruler and the demands of peace, and nothing else. As for the Christian emperor, his burdens are even heavier, because he is ultimately obliged to decide at every moment what is and what is not conducive to peace and what is in keeping with the will of God. He must never be proud and it is his inward commitment to Christ, his motivation that alone must guide and justify his conduct. But whether he is good or bad, he must be obeyed, unless he asks one to do something manifestly satanic, such as killing a parent or renouncing Christ. Only then does passive disobedience become the Christian’s response. As long as one has the slightest doubt, however, one must follow the order of the secular sword. For it is there to punish sinful men, to prevent the worst disorders, and even to bring peace to them. If we do not understand exactly what they are to do in any given moment, that only reminds us that we do not fully understand the ways of God. This doctrine remained profoundly important because it corresponded to the realities of European life. Christianity was the religion of kings and emperors and of the nobility. It had not begun as such. On the contrary not only among the Jews but also among the Gentiles whom Paul converted, the majority were socially insignificant people, and for centuries they were a persecuted minority as well. To adapt their religion to the requirements

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of the ruling classes without disfiguring its central tenets was not an easy matter, and it was Augustine’s achievement to have turned obedience into a doctrine of public service. Given the flexibility of the doctrine of absolute obedience to political authority one need not be surprised that both the insecure monarchies of early modern Europe and the leaders of the Reformation found it appealing. The insecure rulers needed the doctrine against their rebellious subjects and also against members of increasingly diverse Christian sects. The leaders of the Reformation, Luther especially, having raised radical rebellion against the authority of the Papacy, turned to the secular rulers as the sole agents of political authority on earth. We must return again to the New Testament. For Luther the decisive passages of the New Testament were, first, Peter, and second, Romans 13. His sense of sin was also immense. All human beings are divided within themselves, flesh and spirit, and no one can escape sin, but God will forgive the genuine Christian in spite of his sins, not because he is without fault. A perfect Christian is free, in the sense that he follows only the voice of faith within him, but he is also the servant of all, because love of God implies service to all others. As a temporal person the Christian needs law and government lest he fall into bad habits. Moreover, his fellow men need law and government even more than he does, and his service to them includes supporting the public authority that they need to keep them from evil deeds. “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself” means supporting government for his sake. And this, as far as Luther was concerned, applied to clergymen no less than to ordinary citizens. Coercive authority belonged to secular rulers only, and the clergy had no part in it. This naturally enhances the obedience due to rulers, who alone now hold the secular sword from God. Great as that authority is, it is also degraded in that princes have nothing to contribute to the spiritual realm. Their rule is limited to earthly and temporal affairs. The true Christian, in fact, lives in two worlds, one spiritual, the other material. In the latter he obeys the rules of man; in the first he lives only according to the Word of God. The rulers of the temporal realm govern by force, and they enforce a merely external peace; the sword that achieves this is put into the hand of princes by God to prevent violence



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and sin. God’s second rule is more direct, when he speaks to Christians through their hearts and consciences. It is a very inward faith. Now, although we are all sinners in this world, we are not all equally so: some are ruled by the devil while others are ruled by Christ. The latter are a small, humble group of saintly people who model their lives on the example of Christ. The vast majority of mankind, however, has embraced Satan. That is why God has instituted coercive governments to punish the sinful and keep them in order. The war between good and evil is not decisively won by either side, but the record of human history, with its wars and tyrannies, is proof of Satan’s hold on us. Now Satan may certainly come to rule princes, and thoroughly evil and tyrannical princes are certainly proof of the powers of the devil. That does not, however, mean that the Evil One has triumphed or that we may disobey the ruler, whose office remains valid. God is simply using evil for his own purposes. What is particularly notable in Luther is his contempt for those whom we must obey. Good rulers are very rare, and we should count ourselves lucky if we have one who is merely mediocre. They are there to keep people from tearing each other to pieces and put to their task by God for that end. It is a sign of God’s mercy that he has given us rulers, for they are not only a punishment; positively, they keep us from becoming even worse than we are. Temporal rulers alone have been given the power by God to lay down laws and to keep peace generally, which can be enforced by physical penalties such as imprisonment and execution. They have unqualified authority over men’s outward behavior. Luther clearly preferred rulers who were reasonable and just to those who were not, but this did not affect the obligation to obey and conform to the demands of rulers in one’s conduct.5 He even believed that there was a higher law that told men, rulers especially, what was just and what was not. This knowledge was always dimmed by our sinfulness, and in any case it was merely a guide and in no sense a justification for disobedience. The important thing was that punishing and disciplining were godly offices. For in punishing, even by hanging, the magistrate was doing God’s work, 5. See “Secular Authority” (1523), in The Works of Martin Luther, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Muhlenburg, 1930–1943), vol. 3, pp. 228–273.

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fulfilling his function. Here Christian mercy has no place. The Christian prince is meant to punish the unruly; that is what God has called him to do. For his part the Christian must obey even by becoming a soldier, and must fight in any war, unless it is absolutely clear that the war is unjust. Just war is like any other punishment of an aggressor, and, as ordinary persons may not inquire into the motives of their rulers, how can they know whether a war is unjust? So to all intents and purposes they must serve when the sovereign tells them to fight. One’s inner life was another matter. Here the ruler had no power. More­ over, Luther drew a distinction between disobeying and passively refusing to cooperate with the truly sinful orders of a ruler. Catholic rulers had strong objections to allowing anyone to read Luther’s translation of the New Testament in plain German. If a prince asks the faithful to surrender their copies of the New Testament they may refuse to do so and quietly accept whatever punishment he may inflict upon them because their faith in God is being assaulted. If the ruler demands that one arrest or attack a neighbor for refusing to hand over his New Testament, then one may refuse to cooperate and again take the punishment that is sure to follow. This was one of the few clear cases; generally Luther warned his followers not to listen too much to their consciences. In all but a very few very clear cases, obedience was the right course for a Christian. In cases of doubt the ruler had to be obeyed. For rebellion was Satan’s work no less than tyranny. “Rebellion is a great fire that lays everything waste,” he wrote.6 When a peasant revolt broke out, Luther urged savage repression upon the rulers, even though he had warned and chided them for their injustices. But peace was primary for him, and he was unequivocal in his determination “to side with him who is rebelled against, against him who rebels, however justly.”7 For justice was not the primary issue: sin, punishment, humility, and the need for order were the real issues. The true church, that spiritual union of a few souls, united in faith though far apart, was in no need of external restraints; but the rest, the vast majority of fallen mankind, were in desperate need of government, and we could 6. “Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants” (1525), ibid., vol. 4, pp. 186–193. 7. “Admonition to Peace” (1525), ibid., vol. 4, pp. 152–185.



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not trust ourselves to substitute our judgment for that of our rulers. They too were evil, but they served a purpose that we could not question. For Luther the great tension was not between church and state, as it had been throughout the Middle Ages, but between God and Satan, and between Christ and sinful mankind. In that dreadful tension the rulers of states were the agents of order, sent by and required by God. Obedience to them was on the whole to withstand the temptations of Satan, who had begun his career by rebelling against God and was only too ready to lead man on the path to rebellion. To be sure, rulers were also subject to his wiles, and as often as not they were a menace. But until one was absolutely certain that they commanded one to act against the manifest demands of God, they were to be obeyed, lest Satan gain a double victory. Only something as obvious as taking away the New Testament from a Christian could justify resistance, and then this justified only passive disobedience followed by a meek acceptance of punishment. This bleak interpretation of Luther’s doctrine has been challenged because he often contradicted himself; he was a writer who responded to specific occasion, after all. The interpretation I have offered is the one that Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave as well, which is why he was so critical of Luther’s teachings and the practices of the Lutheran churches. My purpose has, in any case, not been to give a complete account of Luther’s religious development, nor of the way he influenced Germany in the twentieth century, but to show how his work represented a type of thought. It was also a doctrine that was preached in churches throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Ultimately its importance is that it is historically an enduring strain in Christian thought.

Lecture 6: Divided Loyalties

until now we have discussed individuals in conflict—Antigone and Creon, Socrates and Crito—and friends in one-on-one relationships. The New Testament doctrine of obedience looks almost entirely to the oppressed Christian as a suffering individual and assumes that all rulers are more or less debased pagans; even Luther has nothing but contempt for princes. Saint Augustine alone contemplates a Christian ruler to whom Christians owe more than mere obedience and faithful service. But again he looks to the duties of the ruler and the Christian soldier as individuals. Nevertheless, in Saint Augustine there is the beginning of something else: the church as an institution. It is certainly not the City of God, but it is the legacy of Saint Peter, and it acts on behalf of Christ on earth. The clergy who have devoted their lives to the church cannot act as individuals only; they speak for a community, and eventually for an institution. In the many quarrels between the Christian clergy and political rulers to which I shall now turn, the individuals involved do not act only as persons; they are deeply aware of speaking for a whole body of others. This is true particularly of the two figures on whom I shall concentrate now, Archbishop Thomas Becket and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Let me start by returning to early Christianity. By Saint Augustine’s time there had already been the first of an interminable series of conflicts between the emperor and the church. I do not say state, because for a long time there was no institution like that around. Instead there were more or

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less powerful princes, and almost all of them had some conflict with the church. Saint Augustine’s hero, Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, excommunicated the then Roman emperor for interfering in church policy, and that was the first of many such incidents. The origin of the principles for such conduct is not in the New Testament but in the Old Testament. For obvious reasons, Christ and his disciples never imagined that their faith would become the basis of a powerful institution or that princes would be Christians, in name if not in conduct. In the Old Testament, however, there are plenty of kings, and they are in constant trouble with God and with the priests and the prophets who represent God. The story upon which all sides in the many contests relied most was in 1 Samuel. It tells how the people of Israel came to the prophet Samuel and asked him to anoint a king so that they might be like all the other nations. God was averse to this suggestion because it implied that the people no longer relied wholly on him, and Samuel warned them that they would get a tyrant who would oppress and degrade them. But they persisted, and God instructed Samuel to anoint Saul king. Soon he had reason to regret his decision and told Samuel to dethrone Saul and anoint his successor, the youngest son of an obscure man named Jesse. The boy’s name was David. In a less dramatic version of the story that is also found in 1 Samuel, the people of Israel are utterly defeated by their perpetual enemies the Philistines, and as a last resort God tells Samuel to anoint Saul to be captain and to lead the Israelites in war. This Samuel did, and Saul was victorious. He understood at first that his victories, as all the other memorable previous successes of the people of Israel, were not his own doing, but God’s. And the first time he disobeyed God he was very repentant and was forgiven, but it was clear that he ruled on condition of good behavior. Saul again disobeyed divine instruction, and Samuel turned to David. In addition, God drove Saul into a deep and lasting depression. In either version we recognize that the conflict was inevitable. Israel was not “like all the other nations,” even though it sometimes wished to be. The people of God had to obey him and him alone, not any human authority, unless that authority was clearly speaking in obedience to God, as Moses had. The ambiguity is there as well: God did tell Samuel to anoint Saul and David, and made them formidable figures. This is the origin of a conflict of

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loyalties that can never be resolved: it is literally interminable. For the people of God, whether Israel or the church, cannot give their unquestioning obedience to human institutions. They must obey God. Nevertheless they need rulers, and God chooses those rulers and anoints them and sets them above the people, who are expected to follow them in war and peace. We cannot possibly go over all the conflicts between the church and various rulers. Let me just remind you of some of the social circumstances that made the inevitable tension so difficult to resolve. Late in the fifth ­century Pope Gelasius offered a formula that he evidently thought would sort things out. God has given mankind two swords: one to the church that gives it authority and the other to the emperor giving him supreme power over all men. Gelasius made it clear that the emperor was subordinate to the authority of the church and its sword. Far from settling things, Pope Gelasius merely provided the terms in which future conflicts were to be set. The political reasons for conflict were many, but the chief one was spiritual, built into the shared belief that faith in God was more important than an earthly pursuit, and the equally compelling reality that one has to survive by material means here and now. It was not that clergymen and political rulers necessarily had to be in conflict. In fact they often clung to and cooperated with each other. During the anarchic centuries of the early Middle Ages the church depended utterly on such help as the Frankish and Saxon rulers could provide, and they were exalted as vicars of Christ and envoys of God. They also took an active part in church government, including the appointment of bishops and other clerics, who were often unsuitable relatives. Feudal relationships originally were highly personal, and vassals were bound to their lords by oaths more than anything else. Now an oath is not an engagement between men, but between man and God. A vassal swears to God that he will obey his lord. It is far more than a mere contract or promise, and clerics again sustained the practice. Nevertheless, for all this cooperation there were bound to be tensions. One source of tension was that the clergy was not without independent power. And power can mean conflict, especially if the issues at stake involve something more than power— ultimately the place of faith in life on earth. For instance, if the clergy could legitimize oaths, clergymen could also invalidate them. It is not clear that an oath can ever be broken without betraying God; the church could revoke an



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oath in the name of God and by referring to a special right of Saint Peter’s that had been given to the popes. That meant that a pope might not only excommunicate a prince but also free all his subjects from their obligations to him. Here spiritual and political issues are inextricably entwined. On a more mundane level there were jurisdictional problems. As rulers set up more stable judicial systems, the fact that clerics even of the lowest rank were tried in special church courts was a hindrance to law and order, because these ecclesiastical courts tended to be very lenient to their own, some of whom had committed acts of violence and theft, and their creditors were also often enraged. Remember, many clergymen were mere teenagers and young unmarried males. Finally, adding to these sources of tension was the fact that the church was the largest single landowner in Europe, and that its bishops and abbots had become entangled in feudal relationships themselves. Not that all bishops were united during any one of the many conflicts. Far from it. Many sided with their secular ruler, whose civil service they staffed. Such is the general background for the first of the spiritual duels between Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, and the English king, Henry II.1 The quarrel was not an isolated incident. On the contrary it came after a hundred years of sharp polemical warfare, which had begun with a determined effort to reform the church, to make it more rigorous and less secular. The pamphlet war had begun with the reform of the church itself by Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century. In order to end all kinds of intolerable practices he saw it as necessary that the control of appointing or investing bishops rest entirely in the hands of the church. In short, he wanted the emperor to get out of church affairs, and when the German emperor Henry IV refused,2 Pope Gregory deposed him on the grounds that he had broken his coronation oath and that, in any case, he, Gregory, had the right to dethrone emperors. He was by any standards a radical innovator. Nevertheless, he did force Henry IV to his knees, and some sort of compromise was reached. 1. Archbishop Thomas Becket (1118–1170) had a friendly relationship with King Henry II of England, whom he served as Lord Chancellor until he was made archbishop. 2. Henry the IV was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and king of Germany.

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These events stimulated a new and often radical political theory. It called for defining tyranny more exactly and with it prescriptions of what to do when a ruler met all the objective criteria that defined a tyrant. The man who wrote the book on that subject was John of Salisbury, Becket’s friend and loyal associate, and the very model of a Gregorian intellectual: a great scholar and a very polished diplomat who managed to get on with everyone. His book was written when Becket was still a chancellor. It is not a defense of Becket’s conduct as archbishop, but it is dedicated to Becket, in the hope perhaps, that he would act as a restraining influence upon the king.3 John of Salisbury is a long way from the New Testament or Saint Augustine. First of all, John had a very broad definition of tyranny. A tyrant is any usurper—that is, someone who does not hold his office from God. This can be plainly recognized because he sets himself above the law and suppresses justice. There are therefore not only public tyrants, but private ones as well. Tyranny is an encompassing form of viciousness. Princes are especially prone to tyranny, not because they have to act harshly to administer justice, but because they forget that they received their powers from the church in order to rule justly and that when they fail the church can depose them. For did not Samuel substitute the humble David for Saul when the latter was disobedient? It is not that John was inclined to allow the subjects of the king to forget their oath of fealty or show any disloyalty. On the contrary, he clearly preferred disciplined Roman legions to the unreliable feudal army. The first duty of armies is to protect the church, but it is not the only one. Fighting foreign enemies is also a duty, and a Christian soldier ought to serve even a pagan ruler in defense of his country. In fact, John was a devoted supporter of Henry’s wars in France. Nevertheless, the difference between private tyrants and public ones is clear. It is right and honorable to kill the latter, not the former. One may flatter and deceive political tyrants if that will modify their conduct, but if all else fails they can be killed. Private tyrants can be taken care of by the criminal law, but public tyrants must be killed. It is precisely because John thinks of the prince as the image of God that the tyrant is regarded with such horror. If treason is seen as a crime 3. The theologian John of Salisbury served as secretary to Archbishop Becket. The book dedicated to Becket is Policraticus (1159). John of Salisbury later became archbishop of Chartres (in France).



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against God tyrannicide is permitted because it in effect removes a traitor against the law. Tyrannicide as a legitimate act does not come as part of devaluation of secular authority. Unlike Saint Augustine and Luther, John does not look askance at rulers. Quite the opposite is true. It is when public authority, military discipline and victory, and the rigorous administration of the law are greatly admired, and when the prince is seen as a divine being inferior only to the clergy, that the difference between the true prince and the tyrant becomes so significant. Now John’s solution was radical. But so was his sense of the place of the prince. He thought of a kingdom as a body, of which the church is the soul and the prince the head. The senate or nobility are its heart, while judges and administrators are its eyes and ears. The peasantry are its feet, the soldiers and civil servants its arms, and the financial officers its stomach and intestines. To cut off the head of a kingdom is clearly to kill it, nor can the body politic move or act without its head. That is why the prince must be venerated when he acts well and killed when he destroys the rest of the body. This is no longer a matter of enduring tyranny patiently. The Christian is instructed in how to act against unjust rulers, and how to act politically. Here is the first, open doctrine of divided loyalties in which, as Becket was soon to show, there is more to be done by a faithful Christian than just to suffer the secular sword. He defied Henry openly and went to his death as a demonstration of the superiority of the church over the prince, not humbly but defiantly, and in the interest not of his own soul but of an institution, the church. In this he was relatively conservative because, after a century of conflict, doctrines such as John of Salisbury’s were not uncommon. Not waiting for martyrdom, but deposing and killing the tyrant was the answer to lawless government. And in defense of this view not merely the Old Testament but examples drawn from Roman—that is pagan—­history were cited with much admiration. This is a long way from passive resistance, and it is only the beginning of Christian doctrines of resistance to unjust government. Now Becket did not threaten Henry II with violence at all, but he did defy him openly and uncompromisingly. The conflict was over criminous clergy. Henry II was in his way a very capable king, even if he had a violent

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temper. He was not a tyrant by the standards of the church or anyone else. Among his achievements was to give England a centralized and competent judiciary, and he was determined that their jurisdiction should extend to the clergy. One land, one law was the minimal requirement of public order, in fact, and a good many clergymen were inclined to agree with him. Even the then pope, Alexander III, a rather conciliatory person, was not eager to make an issue of it. So, as in all these cases, there was no general agreement in either camp. The facts of the case are complicated. Thomas Becket was the son of a London merchant of Norman descent. Clearly a young man of exceptional talent, he became secretary to the archbishop of Canterbury at an early age. When Henry II finally managed to put an end to a protracted civil war and establish himself as king of England he made Becket his chancellor. Becket’s conduct was not unusual. He enriched himself enormously and lived lavishly. He was the king’s companion in everything—hunting, debauchery, and, more important, giving England military and political security, perhaps the first taste of effective civil government in a long time. He also supported the king’s stringent ecclesiastical policies. When the old archbishop of Canterbury died, the king insisted that Becket assume the office. Becket resisted this move because he apparently had no desire to become a serious cleric. But when he finally had no choice but to accept the post, he was utterly transformed, both personally and publicly. Psychologically he remains a complete puzzle. He took to wearing a hair shirt next to his skin, he ate nothing but a small amount of bread and water, and he was rigorous in all his observances, including frequent prayer very early in the mornings. And he rebelled against his old friend and patron, King Henry II, who had appointed him, of course, in the hope of having a loyal and trusted friend at the head of the English church. In the course of defying the king’s order that the clergy be tried in the civil courts, Becket never wavered in his principles, but he was not always certain of his political path. When the king called all the high clergy together to make them affirm openly that they would abide by the existing “customs” of the realm, a meeting, the Constitution of Clarendon, was called. This in effect would have put all the secular management of the church’s affairs in



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his hands, but would also bind him to protect the clergy against any threats from lesser magnates. Nor did Henry have any designs on doctrine. Many of the bishops were far from opposed to this agreement, and they heartily disliked Becket’s conduct. He first accepted the constitution and then rejected it and went into exile to France, where he stayed some seven years. When he and Henry made up enough for him to return he immediately began a new quarrel. While he was away the bishops in England, at Henry’s request, had crowned Henry’s oldest son joint king with him, to avoid any later succession crisis. Becket had no objection to the heir, but he insisted that only the archbishop of Canterbury had the right to crown the kings of England, and he excommunicated the bishops who had usurped his authority. He intended to crown the prince himself all over again. It was this act that enraged Henry II beyond control. He did not order his knights to kill Becket, but he did utter the wish that someone would rid him of this pestiferous cleric. And so they did. When the knights threatened Becket in Canterbury he made no effort to resist; his friends had to drag him into the cathedral, assuming that he was safe there. In fact, he was not, and the knights killed him at the altar. He was certainly ready for his fate and may even have intentionally provoked it. The year was 1170, and he had been archbishop of Canterbury for only nine years. Within a few months miracles were reported in Canterbury, and Becket was canonized three years after his murder. The pope did not punish Henry II. Here we again turn to the motivations and inner struggles of the person who faces the awful decision of obedience under conditions of radically divided loyalties. What went on in Becket’s mind? Why did he suddenly choose to defy the king? Everything from personal ambition to latent hatred of the king has been suggested. Some claim that he was a Saxon patriot out for revenge against the Norman ruler, but that is modern nationalist fantasy. Becket was, in any case, of Norman descent. Was it self-disgust at his former life style? Possibly so, but why defy the king? Personal asceticism would suffice for that. Or was it an arrogant sense of honor now deployed on behalf of the church against the secular nobility to which he did not belong? This interpretation may imply too modern a class view on the whole, but a sense of the honor of the church may have been at play. So it may

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have been a conflict of rivals to honor. Was it the prince of the church at last facing the prince of the realm? It was often said that this was the issue, even in Becket’s own time. But that seems inadequate. What is all this to us? It is simply that Becket lives in our imagination. Poets and playwrights have gone over his drama often, but for us the one that counts is T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.4 This is by no means the only play that attempts to reveal Becket’s mind, but it is the most famous and the best. It is also significant for us as an intensely Christian picture of Becket as he reflects upon his political rebellion and on his imminent death. More than one commentator has noted the similarities between ­Eliot’s Becket and Martin Luther King as Christians who accepted the full dangers of their defiance of political authority. King’s cause was, of course, morally much clearer than Becket’s, but as examples of Christian fortitude they are very similar. Both men knew that they were in danger, and both chose not to fight. The murder of both sent a lasting shiver through the spine of a whole people. Eliot’s play opens with a chorus of poor women who are in Becket’s special care. All they ask is to be left alone; they do not want to be involved in Becket’s political troubles. They are there to bear witness, but they miss Becket’s kindness, for he has been in exile for seven years. They are from the first the true patients—that is, passively acted upon and uncomplaining. They have much to teach Becket, for whom the issue of resignation or defiance of secular authority is not so simple. Politically Becket is a man of conscience acting in the world, but as a Christian he has to question his motives at every turn. Is he proud, is he too sure of his own virtue, does he seek suffering to make a point to himself? How can he reach a state of perfect passivity internally and yet act on behalf of God and act politically at that? So Becket has to answer four tempters first. The first one reminds him of his friendship with the king and of its bonds. He was not always so harsh toward every vice and had been kinder then. Was this new rigor not a mere

4. Murder in the Cathedral was first performed in 1935 in an adjunct building to Canterbury Cathedral. Eliot’s play was partly based on the eyewitness account of Edward Grim, who was a clerk at Canterbury at the time of the murder.



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sign of stubborn pride asserting itself against ordinary human affections? Is this not “the pleasure of higher vices”? To him Becket says that he has changed and that he must now look to more than the mere present. The second tempter is far more subtle. He reminds Becket that he was an excellent chancellor, that he restrained the king, that he had brought justice to England and that he had deserted his post, simply because he could not bring himself to make the necessary compromises with the real world. To this Becket replies that he had a higher calling than merely to “arrest the disorder” of this world. That is, he now accepts the Augustinian view of the inferiority of the calling to rule. Still I think we will have to give the second tempter some serious consideration; we might agree with him. The third tempter is easier to dispose of. He speaks for the barons of England who are looking for an ally in Becket in their struggle to regain some of the power that Henry had taken from them in order to bring the civil disorders to an end. To him Becket says, “No one shall say that I betrayed the King,” and sends him packing. The last tempter is the most serious one. He accuses Becket of actively seeking martyrdom to assure his eternal glory. The king will be forgotten, but people will worship at the shrine put up for him for centuries to come. To him Becket can only say, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” It is this line that Dr. King quotes, though he is admonishing his fellow Christians at this point.5 Becket is evidently not at all sure that this tempter is not right about his motives. This sort of self-interrogation is typical of people who choose to disobey established authority when they believe that such an act is right only in extreme cases. It is not all that obvious that his was an extreme case. This is especially true of Becket, who insists to the last that he has been a loyal subject to the king, but he must die so that Christ’s church “may have 5. T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), all quotations from part I. Martin Luther King quoted Becket’s response to the last tempter in his open “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (16 April 1963) to denounce the Birmingham police who used a moral means (restraint toward protestors) for immoral ends (to maintain segregation). King’s letter was published by a number of American news­ papers and magazines (the New York Post Sunday Magazine, the New Leader, the Atlantic Monthly) and reprinted in his Why We Can’t Wait (1964).

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peace and liberty.” He dies, as one of the priests says, because he feared the injustice of men less than the justice of God. This is the model of the defiant man of God who rejects violence in the face of violence because he is trying to create a greater peace. The barons think he is crazy or a public nuisance at best, and cannot understand him, and perhaps neither can we. For one thing is left for us to decide: Is he acting politically or not? The reason we are left wondering about the extent of Becket’s political objectives is that he does not say much about the king. He does not claim that he is defying a tyrant. On the contrary, he insists that he remains a loyal subject, though no one else thinks of him as being that. If he had said that Henry was a tyrant, it would have cast his conduct in a very different light, of course, but Henry really was no tyrant, in terms of the definition of a tyrant that had emerged in the course of the pamphlet wars that began with the Gregorian reforms. Here again we recognize a key similarity with Dr. King’s inner struggle. As a Christian he could not simply argue that his cause was just, as it surely was; he had to avoid, reject, and condemn violence at every turn. The nonviolence of his movement was not a tactic; it was its Christian essence. Let me conclude by pointing to several further parallels between Becket and King. Both are deeply concerned about the failure of their fellow clergy to act courageously. Temporizing is not an option for either one. Yet both had to answer for themselves to their own conscience. The temptation to compromise is always there, and in an interview he gave to a magazine in 1965, Dr. King blames himself for playing along at one time.6 Now he realizes that acting rather than negotiating has transformed him, and that while he must act in a spirit of love, he is a new man, with a cause above the immediate. The second tempter, who argues that going slowly is more prudent, is also rejected. The third tempter, the revolutionary disrupter, is also turned away as Becket rejected the offers of the anarchic barons. What of seeking martyrdom? In the interview I mentioned Dr. King admitted that he expected to be killed, since he was being threatened every day. He did not dramatize himself, but simply accepted it with a shrug as the natural risk of his chosen path: “I have a job to do,” he said, and that was all. 6. Alex Haley interviewed King for the January 1965 issue of Playboy.



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Nevertheless, even as he talks to other clergymen and reproves them, King is interrogating himself, and it is clear that nonviolence, acceptance of penalties, purging his heart of hatred were all as important to him as vindications of his motives and higher loyalties as they were for Becket. Both, of course, had the early Christians in mind. I would like to sum up this long and complicated lecture. Divided loyalties, in one case to a cleric’s church, in the other to his oppressed people, makes the Christian leader oppose the powers that be, but in a unique way: without hatred, deeply self-conscious, concerned with his own motives, and yet utterly aware that it is not himself as an individual, but the community of the faithful who are at stake and for whom he speaks. Intellectually this frame of mind leads, as it does in the writings of John of Salisbury, to a well-­ defined theory of tyranny that can guide the faithful in such a conflict. In the end, however, these manuals are not crucial; what matters is the state of mind, the character, and the fortitude of the clerical conscience as it leads others and assumes the consequences.7

7. For further reading Shklar suggested to her students Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

Lecture 7: Honor and Richard II

in the early middle ages, the tenth and eleventh centuries, the church was more than eager to lend whatever doctrinal support it could find to prop up anyone who seemed able to maintain order in a very anarchical world. From the period of Charlemagne, in fact, it had been asserted that kings had a semi-divine character and that, like Saul and David, the kings of Judea in the Old Testament, they were the Lord’s anointed and so enjoyed a special sanctity. In the years following the death of Charlemagne this belief was understood to give the church a special authority over rulers because the high priests in the Old Testament, the prophets Samuel in the case of Saul and Nathan in the case of David, checked the kings and reproved them in the name of God, who had, in fact, been rather reluctant to accept Judean kingship, which seemed to challenge the utter supremacy of the God of Israel. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, there appeared an interesting political theology, which was designed to enhance the divine status of legitimate kings. They were said to have two bodies, or to be “mixed persons.”1 They were a natural body and a divine body, the representation and image of God and Christ. This goes well beyond the doctrine that kings are the vicars of God—that is, his designated agents or representatives on earth. This asserts that as kings they are God and Christ. 1. Shklar’s recommended reading for this lecture was Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 24–60.

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The act of anointment transformed a legitimate heir into a new being with two bodies. His natural body played a very significant part in this duality. He had to be the legitimate heir, preferably the son, of a reigning, anointed king, and he had to fulfil his feudal duties; that is, he had to abide by the rules of honor and inherited dignity, property, and status that prevailed in feudal society.2 Nevertheless it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to justify rebellion against the Lord’s anointed if he is simply a tyrant or an incompetent ruler, or fails in his political obligations. Only God can depose rulers, or possibly they might depose themselves. When Shakespeare wrote Richard II the notion of the king’s being half divine and half natural was long forgotten, but a secular equivalent was the official theory of kingship in the Tudor era. The king or queen was still two bodies, one natural, the other corporate, symbolizing the people of the kingdom, the former a natural and the latter a public person. The public person never dies; the former is a temporary occupant. Rebellion is always and absolutely wrong, but the duties of the public body of the king are much preached. William Tyndale, one of the foremost Protestant theologians of the Tudor age, wrote in 1528 in “The Obedience of a Christian Man” that weak kings were worse than tyrants because “a tyrant though he do wrong to the good yet he punishes the evil and maketh all men obey.”3 The important thing is that all men must obey because it is absolute sin to rebel. The king is one person with two bodies, and one of them is entirely at God’s disposal since God alone can unseat a king who is a legitimate and anointed heir. It is therefore not surprising that Queen Elizabeth I forbade the abdication scene from Shakespeare’s Richard II being performed at all and that the rebellious followers of the earl of Essex were the original sponsors of its being put on. The problems that Richard II poses are endless, because Shakespeare, while he is writing with Tudor views in mind, is also placing the drama in its own time, and he is well aware of the more profoundly biblical meaning 2. For some of the following discussion Shklar draws on Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). 3. William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1748), 180.

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of the king’s two bodies in the time in which the play takes place. He is naturally also fully aware, as was his entire audience, of the consequences of the rebellion against Richard and the crowning of Bolingbroke as Henry IV. The result was the Wars of the Roses, a perpetual civil war that lasted almost a hundred years and decimated the English nobility, probably a good thing in the long run. The war ended only with the victory of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and who, having defeated the opposite side, married Margaret of York, a princess of the opposing party, and brought some precarious stability to England. His granddaughter Elizabeth was not eager to have all that turmoil raked up again unless it somehow justified Tudor legitimacy and political orthodoxy. She had nothing like the religious prop that King Richard and his Plantagenet ancestors had enjoyed. She was not the imago Christi or the shadow of God. They had gone on Crusades to capture the Holy Land from the heathens; she was a shaky Protestant queen with a lot of religious dissent to plague her. In fact, no ruler after Richard, who was the last Plantagenet king, could make the kind of claims he had made for his kingship. A king who has as one of his bodies that of Christ cannot be deposed or killed very easily, or at all. The question is whether his own natural body, his purely human body and self, may not rebel against his other self. That is one of the central problems in Richard II. In modern terms it sounds very flat and trite: Can a government delegitimize itself even in the absence of overt rebellion, so that a takeover, whether violent or not, is simply a restoration of the original legal order? An obvious example might be the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who, among other misdeeds, delegitimized himself by having an opponent openly murdered.4 At that point he was simply no longer plausibly acceptable and so was replaced, without any bloodshed to speak of. He simply went too far. That is neither tragic nor very dramatic nor all that interesting or unusual. No deep religious significance is involved, as is the case in the spiritual world of the king with two bodies. 4. Ferdinand Marcos was president of the Philippines between 1965 and 1986. For most of the time Marcos ruled the country as a de facto dictator under martial law. His regime was largely held responsible for the killing of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, the assassination that led to the Philippine People’s Revolution, which finally disposed of Marcos.



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To be a king with two bodies is surely a condition full of the most complex psychological problems. What is it like to be a person with two bodies? What does it mean for the king to be such a person? His obligations to his second, divine person are in some ways greater and more difficult to fulfill than the mere obedience that is demanded of his subjects. So today we must consider a very peculiar but far from uncommon sort of political obligation: that of a ruler, an anointed king specifically, to his divine self and office, and what he owes himself. The other set of obligations are less unusual: those that a wronged subject may or may not have to such a king. And again—for this is, after all, Shakespeare—we get a deep look into the evolving psychology of the rebel. Remember what I noticed in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story—how he was borne along by events, and how he changed as a person when he joined the active political resistance against Hitler? We find over and over again that once a person becomes involved in or decides to rebel against an established regime, that person may find that he or she is carried along by events in a world that has lost its contours and predictability. So we find in the play not only a conflict of political power and even values, those of feudal honor as against divine majesty, but also two sets of obligations, the king’s to his own divinity and the subject’s to the king, and finally two very different men whose psychology is decisively structured by their political fate and social situation. There are also issues of loyalty that cut very deep here. The only people in the play who feel ties of personal loyalty to individuals are women, who remain loyally bound to their husbands and sons throughout. The ties of family loyalty are routinely disregarded by all of the younger members of the royal clan, and it is one of the things that the older generation, as represented by John of Gaunt, laments. For all the chief protagonists are closely related one to another. Edward III had seven sons. The oldest, Richard’s father, the Black Prince, was killed in battle in France and became an instant icon of all that was noble, brave, and chivalrous. A regency was established by his brothers until his son and heir, Richard, could take up the crown. Several of the brothers died natural deaths, and in the play only two survive, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Bolingbroke’s father, and the Duke of York. Richard has, as we shall see, little use for his relatives and

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spends his time with cronies of lowly social origin. As for ties of personal obligation to men who have done political service to an overlord, alliances and the like, they are all very brittle and subject to instant rejection when it is politically advisable to do so. This lack of political friendship is new, and it is evidently part of Shakespeare’s world, in which Machiavelli was the most celebrated author. The ways in which new princes acquire their power through war, and not by peaceful inheritance, is the subject of Machiavelli’s The Prince, and we are never allowed to forget that this is what Bolingbroke is. If anything is in short supply in this world it is loyalty. It is not scorned, but it survives only in the nonpolitical world of women, and it is not, I think, a biased reading to think that there is more genuine fortitude among the women in this play than among the men. Finally, unlike most rebellion stories, this one has no heroes. Someone said that it was the perfect Cold War play. No one is perfect, no one wins. Eventually it ends. We can see why the characters act as they do, but we cannot fully accept the self-image of anyone. It is, in short, a play without illusions, without joy. Nevertheless, it has in it some of the most beautiful poetry in the E ­ nglish language. It is also a difficult play, and that is why I shall now go over it carefully with you. I would also encourage you to interpret it differently. You may find yourself in good company, since there is always so much controversy about any Shakespeare play. The only way to recognize the insoluble difficulties into which these views of authority, loyalty, and obligation throw the protagonists is to read the play very carefully. The Old Testament must also not be forgotten. For while here the reluctance with which God gave Israel kings is wholly forgotten, the fact that the Lord’s anointed defied him, suffered, were admonished by the prophets, and often ended badly was not forgotten. The final paradox of the natural body of the king is that it is the body of a sinner who listens neither to God nor to the priest, and who deserves to be visited by punishment. The play begins with lying. The audience knows that Richard had in fact ordered the murder of his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and everyone else on the stage knows it as well, but the deed cannot be charged against him because he cannot in principle do wrong. His servants, however, certainly can. What we get is the high ceremonial and chivalrous tone of the court,



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as Richard calls on Bolingbroke and Mowbray to put their quarrel before him. The former accuses Mowbray of treason, diversion of the royal funds, and the murder of his and Richard’s uncle, Gloucester. He challenges him to a duel, Mowbray takes up the challenge, and while he admits to having made a failed attempt to assassinate Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, he denies having any part in the murder of Gloucester, and explains that the moneys that he retained were in fact a debt the king owed him. He then quite justifiably affirms his loyalty to the king. For the two contestants what is at stake is perfectly clear: Bolingbroke’s honor in defense of his uncle, certainly, but there is more. He is challenging Richard outright because the king has already transgressed the rules of honor in some way which we do not yet know. Still, to begin with, in keeping with the demands of the code of honor, Richard sets the date for the trial by arms. So far, so good. Richard appears to be a very proper king who performs all the functions of a feudal monarch appropriately and overtly; there is no one who would dare to oppose him. In the next scene the realities begin to become overt. The Duchess of Gloucester upbraids her slain husband’s brother, John of Gaunt, for not avenging his death. Her love, her loyalty, and her sense of duty to avenge a slain husband and brother are poured out in a torrent of pain. But Gaunt will not act. Richard is the Lord’s anointed, and only God can deal with him. As far as Gaunt is concerned, that is that. He does not say anything in defense of Richard, but Richard is a divine instrument, and it is not possible to act against him. In scene 3 we expect the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke to commence, but at the last moment Richard orders that it be stopped on the pretense that he wants no blood spilled. Instead, he banishes both, Bolingbroke first for ten years, and then, after Gaunt pleads with him, for six. We should note that in council Gaunt had agreed to Richard’s plan, which shows the degree of his deference to the crown. Mowbray, who had served Richard so loyally, is banished for life. Richard is, it turns out, not a chivalric king mindful of the laws of honor but a crafty, scheming Machiavellian prince. With one stroke he rids himself of a dangerous rival and inconvenient follower who has already once collected a debt and might ask for more favors or even blackmail him. Yet the two accept Richard’s sentence, both

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lamenting their fate. This is, however, not the limit of Richard’s transgressions against honor and family loyalty. In the fourth scene we find him with his cynical cronies, to whom he admits that he has been too extravagant to be able to wage his campaign in Ireland; to fill his treasury he will simply confiscate the property of his uncle John of Gaunt, who is dying. In short, he plans to rob Bolingbroke of his lawful inheritance, thus undermining the most fundamental institution of the feudal order, even his own legitimate inheritance. Richard is neither wise nor upright, but that does not invalidate his rule. Act 2 opens with the dying Gaunt making his famous nostalgic speech about the England of the past and why and how Richard has betrayed it, lamenting that he will destroy England if he goes on that way. Richard is a shameful, blotted, scandalous character, as contrasted with his ancestors, who went on crusades to the Holy Land. He pleads with Richard, “Commit thy anointed body to the cure,” and he warns him, “Landlord of England art thou now not king; / Thy state of law is bondslave to the law.”5 That is a dreadful accusation, because a king who thinks he owns his kingdom is a despot and a tyrant. He is no longer a lawful ruler bound by the obligations of his crown—that is, by his political body, in Tudor terms. In medieval terms his natural body has betrayed his sacred one. He is also destroying the rules that establish his own legitimacy, as York, his last living uncle, warns him when he says, “For how art thou king / But by fair sequence and succession?” (2.1.198–199). That is heredity. The weight of that warning is instantly clear when the nobility, led by the Duke of Northumberland, see the threat to their status and still in loyal fashion agree that the king must be saved from his base, flattering advisers and the crown restored to rectitude by making Richard act as feudal law and custom require. By scene 2 we also know that Bolingbroke has decided to return home to collect his inheritance by force. In scene 3, the state of the conflict becomes evident in an angry exchange between Bolingbroke and his uncle York, who acts as regent while Richard 5. Richard II, 2.1.97, 113–114. Act, line, and scene numbers are from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin, 2002); line numbers may vary slightly in different editions. Further citations are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.



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is in Ireland. York speaks of the evil of defying the Lord’s anointed while Bolingbroke insists that there is no rebellion in coming home to claim his own inheritance; despairingly, York recognizes that Bolingbroke has a claim. York is not, I think, as interpreters say, an opportunist who bends with the wind. When he refuses to take sides, cannot act, he is caught in a nightmare in which he has obligations to both sides in the war, to his king and to the nephew whom the king has surely wronged. With act 3 we see the decisiveness of Bolingbroke and his political intelligence. He does not merely have the king’s favorites executed, he gives reasons that anyone could respond to. He blames them for inducing Richard to discard his queen—it is generally thought for homosexual affairs, since the word adultery is not used—and for in general having misled and corrupted him. Cleverly enough he charges them with private vices which are just what the public reviles most. This is in stark contrast to Richard, in the next scene, who as he returns to England weeps, sentimentalizes, and calls his enemies toads, spiders, nettles, and so on. But he does propose to fight. His reliance is only on God and his anointment, however, because by now his armies have deserted him. Not only he himself but also his loyal Bishop of Carlisle repeats that nothing can wipe away the anointment of God or reduce his kingship. When he realizes that all have deserted him, he calls out “each one thrice worse than Judas” (3.2.132); this of course contains the most terrible implication of identifying himself with Christ, of being imago Christi. That is also the horror of being both wholly God and wholly human. Richard now recognizes this and laments, “You have mistook me all this while / I live with bread like you, feel want / Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?” (3.2.174–177). This ends his most famous speech, which begins with “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (3.2.155–156), for the natural body does naturally die. Richard does not deny that he has an obligation to his kingly self; he merely says that it is impossible for any human being to fulfill it. One cannot be one person with two bodies. He does discharge his followers, but only because he has no choice. That may be part of his weak character; he gives up too soon without a fight, though his cousin Aumerle tries to keep him going.

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Now in scene 3 we find Bolingbroke, York, and Northumberland before Flint Castle, where Richard is lodged. Northumberland already speaks of him as plain Richard and is rebuked by York for forgetting that he is King Richard, “a sacred king” (3.3.9). Bolingbroke makes light of the matter and sends a messenger to Richard asking only that his exile be ended and his inheritance returned to him and that he and the king should then return to a natural condition “of fire and water” (3.3.56) He seems ready to submit as a loyal subject once his demands are met. Richard does not believe that this is the case and he warns Northumberland that England will suffer endless strife if the Lord’s anointed is deposed. Though both Northumberland and Bolingbroke seem to be submissive enough, Richard is sure his reign is at an end: “Down down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon” (3.3.178). When Bolingbroke protests, “My gracious Lord. I come but for mine own,” Richard replies, “For do we must what force will have us do / Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?” and Bolingbroke replies, “Yea, my good Lord” (3.3.196, 207–209). Now this is the crucial moment, because going to London means certain disaster for Richard, since the people there are very hostile to him and attached to Bolingbroke. It is at this point that Bolingbroke seems to decide that he will indeed take the crown from Richard and replace him as king of England. Many readers believe that this was his plan and that he plotted to dethrone Richard from the first. I do not think that the text justifies such an interpretation. Rather, I think, along with many others, that Bolingbroke is carried along by events, that he is the pawn of Fortune, that he has set a train of events in motion and suddenly is faced with making a crucial decision. He began with claiming only a return of what was lawfully his and then became a rebel. When Richard reveals his enormous human weakness and suggests that he is indeed a usurper, Bolingbroke seems almost as inadvertently to discover that he has overthrown the king and taken his place. It is not that Richard has shaken off his majesty; it is that, like so many people whose obligation to their rightful ruler weakens step by step, Bolingbroke comes rather unexpectedly to a point where he crosses the line from protest demands to open rebellion. Scene 4 is, in simple language and with analogies to nature, the gardener’s account of what has happened. The point of these remarks and the



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Queen’s reviling him as the new Adam, the very reincarnation of sinful man in the garden, is that he represents the humble man of the people who explains why Richard undid himself. Bolingbroke may now be popular and have the balance of power, but he has no legitimate claim to be king, and he knows that. He therefore returns to the murder of the Duke of Gloucester and the other crimes for which Richard must be held responsible. The Bishop of Carlisle warns him that none of this matters. Richard appears, and he cannot shake off “regal thoughts,” because his divine self still sees only Judas Iscariot in his enemies: “Will no man say Amen / Am I both priest and clerk?” (4.1.172–173). By this he means that he is still both a priest and one who has been reduced to giving responses to the priest’s questions in church ritual. Bolingbroke and his men now want him not only to release all his subjects from their oaths to him but also to confess his crimes so that their position might be more justified. But in fact Richard cannot do that. He not only sees himself as Christ and the onlookers as so many Pilates, he believes that he will be a traitor if he confesses because he will be renouncing his obligations to his sacred self, which he cannot do. In a very real sense only God can release him from his oaths and offices. He tries to illustrate his dilemma with a mirror. His face is now only that of a human being and has lost all its former ability to inspire fear and reverence, but in his “tortured soul. / There lies the substance” (4.1.298–299). He smashes the glass that reveals his human self and continues to cling to what he cannot abandon without the gravest sin. It is often said that Richard is weak, hysterical, self-indulgent, and unstable. I think that is to miss the point. He was certainly a wasteful and foolish king, but once he loses power, he reveals not so much a personal character as an impossible situation. He is obliged to remain loyal, to keep his oath, to retain what he cannot give up, the anointment of the Lord and his sacred self. It is not his to discard. He is bound to assert it, to keep insisting on it. That is his obligation to his role, and he is unshakable in his determination to insist on his unique person. That is what infuriates Northumberland and makes Richard such a threat to Bolingbroke. Nor does Richard lack courage. He is defiant to Northumberland and ironic to Bolingbroke to the last, and both recognize that he remains a real danger, even locked up in a distant prison.

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In scene 2 of the last act there is a curious interlude. It may show Bolingbroke’s astuteness in not carrying severity too far or his failure to be as cruel as a truly Machiavellian prince should be. I rather think the latter, for Aumerle’s survival is not in his interest. The other, and I think more compelling, meaning of the scene is that it may be intended to remind us of the varieties of human loyalty. The Duke of York, ever the loyal subject, rushes to the new King Henry IV to warn him of a conspiracy led by his own son, Aumerle. The Duchess rushes after him to plead for her son. To her, as to the Duchess of Gloucester, all that matters is family love, the loyalty that love inspires. Aumerle is her child, and she means to save his life no matter what he has done; to her all these politics mean nothing in comparison to her love for her son. My guess is that we find a more human king in Henry, and one who also worries about his son, who we know will eventually be a great king, Henry V. We see in Henry IV, in fact, a king who does not have Richard’s problem of a divine self, though the problems of treason have already begun to trouble his reign, as they would again and again. As for Richard, he remains a reminder of real majesty, and Henry wants him out of the way. Richard also wants to die, because even in solitary confinement he cannot quite be a traitor to his majestic self and is tormented. When the king’s henchmen kill him he dies nobly. King Henry, however also knows that he must do something to atone for the murder, and he says that he will make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to expiate his sin, though in fact he never does; he remains a usurper and a regicide. He has the crown, and there are many men who are now bound to him by oaths of allegiance, but neither he nor anyone else claims that he is the Lord’s anointed or a sacred person. He does not have any of Richard’s problems of obligation to a sacred self, and his subjects do not feel the formidable reverence that Richard inspired. The Tudors and Shakespeare understood that perfectly. After the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses that Richard’s murder began, no king was truly sacred. The political theology of the Middle Ages was over once and for all. The two bodies that were now being claimed, one the people the other the king or queen, were separable in a way Richard’s was not. In the history of political obligation this is an extraordinary chapter. Here we do not have Christians patiently enduring the powers that be because



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they are of God, like so much else that they must suffer. Here we have a Christian enhancement of kingship. It is not a scourge, but the very image of Christ. This is not merely an agent of God whom one must obey, for better or worse, but a positive incarnation of the sacred. The king is a unique being, and obedience to him is exactly the same as is demanded by God himself. Since the king is also, at a less exalted level, supposed to maintain the order of feudal ranks and inheritances, he must expect to face rebellious barons, as King John did when the nobility extracted Magna Carta from him, a charter guaranteeing their rights and limiting his powers over them. There was Edward II, whom the nobility killed and replaced with his son. So Richard was not the first of the Lord’s anointed to face rebellion, but by breaking his line and assuming the crown Bolingbroke decisively destroyed the entire theology of the king’s two bodies. He thus altered the pattern of obligations, which, even though oaths are still made to God to obey the ruler, became basically secular, legal, and involved loyalties that were not as intense as those that Richard could arouse in people who believed in the medieval political theology, like the Bishop of Carlisle. It also ended the dreadful tension for the king, who had to remain faithful not to an office or an oath but to his other self, which he could not shake off without being a traitor to it, which was poor Richard’s tragedy. He was both a man and a God, but he was not really Christ, and it made his life impossible. What then of obligation? Richard had delegitimized himself by his disloyalty, his refusal to live by the code of feudal honor. A Machiavellian prince cannot be saved by an appeal to divinity alone; he must also be far more resolute and competent than Richard was. On the other hand, while Bolingbroke is a successful new prince, he lacks that aura of divinity that he or any ruler still needs to command the obedience and loyalty of the nobility. They are his allies, but they do not have a deep obligation to his crown. He lacks authority, and the result is endless civil war, which was an ever present threat in Elizabethan England. Neither anointment nor honor was sufficient any longer to sustain a ruler, and the conclusion is that the Age of Machiavelli had come and that obligation was another word for necessity.

Lecture 8: Tyranny

so far the overwhelming case is for obedience except in extreme cases of religious evil. Even John of Salisbury, when he speaks of lawless rulers whose conduct may be punished by tyrannicide, is not clear. Moreover, he was an exceptional writer at a very tense moment. Until the Reformation most theologians were more circumspect, and rulers and ruled were often divided on sectarian lines. The two main Protestant leaders, Luther and Calvin, were equally opposed to any sort of self-assertion on the part of subjects. Calvin was at first even stricter on the subject of the duty to obey, especially as he had hopes of converting the king of France, Francis I, to his cause.1 When it became clear that a very significant part of the French nobility were Calvinists or Huguenots, and that the king and other noble factions were going to persecute them, and did so with increasing violence, this occurrence became the basis for an extensive literature. Today I am going to talk about the first systematic theories of resistance to public authority as both the duty and the right to rebel against a tyrant. I shall talk almost entirely about doctrines of Calvinist origins, though eventually there were many Lutheran equivalents when religious wars began to rage all over Europe. At the end I shall say something about Catholic doctrines of natu 1. John Calvin was a sixteenth-century French theologian based in Geneva and, together with Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Its central doctrine, based on predestination and eternal damnation from which only God can save man, was named after Calvin.

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ral law as a basis for resistance, but I shall really address it at length when I come to the twentieth century, when it was more widely discussed. I shall not go into the details of who said what and when. Instead I will concentrate on the radicalization of what began as a very cautious approach to resistance until it became a radical revolutionary doctrine that came to its peak with the execution of King Charles I of England in 1649. My story covers some one hundred years.2 It began as an appeal to the nobility framed entirely in religious terms—that is, ample biblical citation to show that a heretical ruler was a danger to the faith and called on them to remove this enemy of God—to increasingly political arguments that no doubt were still fired by some degree of religious feeling but which were no longer simply a matter of defending the faith, be it Catholic or Protestant. Charles I was tried for treason and tyranny, not for lack of piety.3 By then a ruler need no longer be a traitor to God, she or he need only have betrayed the people for whose benefit they were to rule. Radicalization meant here an increasingly loose and nonreligious, political definition of tyranny. I say “she” advisedly, because the radicalization of doctrine, as well as the difficulties it created, appeared first among the Protestant opponents of Queen Mary, who tried to return England to Catholicism by force and created a group of refugees, known as the Marian exiles, who were very prolific political pamphleteers. In Scotland the same scenario was played out when Mary Queen of Scots, who was Catholic, was confronted with Calvinist clergy. She was finally executed by her cousin Queen Elizabeth, but not for religious reasons. The Scots who came later were in fact even more radical than the Mar 2. For a general overview see also Oscar Jaszi and John Lewis, Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide (New York: Glencoe, 1957). 3. Charles I was married to Henrietta Maria of France, a Roman Catholic. His opposition to the radical political elements of Protestantism and the Reformation and the fact that he ruled like an absolute monarch were among the major causes that triggered the English Civil War (1642–1651). Charles I was eventually defeated, imprisoned, and executed. For details of his trial, see David Lagomarsino and Charles T. Wood, eds., The Trial of Charles I: A Documentary History (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press and University Press of New England, 1989), 74–129. The Civil War was followed by the Protectorate of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell and his son (1651– 1659) and, eventually, the Restoration in 1660: the return of Charles II as king of England.

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ian exiles, but not anything like the radicals of the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. The first step away from a simple duty by qualified constitutional lesser magistrates—say, the nobility—duly inspired by God, to act against a heretical and persecuting prince was a legal argument. Lutherans and Calvinists both raised a claim that a prince can disqualify himself. If he acts patently against the law he becomes a private citizen and may be treated as a felonious private individual. Daniel in the Old Testament had disobeyed a ruler, the Persian emperor Darius, who had overstepped his authority; and so might others on the strength of that example. Rulers have godly offices to perform, and when they fail in these they act outside the bounds of their authority and cease to be magistrates. Those who then punish them are not acting against a king because this individual is no longer a legitimate ruler. In Calvin’s version the ephors4 are still the only ones who may disqualify a ruler, but the problem that this notion of a tyrant creates is clear enough. As long as there was only one church with a recognized hierarchy, in principle, at least, the pope alone, or a bishop in minor local cases, could ultimately excommunicate and disqualify a ruler by lifting the obligations of oaths made to him. But who was to decide that the ruler had offended the honor and dignity and right of God now? Theologians such as Luther and Calvin and other learned men around them might advise, but they neither had nor claimed the sort of authority enjoyed by the Papacy. Who is to identify tyrannical behavior and then say that it is so gross that it cannot be of God, not even as a chastisement of fallen mankind? How can one identify a ruler who is not of God and so not a ruler at all, but just someone who happens to have legally inherited the office yet is so bad that she or he is simply a mistake? The question of who decides was aggravated by the Marian exiles because they widened the definition of a tyrant. A tyrant is, to be sure, first and foremost a traitor to God, but he may also be grossly immoral, acting against the law of nature by stealing from and murdering his subjects. At that point he clearly becomes just an ordinary felon. For the powers that 4. In ancient Sparta ephors (usually five in number) had the function of overseers or magistrates who shared power with, and checked, the Spartan kings.



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come from God must now be understood as the only lawfully exercised powers, and these offenses, religious as well as moral, suffice to destroy the authority of a ruler. How did these men acquire their power, then, since it is not of God as a direct gift? Pointing to the election of Saul, the radicals argued that the people had made the choice and that they had also made a mistake in electing this ruler and then had to be saved from the consequences of their erroneous choice by God and Samuel. They had saved the people of Israel from mad Saul, and their example must now be followed. The lesser magistrates might now include men elected for the office of ephors as well as the hereditary nobility. So the circle of men qualified to decide who was a tyrant is widened, and it almost looks as if the whole people might have a duty to rectify their own mistake, as some of those Marian exiles hinted. That was, however, an unusual step; most writers left to the magistrates the decision to brand a king or queen a tyrant, and also allowed them to decide if the duty to resist and rebel had come to them as it had come to Daniel. One immediate consequence of this theory of the duty of ephors to resist the tyrant was a sudden upsurge in historical research to find out who was and who was not an ephor and what their constitutional authority was. In England there was Parliament, in Aragon and France there were meetings of the estates, but was there more than that? Oddly enough, most Protestant writers looking back to the Roman conquest found among their German or Frankish ancestors a nobility that were co-rulers with their elective kings; on the basis of these antique records they now claimed that the French kings were usurpers as well as tyrants, having deprived their nobles of their constitutional rights. The point of this for us is that the argument now takes a new form. Political duty to obey or to resist is no longer based on the Bible alone, though it remains supreme as an authority. Historical precedent and legal reasoning are now added and become integral parts of arguments both for and against obedience to established rulers. Immediately for the French, for example, it meant that the nobility had a specific constitutional duty to resist a tyrannical king, who was a tyrant because he was a persecuting traitor to God. Radical as this new use of secular and constitutional theory was, it was relatively conservative when we recall the English and Scots. They found

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the most radical arguments still in the Bible, specifically the Old Testament. There was the covenant between God and the people of Israel. Were they not the equivalent of the old Israelites? They were, and they too had in the Reformed church made a covenant with God, and they too had a duty to resist and indeed to do away with the ungodly, especially rulers who had become tyrannical. The clear inference is that if it is up to the people as a whole to covenant and to resist, then it is up to them as well to decide who is and who is not a tyrant, and whom to obey and whom to disobey. Indeed they will be damned if they fail to resist, because they have sworn to God that they will not obey his enemies. Every congregation can and must know when the Lord’s ordinances are being disobeyed by their rulers and magistrates and that they have entered into a covenant with God to disobey and resist tyrants so defined. So far I have talked about an increasingly expanded duty to disobey tyrants, rulers who disobey the commands of God. I have said nothing about the right to do so, and to this argument we must now turn. The Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants) also stresses the duty to resist.5 Here the discussion is far more political. The first issue is to distinguish between two kinds of tyrants: usurpers and godless rulers. Usurpers are conquerors who come to the throne by force or fraud. They may wrongly kill an existing ruler; they may institute a coup d’état or in some other way seize power without any legitimate hereditary or legal title or claim to it. They may in time, of course, turn out to be very good rulers, godly and law-abiding. So they do pose a real political problem. The second tyrant is one who has a perfectly valid hereditary and legal claim to rule but who disqualifies himself by abusing his office. There are several grounds for deposing or resisting such a ruler. For the contract between the people and God is not the only one; a second contract 5. The French Huguenot Vindiciae (1579) was the first systematic doctrine that argued in favor of resistance to tyranny. A modern translation is “Junius Brutus” and Harold J. Laski, A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925), 65–213. In the context of the tyranny argument the originality of the argument of Montaigne’s friend Étienne de la Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1576), in which he argues that tyrants depend on our willing acceptance, without which their rule would be impossible, needs to be acknowledged.



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exists between them and their rulers. The tyrant is one who has broken either one of these contracts and is therefore an illegal ruler. If he is a conqueror, there may not even be a contract to begin with. He is a common criminal, and any citizen can strike him down as a public outlaw. That is what the second half of “A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants” is about. Even the lesser magistrates who have special rights to resist are not chosen by God any longer, but represent the people on the basis of some sort of fictitious election. Here again history was important to the claim that such election had actually occurred in the remote past or was constitutionally required and ought to be held. A decidedly feudal element of mutual reciprocal obligations also appears: the king is tied to the nobility by oaths, and both king and nobility are tied to the people. The English Parliament is also seen as having the right to judge conflicts between the king and the people. The fundamental argument is that ultimately the magistrates, as the representatives of the people, have a right to resist tyrants because the rulers are bound by an original contract with the people to rule them justly and for their benefit. The obvious question is, Who needs the magistrates if the people are the real contractors? All these people were naturally afraid of popular uprisings, but their doctrines did point at the very least to a democratic constitutional outcome. Let us take a closer look at “A Defence” and then at an actual case of tyrannicide, the execution of Charles I in 1649, to see what the right to resist now meant. The duty to resist is clear. The people promised God that the true religion would be defended against a ruler or anyone else. The right to do so and the appropriate agents were treated differently. For this involved more directly secular, political questions. Who has the authority to resist, given that the duty to do something about a godless tyrant has arisen? We all have, after all, a general duty to prevent crime, but we do not have the right to go and shoot suspects and even convicted criminals, much less to do away with a prince. Nevertheless, the duty to disobey the prince who has failed to do his duty is the ground for the right to disobey and resist him. I cannot sufficiently emphasize the primacy of duty in this literature. Rights are wholly derived from duties to God. What is new is the extent to which the language of

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contracts and indeed of feudal relationships enters the argument. Thus the opening argument of the “Defence” demonstrates that God grants all authority, but that to establish earthly political order he makes two covenants, two contracts. One contract is with the ruler, setting down the latter’s duties; the second contract is with the people. Both parties are thus bound to serve God. The relationship of both of these human contractors with God is described in very curious terms. Both rulers and ruled are God’s vassals, and he is their overlord. This was the prime example of oaths that bound inferiors to superiors in medieval Europe, and it still had a real resonance. However, it is worth noting that the language of promising injected into a biblical narrative where covenanting certainly exists is not described in these terms. What is now established is that the duty to obey God gives the people a title to act against the ruler who has failed in his duty. They obey and fulfill their obligation to God by resisting rulers who have broken their oath to God. This is a very brief chapter in the “Defence” because the readers of the tract had heard it all before. The second part would be equally familiar to them. But there is a powerful threat in it: if the people of God fail to resist the unholy ruler they are guilty in the eyes of God and have failed to keep their promise to him. We have moved from a vague duty to resist orders that force us to betray God, like worshipping pagan deities, to a positive, contractual obligation to God. In other words, if the ruler is Catholic, that proves that he is sworn to obey the Anti-Christ, and faithful Protestants must resist and punish him because they have promised God to enforce the contract that has been made between the ruler and God. They have promised to obey God and a godly prince, but also to do away with rulers who fail to live up to their promise. They are bound to execute the divine order. Because the duty to resist is now so specific, the “Defence” is also clear about who may act: not private individuals but whole towns and provinces, led by their officials, who may rise against kings and emperors. After all, the covenant between God and the people is a collective one: it imposes duties upon them collectively, and they may only act as a body or in response to their representatives, the magistrates who speak for them. Most important of all is that there is yet another contract. It is a contract between the people and their rulers. Here God is not a party, except indi-



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rectly, in that he requires us to keep our promises. It is also God’s will that rulers hold their authority from the people, not only from God. They rule in virtue of the consent of the whole people. They are elected, and even the principle of hereditary succession of princes is based on consent. This means that the whole body of the people is above the king, and, resorting to an old metaphor, the commonwealth is said to be a ship, of which kings are merely pilots whose sole job is to secure the safe passage of the people. Most threatening of all is a purely practical observation: if a people ceases to obey the ruler, his power just collapses, melts away. So in fact all rulers depend on the willing obedience of their people. History is not irrelevant to this point, and the “Defence” points to the many occasions when a people simply did away with an unsatisfactory, not even a tyrannous, prince. History can take the right to resist only so far. Examples do not always carry conviction. A right must be derived from some fundamental rule. One way of establishing such a rule is a divine command to act. But a secular argument may also work. Why do we need rulers at all? People are naturally free, in the sense that rulership is an institution created by men; it is something human beings contrive, and we can therefore easily imagine them being without it. The reason people set up some persons to govern them is that it is convenient to have judges who settle controversies and commanders to lead us in defense of attacks from other groups. In other words we decide that it is in our long-term and collective interest to have someone to enforce rules and to give orders so that orderly and efficient military action can be undertaken. However, who makes rules is not taken up in the “Defence.” There was the Roman doctrine, which had put legislative authority in the hands of the emperors, but that was hardly what these writers would want to claim. Instead they resorted to a rather vaguer view that law was just there, and if anyone made it, it was the people as a whole who gave it to the ruler to enforce. But rather timidly the “Defence” also notes that self-protection, the urge to protect our lives and our property, is in accordance with the law of nature. The reason that it is slipped in very quietly and not much discussed is that it was a standard part of Catholic moral theology, Roman in origin, and being used by Catholic writers to de­legitimize Protestant tyrants. It was a doctrine that both Luther and Calvin had spurned as essentially pagan and not in keeping with the primacy of

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faith and our total reliance on the will of God, rather than on our feeble and corrupt powers of reasoning. However, surreptitiously the right to resist does rest on a natural right to self-protection. That was part of the contract between the people and the ruler. Princes are merely the executors of the law that the people entrust to their care, whether it be nature or custom that makes the people’s laws. If princes make new laws on their own or fail to enforce the old laws, the people have a right to resist, and depose them. Nor is this just a matter of legality. For one cannot suppose that the people would impose unjust laws upon themselves, and so any unjust act of a ruler is also clearly illegal, and that includes unfair and extortionist taxation, and wasteful expenditures on royal luxuries and high living. In sum, the contract between the people and their ruler is one that demands that he rule justly; otherwise the contract is dissolved, and they have a right to refuse obedience. There follows a gruesome account of all the awful things a ruler might do to deserve the title of tyrant. In essence he acts for his own interest and against that of the people whom he is supposed to serve, and on the whole it does not take much to qualify as a tyrant. All he has to do is to create civil dissension or impose unwarranted taxes. In such a case either the people as a whole or those chosen as their representatives have the right under the law of nature and the duty under the law of God to do away with the tyrant. Such were the principles that moved Huguenots once the Wars of Religion broke out in sixteenth-century France and among the Dutch in their revolt against the Spaniards. For us the most dramatic case of the application of these theories was at the trial and execution of Charles I, king of England. The charge against the king was based on the assertion that he had been “trusted with limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land” and had assumed “tyrannical power to rule according to his will.”6 He had failed to call Parliaments and had started a civil war, and so was both a tyrant and a traitor. Parliament, as the representative of the people, was now going to try him for these crimes. They had captured the 6. Here and in the following paragraph Shklar cites the words of John Bradshaw, president of the High Court of Justice, at the trial against Charles I. See Lagomarsino and Wood, The Trial of Charles I.



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king in pursuit of their right of self-defense. So here was the king, a tyrant for subverting the fundamental laws of England and a traitor who had made war on his own people. The Commons had a legal right to try him as the representatives of the people and in response to natural law, which required that the people defend themselves against physical attack. Politically the prosecutor called upon the king to defend himself against the charges “in the name of the people of England of which you are elected King.” The king’s response was not negligible. He pointed out that the very few remaining members of the House of Commons had no legal right to try him. The whole Parliament was a court, but the House of Lords was absent, as were many of the original members of the House. Moreover, he was not an elective king and could not be deposed. He had his power of God and would answer only to God, eventually. This was not a court that had any legal right to try him. Nor was his claim to be the defender of the liberties of the people wholly hypocritical. The traditional doctrine had been that the subjects had a right to their property and lives and that the king must defend these, but that they had no right at all to have any say in how they were governed. Parliament met when the king wanted to consult them and to get as much revenue out of them as was possible. Unhappily for the king, he had in fact ruled arbitrarily, had begun the Civil War, and had lost it, while men with different political and religious views had won. Even history was on his side. Kings had certainly been deposed or killed before, but they had not been tried for breaking a contract with their subjects. The king was quite right as far as the actual law went, but he was hopelessly at odds with the reigning political doctrine. The judge who sentenced him was not perhaps wholly convincing when he compared Charles to the most horrible Roman emperors, but he had a winning argument when he said, “There is a contract and a bargain made between the King and his people, and your oath is taken sir, if this bond be broken, farewell sovereignty!” The king was regarded the destroyer, not the protector, of the people of England in the court’s judgment, and the fact was that the king had started the war. To say that he did so in defense of his prerogatives and even the actual constitution was not enough. He had raised an army against those who merely wanted to alter his policies

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through legal, parliamentary action; that was irrefutable once one agreed, as Charles did not, that kings were responsible to their people. It was a clear ideological confrontation between the divine right of kings and the right of the people to enforce a contract between themselves and their kings on the basis of their natural rights and their duty to God.

Lectures 9–13: Hobbes and Modern Contract Theory

no full texts exist for lectures 9–13. Among the Papers of Judith N. Shklar in the Harvard Archives we found only a short text on Hobbes and no records that would confirm the existence or the survival of any fully written-out versions of the lectures on Locke, Hume, Rousseau, or Kant. To enable readers to follow Shklar’s overall logic and argumentation, we reproduce here the short text of her Hobbes lecture, followed by edited versions of fragmentary lecture notes on Locke, Hume, and Rousseau located in the Harvard Archives, marked “MR2” (belonging to the Moral Reasoning course material). For Lecture 13, on Kant and regicide, the only available material consisted of keywords, which the teaching assistants were asked to use as board material. They are reproduced here as well. In the Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant fragments three dots indicate omissions and brackets insertions by the editors; periods have been added as needed to indicate the end of a note.

Lecture 9: Thomas Hobbes With Hobbes we enter a new intellectual world, but it should not surprise us.1 He was merely the most articulate and coherent spokesman for 1. The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was educated at the University of Oxford, where he met, and was influenced by the scientific writings

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views that emerged out of the horrors of protracted civil war. Many statesmen and writers on legal and political topics had come to the conclusion that something must be done to get religious belief and other group loyalties out of politics, to put an end to the unending slaughter. In France they were called les politiques—“politicians,” people who put politics before religion. And this goes to the heart of the matter. The objective was to get first of all the churches, then, as far as was possible intellectually, God out of politics. These people were not necessarily atheists or skeptics, but inevitably they preferred to think of God as a remote being who had created us and then withdrawn from the world. This was and is known as deism, and it is what Hobbes espoused. The God he presented was the voice that asks Job, “Where were you at the Creation?” that is, “What do you know about me? Nothing.” It is therefore impious to pretend to know the will of God apart from what can be learned by the careful study of his creation: ourselves and the natural environment. This naturally gives the sciences an enormous moral basis and politically has the effect of neutralizing all those emotions that are aroused by the sense that God has instructed us directly in matters of political and moral right and wrong. In Hobbes’ case these considerations are taken to their ultimate limit, to a political theory in which political obligation is in no way tied to any loyalty at all. He does not argue that people do not feel loyal to their nearest and dearest, but that this has no bearing on the great question of why we must obey those who govern us. In a nutshell his answer to the question “Why obey?” is “Because we have promised to do so and to break one’s promise is irrational.” Let me say at once that promises are wholly human contracts, not oaths that we make to God. There is nothing to stop us, of course, from dragging God into our contracts, but it adds nothing to our obligations, and it may be deeply offensive to God, in fact, to be called into our affairs in this irresponsible way. Who was Thomas Hobbes? His father was an exceptionally ignorant and feckless clergyman. Hobbes grew up a poor boy, but was at once seen to be of, Francis Bacon. Because of his critical stance toward the English Parliament, he was forced into exile, where he continued working on De Cive, the third part of his Elementa Philosophiae. During his travels on the Continent he met, among others, Galileo and Descartes. The execution of Charles I led Hobbes to write what would become his most famous work, Leviathan (1651).



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very clever and sent to the local grammar school and then to Oxford. For most of his life he was tutor to the sons of one of the great noble families of England, the Cavendishes. He went with them into exile in France and there got to know all the famous philosophers of the time, as well as getting a sense of the horrors of the French Wars of Religion and the raging wars in Germany, which were far more devastating than the Civil War in England. At various times he also did various political errands and research for the Cavendishes, and he had a very considerable experience of the realities of political life, even if only indirectly. Eventually Hobbes did write an account of the Civil War in England, and it did not please anyone.2 The blame fell on ambitious aristocrats, lawyers who thought they had the right to legislate by court decision, rich Londoners who were unwilling to pay taxes for the defense of the kingdom, and above all clergymen who thought it was their task to preach whatever religious opinions came into their heads, and worst of all university intellectuals who spouted classical doctrines about freedom and the right to kill tyrants. All these malcontents, but not the ordinary people of England, were responsible for the disasters of the Civil War. They were not, however, the only ones. The king and his advisers were fools and incompetents who had done much to bring it all on themselves. One has the distinct impression that the only person who knew anything was Thomas Hobbes himself. In the event the officials around Charles II and the king himself liked his views about the rebels well enough, but suspected him of atheism, and in any case, while his doctrine was certainly encouraging to governments that were effective rulers, it was not a royalist doctrine, just a support for any government that was in charge, which could just as easily be Cromwell as the king. I mention these details to bring out the fact that though Hobbes spoke for a substantial body of opinion, he was no apologist for any particular party, but rather an intellectual’s intellectual, a philosopher who is in fact still very much alive and much discussed by contemporary theorists. Where did Hobbes begin? Actually, his first production was a translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, in which he could find a fine confirmation 2. Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament (illegal printings first appeared in 1679 and 1680; an official posthumous edition was first published in 1682).

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of his own conviction that civil war was the worst condition imaginable. To demonstrate this he did not, like Thucydides, offer a description of an actual historical event but undertook what we might best call a rational thought experiment. What would happen if we suddenly found ourselves in a situation without any government at all, in a state of perfect anarchy, with no enforced rules? This is what he called “the state of nature.” And he compared this procedure to taking a watch apart. It is the condition in which human nature can be observed at work without any artificial restraints. By “artificial” he meant rules, not just objects that human beings create for their own purposes. The state is such a creation, and its purpose is to replace God in determining what people may and may not do in relation to one another. Indeed, among other things it appears that no feelings of loyalty of any kind are required to make the thing tick. To be sure, people have these feelings, but they are not what makes the watch go, once we understand its mechanism properly. Rational self-interest is all that can or should be made to account for a regular and reliable watch or state. What Hobbes gives us is a pure theory of obligation, a theory designed to convince us that to be rational necessarily means that we must and should obey those who have the power to govern a city.

Lecture 10: John Locke So far little regarding natural law, just Hobbes’ assault on it. Today: Doctrine designed to tie communities together in pursuit of common good and just laws, transformed in natural rights. Two contracts: 1. All with each to accept majority decisions re fundamental law and form of government, i.e. Constitution. 2. Contract between majority and those who govern . . . Purpose of law and government to protect our natural rights versus aggressor in our midst. This is the origin of obligation to obey. We consent to majority and to its choice of sovereignty as long as latter protects the individual, natural right. Conditional obligation. Unless government breaks its trust unconditional obligation to obey law. Government has authority to punish even unto death. Function of government to legislate and enforce law. As natural right limits what we may do to each other, so limit governments . . .



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Obligation depends on trust. Unless you have reason to trust government, no obligation to obey. Dissolution of government not dissolution of society. An arbitrary government worse than state of nature. People tend to put up with abuse. React in defense of rights and law. Violations begun by governments . . . Passive obedience inappropriate. Government there to do a job . . . Government means to an end, not end in itself. Conditional on maintaining trust given by consent. How much consenting do we actually do, though? Born into governed society. Tacit consent . . . An explicit promise may bind us . . . But tacit consent is not that kind of promise. Just assumed to be there. Consent does fine as theory justifying rebellion, what does it do for obligation to obey? Consent not as such, but consent to what we know we ought to consent to . . . Law-abiding in support of a trust-abiding and trustworthy government. Also duty general, society as a contract with all others. In that case tacit consent is not really significant, adds nothing to reasons for obeying. Reminder of First Contract. Are these reasons for obeying enough? Not if you want to argue for a deep, binding, personal duty and obligation to do so. Obligation of promises may then seem compelling. Still, “consent” perhaps best way to reconcile two different objectives: (1) justify rebellion; (2) justify obligation to obey government that does protect natural rights of citizens. Obey new king, who would be ok. If you do not choose to do so, [you] can always leave . . . Go to America. If you do not go to America, it signifies consent, and implicit contract that makes others assume and depend upon your continued obedience. This is one of Socrates’ arguments in Crito . . . Locke a very successful revolutionary theorist.3 But an old-fashioned one. Rebellion justified by ill-conduct of government. Tyranny. Rulers who do recognizably unjust things. [Locke] looks to their past and present behavior, and charges them with breaking the rules. [Hatred of ] the real rebels, not 3. John Locke (1632–1704) had a keen interest in science and philosophy and became a member of the Royal Society. His most famous writings are An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (published posthumously in 1931 and 1936), Letters on Toleration (1667), and Two Treatises of Government (1689). It is particularly in the latter that Locke develops his contractarian argument.

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the protesters. Does not look to future or better state. Redressing wrongs, not creation of a better, new social order . . . Some American revolutionaries already did look to future, but many did not. New England Puritans were able to integrate Locke very readily into their outlook . . . [The American revolutionaries] feared disorder, lawlessness: signs of a sin. Had to convince [selves] of utter depravity and despotism of British Government. Good men must resist evil . . . Colonists had sinned too, but deprivations of war had returned them to sobriety. [They] had virtuous leaders (remember those ephors) in Continental Congress in Philadelphia . . . They had shown Americans, as had the evident vices of the British, that they were not rebelling at all. They were merely asserting their just claims against an oppressor, . . . among these were what the Great Mr. Locke called natural rights to life, liberty and estate, which in their wickedness the British were taxing away. The crown had broken the trust placed in it by the long-suffering patient colonists . . . Religious duty, virtuous leadership, and the violation of natural rights by a wholly corrupt enemy justified rebellion. Or, to be exact, the restoration of virtue and justice . . . Was it a majority rebellion? Loyalists said no. Those who thought . . . as Jefferson did . . . emphasized enormity of violations of their rights. Taxed without consent. Taken away right of representation. Interfered with judiciary. Ruined our trade . . . All this could call for only one response, given that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [u]nalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” . . . Does not follow quite Locke’s formula. Nothing re property or estate. Instead pursuit of happiness. Meant right to seek one’s end here on earth or in the afterlife. Pursue any or secular life-plan one chose. [It] then goes on: “That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” When governments fail in these obligations it is time to “throw [them] off.” Not lightly or recklessly, but after due deliberation and efforts at negotiation, it may come to rebellion. That is the pure Lockean doctrine of limited obligation to obey . . .



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This is a long way from Hobbes’s contract. Jefferson thinks “our sacred honor” more significant. Just the sort of talk Hobbes deplored . . . Nature of the contract differs. The public influence of individuals is far greater and they are expected to concern selves with politics. Citizens, not subjects. What is shared with Hobbes is the effort to create a theory of obligation out of the promises made by individuals . . . Consent creates a just and free society, inhabited by people who refuse to submit meekly. [The people] are supposed to assent and consent to what they believe and what they regard as their political duties . . .

Lecture 11: David Hume In reading Hobbes you may have wondered if he offers any reasons why if one is sure to get away with it, why not pass bad checks? What if everyone does it? Not an answer [one] wants and certainly not at the same moment . . . Locke? Tacit consent . . . is it any good? Does a mere residence really constitute consent? In any case is all this concentration of the consenting individual in Hobbes and Locke not undermining the habitual and communal basis for obligation? What sort of society do they have in mind? Are people really like that? . . . One reason I have put off criticism of contract theory [is] because Hume more or less put it out of business in England. Hume [was] successful. Two consequences: (1) Social Contract/Natural Rights theory rejected in England. Lost [its] radical appeal. Replaced by more relevant utilitarian reform program [such as we find in] Bentham; (2) on European Continent new way of presenting social contract [such as in] Jean-Jacques Rousseau [and] Kant . . . [Hume lived in] calmer times.4 No stress on need for self-preservation 4. David Hume (1711–1776) was one of the best-known philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was friends with Rousseau and took care of him when the French philosopher sought refuge in England. Hume’s philosophy has strong empirical and skeptical foundations, as expressed in his major works A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Hume’s writings were not limited to philosophy. He is also the author of a celebrated six-volume History of England (1754–1762) and a collection of essays (1744) in which he tried to make his philosophy intelligible for a larger readership. Hume’s essays were assigned reading for Shklar’s course, par-

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as in Hobbes and Locke. [Hume] shared Hobbes’ appreciation of security, but not of fear. [He] shared with Hobbes especially strong sense of danger religion posed to human happiness. Repelled by grim Calvinism of Scotland. Hated Kirk.5 [Hume’s is a] radically non-Calvinist account of human virtue . . . Virtue does not really talk “of useless austerities and rigours, suffering and self-denial.” All she aims at is to make the virtuous “cheerful and happy,” affable, gentle and human during their brief existence. “Just ­calculation . . . and a steady preference of the greater happiness” is all she demands.6 Our obligation arises from our desire to be liked, by our immediate social circle and by the world at large . . . Not so much fear as just feeling: natural, for family, mostly internalized social pressure. Origin of organized society [lies in the] family. Extensive kinship group. Selfish, but not aggressive. Diffuse benevolence [is] part of emotional equipment. Not [to be found in] Hobbes. Not preservation of self, aggression, but need to protect possessions [is the] source of conflict. Need for law. Scarcity. Limited generosity . . . For Hume: no promises before enforced rules of justice. Impossible. Without such rules promising is absurd, for person [is] moved only by personal preferences . . . Rules and internalization of rules [are] required first. Only when practice is already established does it make sense to say “I promise to do X.” Understanding that one is expected to do X later and to be condemned for not doing so. Obligation cannot be created by promises. Most understand obligation, feel, before we can promise. We are bound to maintain law and order, not because [we] promise, but necessary in itself . . . Binding oneself to future conduct only [possible] in settled social-rule governed world. Stable conventions . . . Habits of obligation and obedience are antecedent to promising generticularly “Of the Origins of Government” and “Of the Original Contract” reprinted in David Hume’s Political Essays, ed. Charles W. Hendel (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 39–61. 5. The Calvinist Church of Scotland. 6. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 279.



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ally. We obey because [it is] in our collective interest to do so. Commerce, civility, peace depend on it. Obey government because realize far worse off without it. [People are] not sheep-like (Locke). Sensible. Excoriate treason and disloyalty . . . This is not expression of tacit consent. [For Hume that is a] meaningless term. We put up with bad laws as flaws to be accepted for sake of general lawfulness. . . . It is the prevalence of stable rules that we accept. Since we want legal inheritance we enforce [rules,] will even if . . . scoundrel inherits . . . Too bad, but law is law. But not [the same as] passive unconditional obedience . . . Obedience is given to governments long in place, laws of succession accepted, positive law, web of contracts. Consent an excellent basis for government where it exists. Elections [are] no proof. Within [the] English Constitution moreover [is] a measure of institutional resistance built into the system. Mixed Constitution means friction [and] is part of 1688 arrangement.7 Each part entitled to resist other’s encroachment. [Hume] admired it. Rule of law, religious tolerance, free press. Achievements . . . But absolute monarchies of Europe differ and yet have claim to obligation and admiration. Promote civilization. Arts and sciences ground for legitimacy . . . While human nature same, local circumstances differ . . . There are good reasons for obedience and disobedience, but promising has nothing to do with either. Neither does God. It is all man-made custom . . . We internalize custom, and that is why we say we ought to do something and that is why we feel and demand obligation. That is all there is. Men accept the governments under which they live. [They] act much the way [their] parents did. Habit, not consent, overt or tacit condition [has its roots in] . . . conduct . . . 7. Shklar refers to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic King James II was overthrown by a coalition of English parliamentarians and their Dutch allies, led by William III. The victory of the alliance and the crowning of William III and Mary II as joint rulers was a blow to Catholicism and the political forces it represented.

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We create all our rules and institutions but do not necessarily like them. Habit makes them more tolerable . . . [It] prevents expressions of discontent and . . . disorder. For most people never have a choice regarding where and how they live . . . Habit replaces God. Habit makes us gentle, renders situation agreeable. Bearable. Habit [is a] healthy response to limited opportunities. After all, peasant, artisan cannot emigrate. Intellectuals do that . . . [The] only way consent could operate is to take a generational vote. We do not come like “silk worms” on and off stage of life simultaneously. Not born or dead in same year. [A generation] cannot be separated out to vote a constitution in or out. No cohort can act for itself . . . This opinion [was] rejected by Hume’s greatest critic[,] Jefferson. [For Jefferson, it was the] majority, those living now, who [had the right to] govern. Citizens make [a] new constitution every twenty years.8 Equivalent of every generation contracting and consenting to constitution. . . . [The] dead have no rights . . . Still we ask [with] Hume: why then keep promises? [The answer is because it is] part of [the] social code of society in which we live. Internalized desire for approbation, fear for reputation. [This has] many social advantages. Security of expectations . . . Ultimately this is simply what is meant by morality. In Hume’s view this sense of morality is a passion. Feeling for pleasing, creating affection and trust, avoiding pain or ill will. [There are] so many reasons to keep promises. [To name just] two: (1) because we have come to feel like it, or (2) because we think law and custom, social order require it . . . Personal promises are generally kept as [a] matter of feeling . . . [while] public ones in obedience to law. Both conditioned by social learning . . . Hume’s skepticism about uncertainty of all beliefs tormented him, [he] admitted that habits of daily life [were perhaps the] only cure. [Hume also had a] strong sense of the brittleness of all human relationships. Belief in

8. Thomas Jefferson allegedly remarked that a revolution was necessary every twenty years to prevent institutional sclerosis and oligarchical tendencies from becoming too powerful.



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God makes no difference: [it was] just another learned habit . . . Groundlessness of beliefs shook him, and his observations led him to conclude [that] most people [were] equally at sea . . . But is it not any habit or passion that is socially supreme? Justice is the idea and practice that hold[s] the entire structure of government and law together . . . [This is so] because justice determines and secures private property. [It] settles what is mine and yours. Private property is a socially and legally secured claim to one’s possessions. [It is the] basis of all law; order and justice is the securing of its claims. Justice declares what is mine and thine as settled by laws and institutions. It is the foundation of all order. That is why it is just to obey law. Otherwise no property and no civilization . . . Now we may not remember that mine and thine are at the root of all rights and obligations. If we do, we would be more inclined to obey all laws, to conform to custom and seek good opinion of society, seek praise [and] avoid conflict. Radical psychology, extreme skepticism, find refuge in a conservative ideology. Not [the same as] a nostalgic traditionalism . . . Locke looked scary to [Hume]. To base obligation to obey law on a fiction, and one that invites periodic rebellion seemed a recipe for disaster to him. Natural rights as a claim to disobey [was an] unwelcome notion. No basis [ for it] in history, in structure of social belief and real habits . . . Locke had invented an implausible scenario, and Hume feared that people might act on it and thus render it historically true. [Hume’s] own theory certainly open to radical uses. [For] Jeremy Bentham contract [was] silly.9 Rights a dangerous fiction, nonsense on stilts . . . The response to inefficient delinquent government [was] reform . . . [Bentham] took a leap Hume did not make. Utility decides. Mostly obedience is overwhelmingly in one’s own interest. Government [was a] necessary evil, with emphasis on the necessary . . . Significance of Bentham cannot be overestimated. [He] used Hume’s

9. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was an English social theorist who influenced legal thought, economics, and education. His politics and practical reform programs were deeply imbued with his radical utilitarianism.

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critique to forge basis for radical politics. Re-directed political critique in England . . . Obligation [turned into a] legal concept.

Lecture 12: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Ultimate outsider and most devastating critic of all social institutions ever.10 His political masterpiece, The Social Contract, is meant to show how illegitimate all existing states are by presenting model of legitimate one . . . Jean-Jacques Rousseau had taken Hume’s critique to heart. Knew him. A social contract never occurred. [It served as a] model against which to actual[ly] measure . . . Once we leave nature, other social relations follow. Division of labor. Property. Naturally we are not equal. Now that matters. As [we turn into] producers, accumulators, competitors, inequality [is the result]. . . . With private possessions [come] violence [and] war. Hobbes’s state of nature. Too insecure for both poor and rich. Poor fear violence, rich insecurity of holdings. Rich propose a deal to poor: let us make laws and enforce them to secure life and property. Turn possession into genuine right of property. Poor agree. [This] freezes them. Since wealth equals power all subsequent laws favor rich . . . Luxury, exploitation [are the results]. Why did majority agree to this fraudulent contract? Stupid. Also corrupt. Each thinks “I’ll make it, rest won’t.” What passes for justice in this world is just as Hume said: security of mine and thine. Exchange from possession to legal title. What all social contracts mean to achieve. At any rate it is not consent to this, but general depravity that sustains the law as is . . . 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a French philosopher and educator. He was one of the main representatives of the French Enlightenment but also one of its most radical critics. Rousseau argued against the evils of inequality, which he thought went hand in hand with societal and civilizational progress and led to the increased division in terms of labor and property. He advocated republican ideals, and during the French Revolution the Jacobins sought to turn his philosophy into practice. Rousseau’s most influential writings are Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755), The Social Contract (1762), and the educational treatise-cum-novel Émile (1762). For a more comprehensive treatment of Rousseau see Shklar’s Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).



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Political society declines from a natural bliss. Not an improvement as Hobbes and Locke had claimed. Ratiocinating man [is] a corrupt animal . . . If we had a genuine, not fraudulent social contract what would it be like? Can “men being what they are and laws what they might be” create a society in which duty and self-interest would never be at odds? “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.”11 Rich depend on poor for service, poor on rich for subsistence. Could there be a set of chains that could be justified? One which would not degrade us? Is a legitimate form of government at all possible? [Rousseau’s] answer: maybe no or yes. Make up your own mind. . . . Either way [he] put the question on a new footing. As against Hobbes: compulsion, conquest cannot give right. Might is not right. [It is] a fact, not a norm. Obedience as a necessity creates no obligation. Neither can enslavement. No one can be forced to give up his moral responsibility as a human being, and that is what a slave is forced to do. Literally a-moralized [he] therefore [has] no obligations . . . Only genuine contract [is] between roughly equal persons [who] know that they must do this, lest they go down the usual drain of history. Give up all . . . natural powers, possessions, and rights to create a collective sovereign. . . . Transform selves from private persons into lawmakers who make laws collectively for all of themselves. [Turn] men into citizens. Renounce all natural freedom in return for equal social rights . . . Through this contract we create a “general will” . . . Each must internalize it as a citizen. General will never wrong, by definition. Aims only at general interest and general good. Does not legislate for individuals, or lesser groups . . . Promote two great ends of law: liberty and equality. Equality because of liberty. It is nothing without it. Liberty because any dependence on another person is . . . force taken from the state. Odd to say [the] least. Liberty for Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not being dependent on another specific person. Impersonal dependence on public rules liberates us from that. Freedom is being bound by law in a state where everyone is so bound and equally so. If X depends on Y, Y has more power not only than X but than all the other citizens who have no dependents. 11. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, opening line of the first paragraph of the second part.

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Sooner or later this escalates into general inequality and oppression . . . So unless state has a complete monopoly on obedience [there is a] dynamic of dependence, i.e. no unfreedom and inequality begins its rush . . . No one to be so rich as to be able to buy, no one so poor as to have to sell himself . . . Contract-creating law needs wholehearted commitment . . . Not just pay taxes, rejoice in it. What is not covered by law? Do we have a private sphere? Yes, but it is up to the sovereign to decide about that. Free to practice any religion as long as it is tolerant. In addition, . . . a civic religion [is needed], affirming our exclusive patriotic love of country . . . Again, do have private property. But how much and conditions [of which are] a matter of law. Law makes property possible. Expropriation, taxes, limits all may be legal, and justified by general good, [as long as they are regarded as an] act of general will . . . Groups of individuals get together to exchange personal freedom and possessions for legal rights and legal property. This makes them into single unit . . . Law expresses will as community. [It is the community which] decides on its own scope. General Will [is not identical to the] will of all. Not a majority. What one would will if one only had welfare of society as a whole in mind . . . What must we do? To go on as a free and equal people making our own law, then we will feel obliged to risk lives in war, to obey the laws and to promote policies that promote general, not partial ends. This General Will is will to equality and justice . . . Each society has its own character and ends, and justice is the general will of a given society of mankind; and the smaller, more homogeneous and isolated a society the more likely to realize its general will . . . Sources of degeneration: (1) people lose interest in conduct of public affairs, loses general will; (2) government ceases to follow general will. Develops own esprit de corps, own general will, not personal egotism, as much as corporate self interest, pursue own policies. This happens invariably in time. Erosion . . . To whom and how are citizens obliged? To the general will, not to government; [the latter] is merely their servant. They must obey the law they have made. Not because they have promised, but because they have been transformed and re-educated to feel and know that their condition as free



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and equal citizens depends on it. Their obligation is [to] the general will within and to repress the particular will. Else no citizens and no justice. In [the] long run even most civic minded republic will fall victim to self-generated decay . . . Men being what they are and the psychological forces of self-consciousness, self-interest cannot be diverted to civic ends. Laws as they might be can put off the evil way, still have to obey. We get the government and laws we are fit for. Modern Europeans not fit for republican regime such as Sparta. Even Switzerland was decaying. We are no better than those who rule [and we] have no claim against them, and must obey because it would only be worse for all if we did not. But [if ] civic obligation can exist only for civic men, is regeneration possible? If yes, then not despairing. French Revolution thought yes, [it advocated the] reign of virtue, to make people live up to its real will. [The] . . . Jacobins quoted The Social Contract all the time, wrong[ly] in my view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau [was the] quintessence of European despair. Civilization has made virtue impossible. In a choice between order and anarchy, choose order, given how corrupt we are. And corrupt is the word he applied most to both contemporary society and its governments. Whether corrupt or virtuous we have the government we deserve . . . So we have no chance but to obey. Real obligation [is] possible only as part of a transformative contract, sustained by constant civic education. We would have deep political obligations if we were civic rather than private men.

Lecture 13: Kant and Regicide Trial of Louis XVI . . .12 Robespierre: Will of the people is supreme above justice.13 Revolutionary party acts for people. 12. The Trial of the People of France (represented by the French Convention) against King Louis XVI took place in late 1792 and early 1793. The king was found guilty of having abandoned and conspired against his own people and having unduly left his office. He received the death penalty and was guillotined in January 1793. 13. Maximilien Robespierre was an admirer of Rousseau. As a trained lawyer and elected member of the Revolutionary French Convention he represented the more radical faction of the Mountain (the upper seats in the Convention, as opposed to

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Kant: Categorical Imperative: test of morality.14 Could the reason for my action be: (1) universally valid; (2) a law of nature; [and] (3) does it treat other persons only as means or also as ends in themselves? Example: lying. Social contract is hypothetical: what a rational being would will. Universal law of external freedom: minimum condition for moral conduct. Primacy of peace for law. Unconditional obedience to all governments. Legal disobedience is inconsistent, irrational. Unlawful = war. War is beneath right and wrong: state of nature. Statesmen obliged to end it. Trial of King: (1) assertion of will of sovereign people—Jacobins; (2) basis for a just new state—Girondins. Saint-Just’s new arguments for trial and execution: (1) no one can reign innocently; (2) future of a virtuous people. For King: no trial without prior law. If a foreign enemy: kill him. Is an illegal trial worse than no trial at all?

the Gironde, or “the Plains,” the moderates) and was responsible for demanding the death penalty for Louis XVI. Together with Louis Saint-Just (who was equally keen on seeing Louis XVI guillotined) he was one of the leading members of the Jacobin Club and a major driving force behind the radicalization that ended in the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), during which both were guillotined. 14. The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was one of the foremost thinkers of the German Enlightenment. Kant took the empiricism of Hume as a starting point for his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). His categorical imperative was a law or condition that applied to everyone as a universal law (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785). Kant was an admirer of the republican form and the French Revolution until the execution of Louis XVI. Shklar’s recommended reading in this context was Kant’s Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 84–89, 138–141. For a modern account Shklar’s recommended reading was Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 110–127, 166–177.

Lecture 14: Hegel and Ideology

after the french revolution, the question of obligation remained important only in the United States. In Europe a wholly new style of political discourse came to dominate public life. This became known as the Age of Ideology. Typically ideologies are political belief systems that have four significant characteristics: first, they rely on theories of history, not on moral or religious doctrines to justify ends; second, they are designed to direct political action in a world in which conflict is inevitable and even desirable; third, they require identification of an enemy and the plotting of tactics required to defeat him; fourth, they tend to be secular in their objects, not religious—i.e., the ideology is the supreme cause, and therefore now the focus of obligation. Every modern ideology purports to explain why the social order is as it is and where it will, as a matter of historically predictable fact, go. It not only works for change, it regards the success of its aims as inevitable. The reason for this confidence is that ideologies rely on history both to explain and to justify their principles. All have a theory of history, and all share to a larger or smaller degree the conviction that they are “scientific.” Unlike earlier efforts to understand society, ideologies are action-directed. They are not speculative, but action-oriented. Most ideologies are therefore tied to a political party or movement. They are not just political theories, and even less social sciences, and they are highly programmatic: their aim is to act to promote the ends that history has destined them to achieve. Therefore politics is bound to involve more

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or less violent conflict. Ideologies identify the enemy to be fought, which is characteristically not only opposed to the aims of the ideology and the group for which it speaks; it is also an obstacle out of step with the forces of history. Finally, ideologies aim at earthly objects. Though the fervor they inspire may resemble religions, and although some religious groups in the nineteenth century generated ideologies, these are political belief systems, and they are not directed at the transcendent and the divine. For us the final point is the most significant: that the ideology as a cause and the party that works for its success now become the object of primary obligation, not the state, which is significant only as a means ultimately to enforce the ideology. The main ideologies were radical democratic republicanism (“Jacobinism,” after the French party), nationalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, imperialism, liberalism, anarchism, social Darwinism, racism, and, in due course, fascism and Nazism. This is not a full list, but you will surely recognize them. For us the two most significant ones are nationalism and anarchism because they have a very direct impact upon obligation as we have been discussing it: the duty of an individual to obey public authority. We will come to this later. First let us address the decline of interest in the question of political obligation after the French Revolution. The intellectual basis of the various ideologies that I named was generally the belief that history had a recognizable pattern and that when we understood the way mankind had developed we would also understand what the future would be like and what we had to do to keep in step with it. To put it in the language common to most ideologies, history was governed by laws like the laws of nature. There were at any one time recognizable general forces at work, which operated independently of the will of individuals. These forces were collective human responses to necessity: of geography, language, economic development, the distribution of power in society, the state of knowledge, race, and the accumulated habits, traditions, and cultures of entire populations. In principle these collective forces could be mapped, and their past development could serve to predict the future. These predictions were not neutral, as the laws of gravity were. They were more technological. If the forces of history were fully grasped we would know what we had to do to survive and prosper collectively, as a class or a



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nation or as humanity. The instinct for such collective survival was taken for granted. All social collectivities exist in order to perpetuate themselves, on the analogy of families. Like humanity as a whole their units are programmed by history itself to make survival a given. It is a fact of nature, and we are summoned to act accordingly. If, for instance, you understand that the people, in contrast to the hereditary nobility, are alone responsible for all that has been good and right in the past and present, this can be recognized as a true account of all the great changes hitherto. The cause of the people then becomes the cause of mankind, and you must promote it, by eliminating all its enemies and also by educating the people to understand its importance and destiny and its true will. This is a very crude version of Jacobinism, or radical republicanism, but what matters to us is the element of historical destiny. The people are the real object of obligation, not the state or the law, but the people will not be fully in charge of their own destiny for some time. The obligation of political actors is to act on their behalf to realize the future. Leadership is the knowledge of that future, and it must determine what one does. Eventually the people will rule without hindrance from their enemies, and this future requires the friends of the people to devote themselves to revolutionary activity in order to hasten and ensure the victory of right over wrong, of the people over their aristocratic enemies. Or take a certain kind of liberalism. Freedom of speech and all intellectual activity are absolutely necessary if humanity is to progress morally and materially. The record of history proves clearly that all advances in knowledge have been made by geniuses who defied often terrible oppressors or mere conventionality to assert the truth they alone had discovered. To silence any voice is therefore to risk dooming mankind to stagnation and regress. Even false opinion serves a purpose because it causes us to defend and reexamine the truth. The point again is that our obligation is to promote the future progress of mankind. We now understand how improvement comes about, and if we stifle personal freedom we are, so to speak, defying the laws of progress. If we build bridges without understanding the laws of gravity they will collapse. If we silence the voices of creative and bold spirits we are just as surely ignorant of the laws of progress, and we will stagnate and be dull intellectually and morally. Or take the various ide-

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ologies of class or state war. It is clear that history is the progressive advance of mankind through stages of development each one of which comes to end in a violent conflict between an old and a new power. Thus each stage of history is marked by the dominion of the most advanced class that has risen against its predecessors and has wrested the control of the means of production from it. In the next stage this process will come to an end when the final class, usually the working class, will triumph as a matter of historical certainty. Alternatively, history is a struggle between states. Dominion goes to a new state that has conquered a previously hegemonic power and has taken its place. Alexander’s empire was in time followed by Caesar’s and so on. In another version of this argument, the conflict is not so much between specific territorial states as between forms of state, such as the modern constitutional sovereign state, which replaced the feudal monarchy, which had replaced the Roman state. The kind of state that Hobbes had in mind now becomes a historic necessity, not, as Hobbes had thought, a prudent arrangement. The modern state is a historical necessity, and if one understands why it is the case one will inevitably accept it and indeed promote it. The great moral rule is to know what is necessary and then to do its bidding. History is in this respect not unlike God. The philosopher who is quite accurately held responsible for having developed the theory of history that came to be at the very heart of ideological politics is Hegel, a German thinker deeply impressed by the political and intellectual changes that the secularization of politics and the French Revolution had brought about, who tried to make sense of these tremendous transformations.1 I am not obviously insane and will not therefore try to give you an ac 1. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was, along with his fellow philosophers and contemporaries Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the major thinkers and exponents of German Idealism. Hegel was deeply influenced by ancient Greek philosophy and by Rousseau. He witnessed the French Revolution, its aftermath, and the impact it had on Europe, and on Germany in particular, and his work can be seen as the attempt to establish a systematic, dialectical philosophy in which the Spirit could eventually be reconciled with real events and in line with the course of history. Law and legal aspects were obviously important components of Hegel’s philosophy of history. His most famous works are Phenomenology of Mind, also translated as Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and Philosophy of Right (1820).



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count of Hegel’s philosophy in twenty minutes.2 I will limit myself to indicating why his view of history, which was also implicit in all the ideologies that were swirling around him, is important for us. It made the question of obligation seem either irrelevant or insignificant. Obligation to public authority came to be regarded as a mistaken way of considering politics. History, for Hegel, was not what is ordinarily meant by the term: that is, the account of what men and women did in the past. Rather, it was the process by which mankind struggled to arrive at knowledge of the truth. The great actors in this drama were great men who at no time fully understood what they were doing. This is because the meaning of events becomes clear to us only when we look back and know how it all turned out. Great men are not just bearers of personal talents; they embody the spirit of a people and of an era. Moreover, they are always in deep conflict with the beliefs and people that precede them, even though they were formed by the experiences of the past which they now attack. So history is the way in which intellectual change occurs through a series of intense conflicts until we will finally know all we can know about ourselves and the world we have created. Socrates thus becomes the embodiment of ancient Greece in decline. He sums up all its beliefs and traditions, but he also challenges them by insisting on his freedom as an individual to question them and to distinguish what is rational and what is not rational in their politics. That is why the Athenians put him to death. He put their beliefs to the test of reason and so cast their collective traditions in doubt. The New Testament was Europe’s way of making sense of the idea of a single humanity sharing a common destiny and united by a universal law of mutual love. It also revealed to Europeans that the history of mankind had an end and a purpose, the salvation of mankind. This belief was possible only in a destroyed Roman Empire, but it also challenged and destroyed the pagan world which Rome had defended. With the triumph of modern philosophy and the modern state, Hegel believed, we finally understood that we had made our own history collectively as we tried to know what our destiny was. It was to know ourselves—that is, to understand the process which had created modern European states. 2. Shklar wrote about Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in Freedom and Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

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Understanding knowledge has no mysteries; it is strictly scientific, and it concerns itself with the way we communicate our experiences to each other and then try to understand them. It is the way scientists prove and build upon each other’s experiments and conclusions; it is the way we analyze the events of the past and critically review them until a verifiable account emerges. Once we grasp that history is a conversation of mutual assertions and criticisms, often violent, then we will know ourselves. We will also know, as we look back upon the past, that whatever triumphed had to prevail, because it promoted the progress of humanity as a whole. Even though to the tenderhearted history might look like one long slaughter, to a scientific historian it is clear that this is the way it had to be because men are driven to the next step in their collective development. What then do we now know that makes politics different from the past? We know that the modern state is historically necessary. It is the way that men who demand both freedom and the rule of law must be governed. It is the law that protects the freedom of individuals because modern law, unlike all its predecessors, is the work of reason: it is the outcome of rational jurisprudence and calculation about what is necessary to ensure the future progress of mankind because it is the institutional framework within which for the first time in human history freedom to pursue knowledge and political order are inseparable. To ask “Why should I obey?” in such a state is to be merely ignorant. It means that you do not understand the demands of history. You might be ignorant because you are poorly informed, but that is less likely than that you are deluded by intellectual vanity, egocentricity, immaturity, and an emotional incapacity to be scientific. A modern Christian understands that his archaic faith is safe only under the culturally rational modern state that also supports museums. A scientific intellectual understands that science is possible only under the modern state. The reformer who wants equality now does not understand that he is indulging his own inclinations rather than pursuing justice, because justice is now possible only in the modern state, which has to be unequal to promote economic growth and to ensure that rational elites occupy the offices of government. The whole point for us is this: “Why should I obey the modern state?” is an irrelevant question because the only rational question to ask is “Why is the modern state as it is,” and “What are the historical changes by which



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we collectively produced it?” It is not only what it has to be; it is also what it ought to be because we now finally understand the historical reasons for our situation and must accept it as necessary and rational. We have moved, as we had to, from belief to science, from intuition to self-knowledge. A Hegelian would thus say of the current changes in the Soviet Union that it is gradually emerging from its Oriental despotism to a scientific understanding of the modern world and is trying to establish a modern, legal, constitutional state in keeping with the knowledge that its scientific elites have gradually and after vast bloodshed acquired.3 Communism would count historically as sweeping away a feudal past. Like other irrational systems communism harbored the seeds of its own destruction, which we now see in full force as former Communists attempt to replace it with a rational and belief-free government. Its people would and should eventually trust the new modern state and enjoy a pious but calm patriotism. Its elites must concern themselves with economic development and the establishment of a rational educational system. Thus, while resistance to the Communist regime was not irrational, as the European Reformation and the American Revolution had not been irrational, once there is a rule of law and a relatively uncorrupt elite that governs scientifically, rather than ideologically, there will be no point in asking “Why should I obey?” People will no doubt do it, but that is a sign of personal immaturity. This view of history has been called historical determinism, and the term describes it quite adequately. And you can see that in response to the question of political obligation it seems to rest on a misunderstanding. In the case of theories of progress the right question to ask is not primarily should one obey public authority but what will promote human progress. If the modern state is the necessary and sole political framework within which progress is possible then clearly there is no more to be said. However, even if that is denied, the question is still not directed at authority primarily but at history. The only valid question is “What must I do at this moment in history to promote the progress of mankind?” For liberals and every kind of socialist and many anarchists this was the case, though they answered the 3. Toward the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had officially been dissolved and replaced by the new Russian Federation.

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question in very different ways: class war for one group, parliamentary reform for another. Possibly destroying the modern state is what is called for since it may well repress the creative forces of classes, tribes, and, above all, creative individuals from advancing their own future and that of humanity. Now human progress was not to be the only ideological reading of history. History may, in fact, not be a matter of progress but only of war. Some nationalists have argued that history is a struggle between nations and that the sole end of politics is to see that every national group has its own government and military force in order to engage in a perpetual struggle with other nations in an endless battle for the survival of the fittest. That roughly was the imperialist and fascist message. Here again the individual counts for nothing, and his or her questions about the duty to obey are a sign of bad genes or the effect of alien propaganda.

Lecture 15: The Positive State

last time i explained why the question of political obligation as we have discussed it—as the duty of an individual to obey governments—ceased to interest political theorists in the Age of Ideology. Nations, races, and classes, not individuals, were the real actors in the political drama now. Loyalty to these entities certainly was urged upon the relevant social groups, but it was as members of a nation or class that they were expected to act. Did the individual citizen totally disappear? No, not in the United States, and by the end of the nineteenth century he reappeared in England. It is to that movement called Idealism that I want to turn today. Its basic ideas are still very much alive, and so I begin what is essentially the contemporary part of this course. From now on I am going to talk about ourselves, or at least our own intellectual world. The oldest question of obligation never quite died out in the United States because of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law, which threw abolitionists back upon their personal conscience.1 Slavery and the American Civil War also became issues that were discussed in England.2 The lecture was originally titled “The Positive State (T. H. Green).” 1. Before slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, “free states” (where slavery was outlawed) offered refuge and even freedom to runaway slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was one of the most controversial laws passed by the U.S. Congress regarding slavery because it required authorities and citizens of free states to return fugitive slaves to their masters. 2. The United Kingdom and the part of the Commonwealth that pertained to it at the time had abolished slavery in 1833. However, during the American Civil War,

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The central philosophical issue has been positive obligation, that is, “What are our duties to a relatively just, relatively democratic state that has within it the possibilities of reform?” The question is not “When must I rebel?” but “When must I pay my income taxes, send my kids to school, accept compulsory vaccination, submit to regulations in employing other persons?”—in short, “When must I accept the regulatory state?” The difference between the Anglo-American “welfare” state, and perhaps all other “welfare” states,3 is that the former was justified in terms of liberal values, the flourishing of freedom for all citizens as individual persons, not as part of a social design, as were the command economies of socialist states and the racial imperatives of Nazism, as well as the militaristic or religious visions of various fascist regimes. That is why obligation remains at the center, albeit in a new form. When I said that the question of personal obligation ceased to matter in the nineteenth century, I did not mean to suggest that it died completely. The reason for this is that religion did not really die out, in spite of what is now called secularization. The old denominations lost their following, but it was a very creative period for Protestantism in the United States. There were a number of religious revivals, and new congregations and denominations came into being. In England some of the same movement, evangelism, was especially powerful among the educated middle classes. With the exception of the Mormons, these groups did not run into any trouble with established authorities; what they often did was to try to arouse the consciences of their congregations to do something positive about the social afflictions created by industrial capitalism. The Idealism I am going to describe today was fundamentally to preserve the spirit of this kind of socially aware Christianity, without reference to most aspects of traditional belief that no longer seemed valid to many educated people. These people were, as a rule, particularly active in academic life. They were usually not church members, but they did believe that God had been for a moment incarnated in Jesus and that this belief must have a direct bearing on our spiritual and Britain remained ambivalent and played more than once with the idea of officially acknowledging the Confederacy. 3. Shklar is not using “welfare state” in its current sense to describe Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia but rather as meaning a state that purports to be created for the purpose of looking after the social welfare of its people.



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moral life. At the very least it meant that we knew what example we ought to live up to as persons. We knew this because God is not out there, but within us, and we recognize him in our capacity for moral action. It meant also that human history was purposeful, and that we are all part of a developing spiritual process. God is identical with the self of every human being, to the extent that the self realizes its moral possibilities. To know oneself as a person with moral potentialities is to know God. Jesus is reenacted in the life of every person who knows that he or she has moral duties. Every time we make a moral choice, for better or worse, we see God in ourselves. When we say, for example, “I ought not to do that, it’s wrong,” or when we reproach others for their wrongdoing, we are admitting that we have moral duties and that we are responsible for our moral and immoral conduct. This understanding is God in us—that is, a repetition of the original incarnation. What this means is that religion is completely identified with morality. Moreover, and this is what matters most to us, the morality that mattered most to these people was social morality, what we owe each other as citizens. I mentioned the religious basis of what came to be known as English Idealism, because it remained intensely concerned with individual morality and individual freedom, even though its main purpose was to emphasize the social duties of citizens.4 All of the people I am about to discuss were liberals who were deeply committed to protecting the political freedom of citizens, but their main aim was to do so in a way that was compatible with increased state action to protect the working classes against exploitation and poverty. To that end they began by rejecting all notions of natural rights and also emphasized the obligations of the individual to the state, as long as the state really did 4. English Idealism, also referred to as British Idealism, is a broad label for a number of diverse thinkers, writers, and politically minded intellectuals who became prominent from the second half of the nineteenth century on. They were known for their defense of the Absolute (in the sense of defending a coherent whole) and the continued role of reason, the latter not being necessarily opposed to the former. One of Idealism’s most renowned advocates was Thomas Hill Green, a radical liberal reformer and political thinker who had been influenced by Hegel. His Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation were published posthumously (London: Longman, 1917). For Shklar, Green’s Lectures were of primary importance in structuring her own lectures and argument. She recommended to her students to read in particular pages 122–159 and 180–229.

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promote the common good. What was the common good, you might ask. Here the answer was a little murky. Sometimes it was argued that we can really only know that retrospectively, when we see all the results and understand all the motives that prevailed. That is clearly not much help to anyone here and now. The best test to apply to judging a given state is whether it is living up to its own principles. If it is a modern state, it is in principle supposed to promote the conditions that make it possible for its citizens to develop their moral potential. Thus a state that systematically bullies its citizens into lying and breaks up their families and friendships by making them spy on each other is obviously not creating conditions that encourage citizens to lead moral lives. In contrast, a state that encourages its citizens to get an education, facilitates fraternal voluntary organizations, and discourages self-destructive habits is setting up an environment that makes it more rather than less possible for each citizen to behave in a responsible and moral way. The state cannot make its citizens moral; they must do the right thing for the right reason freely and on their own initiative. But it can create the conditions that make it easier for us to behave decently rather than viciously. A moral action for the individual is seen as an act of self-­ realization. Since there is a divine spark in each of us, we are manifesting the best part of ourselves when we act rightly. Acting rightly is not just a series of decisions. It is building a character, a habitual disposition to do what is most likely to contribute to the common good. The way we learn what to do is a process of social learning. There is no such thing as an isolated individual. There never was a state of nature. We never set up society by consent or otherwise. We are and have always lived in families and in communities, and we understand ourselves when we recognize other human beings. Recognition is the full understanding that we share fundamental characteristics as human beings, but especially with those who belong to the same political society as ourselves. Everyone has what my friend Professor Sandel calls an “encumbered self.”5 The Lockean liberal who thinks of citizens as discrete individuals 5. Michael Sandel is a political philosopher and was colleague of Shklar’s at Harvard. Advocating a more communitarian form of modern republicanism, Sandel criticized John Rawls and others for their notion that it is possible to have an “unencumbered self.”



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with nothing but natural rights is a fiction. We are not only born into a language group, a specific community, a time and space; we also understand what it is to be moral by recognizing others as our fellow citizens, from whom we expect certain sorts of conduct and who may then have similar expectations of us. Our duties are thus a matter of time and place. So are our rights. For we do have rights. They are social claims that we ought to be able to make on our own behalf so that we are able to fulfill our legal duties and receive our legal rights, including rights to life, liberty, and property. We have these rights because it is inherent in the modern state as a moral institution to protect them. The point for the Idealists was to stress that natural rights were not necessary to ensure a free society; rather, the idea of the state as the protector of the common good was the sum of rules that made it possible for individual citizens to live moral and free lives. There was a more specific agenda at work here. The attack on natural rights was not just the necessary consequence of the belief that we were social in our very nature, and that what was natural about us was that we had moral possibilities and a conscious social existence as citizens.6 There was even no great objection to the use of the term “natural rights” as long as it referred to the right to moral self-development. What was objectionable was the notion that we had a right to do anything we liked as long as it was not a violent crime against persons and property, and the claim that the state had fulfilled its functions when it protected the life and property of its citizens. What the Idealists wanted to prove was that the state had an obligation to protect its citizens against the consequences of industrial capitalism: child labor, unemployment, exploitation, ignorance and poor health, alcoholism and violence in domestic life. If it failed to do so it was not providing its citizens with the conditions that made their moral life possible. This is what is known as the positive state. It is not yet the welfare state nor is it a socialist state. It is the “new liberalism.” This new liberalism demanded not only that the state provide factory inspections and that the hours and condition of work be improved, but also 6. Shklar does not make it clear here, but this characterization applies particularly to T. H. Green and the British Idealists.

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that it offer compulsory primary education, an end to child labor, and public health measures. All of these were, in fact, written into law in England in the decade before the First World War. The new liberals also demanded that citizens behave as democratic citizens should by getting actively involved in improving the lives of their fellow citizens, by political action as voters, and by working for a more active and socially improving local government. The well-off and, especially, university students and graduates were also to take part in the social settlement movement. They were to give time to social services, to the homeless and the destitute as well as to the unemployed, and to do something for adult education. They were, in fact, the originators of the settlement movement and of professional social work. This is important for us here because it contains a new notion of obligation. The citizen is no longer asked merely to obey or not to obey. For citizens in a free democracy this has ceased to be a burning question because in the years before the First World War it was assumed that the very definition of a modern European state was that it protected the political and legal rights of individuals to free expression. The question of obligation was not to sovereigns; they were gone. The question was social obligation to one’s fellow citizens in a relatively just state. In fact, obedience was not even discussed. In a liberal society it is not a virtue for adults to submit their judgment and will to the authority of others, least of all to public officials. On the contrary, the enduring belief was, and is, that the free market in ideas, the fearless expression of all thoughts and of all knowledge and belief, is the right of a mature person and also a social obligation, because only through free debate can scientific knowledge advance, error be found, and the genuine person be distinguished from the fake and quack. Our personalities as individuals and our duty to pursue knowledge, to control the oppressive tendencies of all governments, and to inform ourselves as citizens: all of these depend on independent individuals such as Locke had already envisioned. None of the Idealists questioned this aspect of liberalism. What they did worry about was whether something more, in the way of positive activity to promote the public good and especially to improve the lives of the poor, might not be an obligation of free citizens. The Idealists, unlike more radical thinkers of the time, did not think that capitalism and the free market



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were inherently unjust in themselves. They believed that people ought to own property as a means of developing their personalities and skills, and that both accumulation and inheritance of wealth were part of freedom as well as socially desirable because they created wealth for all. It was not, then, competition in the marketplace that created the problem but the poverty and ignorance that had come with industrial production and gross inequalities of wealth. What they wanted the state to do was regulate capitalism in the interest of the freedom and well-being of the working class. They also perceived that the individualism of unregulated laissez-faire had created human beings who were not merely selfish, as we all are, but had been systematically taught to be nothing but selfish. People needed to be taught that they had obligations to the state and to the common good it represented. Under the formula of freedom of contract people had been allowed to pretend that the worker who sold his labor had some choice in taking a job and the wage he could expect. In fact, he had no choice. He was not a slave, but he was hardly free. And the Idealists were interested in improving his condition so that he was in less dire circumstances. To achieve that they had to persuade the ruling classes of England that their freedom would also be enhanced if they gave up some of their power over their workers. What argument might they offer? The notion of positive freedom. For liberals there was a real ideological change. The freedom that really mattered to them was the freedom to develop all one’s potentialities, especially one’s moral and intellectual capacities. As educable beings we need freedom to learn as well as freedom of the press, speech, and religion. In addition, we need formal education to take advantage of these freedoms, and to be educated we need a minimum standard of health and security, otherwise schooling is wasted on the young. Their parents must also be included in education, so there must be adequate adult educational opportunities. All this is easily found in John Stuart Mill,7 but what is new is that liberals now wanted the state to supply the education and all the social support that education requires. Only a welfare state can create independent free citizens. 7. John Stuart Mill was a political economist, civil servant, and women’s rights advocate. He is known for his defense of liberal ideas in conjunction with utilitarian reasoning.

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The second change in the liberal outlook that made this possible was that liberals no longer saw the state as the greatest threat to personal freedom. The large and powerful business enterprises were seen as exercising as great, if not greater, power over the lives of their employees than the state over the citizens generally. These were now seen as the chief threat to individual freedom, as well as inefficient and socially wasteful. Only if the state learned to curb these new economic giants would the individual be free to develop, benefit from education, and become an active citizen. So even before World War I, laissez-faire economics were not as secure as they had been in the middle of the nineteenth century in liberal opinion. Human freedom might not be served by an unregulated market, and might even be harmed by it. This is how the Age of Keynes began,8 though it only became settled during the Second World War. From the 1880s on many liberals saw state regulation of the market as acceptable, perhaps even necessary if society were to function effectively. Negative liberty is simple: it is not being interfered with by other people, especially state officials. In America the defense for it is that we have unalienable rights to liberty and institutions to protect them. It is the obligation of the state to respect and protect the rights of individuals. The obligations of citizens are ultimately based on consent. Positive liberty is a more complicated notion. It implies that we are divided in ourselves between a higher, moral or at least public-spirited self and a lower, self-­ regarding, irrational self. When we follow the call of the higher self we are free, and our language testifies to that experience. Free from the shackles of sin, free from prejudice, free from ignorance; we say it and we mean it. Still, it is not the same kind of freedom as being left alone. At its worst it can justify a government or even private individuals bullying us into moral or ideological conformity on the grounds of “freeing us.” And as freedom is a very positive word, many dictators have said just that sort of thing. We get reeducated in jail, and torture chambers serve to turn us into “good” fascists or C ­ ommunists—not a pretty picture and not an invented one, either. 8. John Meynard Keynes was an English economist who revolutionized modern macroeconomics. His theory influenced President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and other attempts of the British and American governments to find solutions to the world economic crisis of the 1930s.



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Enforced obligation implies that we can rise to a higher level of consciousness. However, at its best, positive freedom is not like this nightmare. It is the argument of a freely aroused personal moral sense: I cannot be free or feel free as long as my fellow citizens or human beings are being enslaved, abused, oppressed. And I must do something to liberate them from the oppression they endure so that I may not become involuntarily a passive bystander or even a beneficiary of their misery. My positive freedom depends on their liberation. This was T. H. Green’s view of freedom and one of the reasons he talked so much about slavery in America. To sum up, beginning with an evangelical, deeply inward Protestantism that is at once very individual and yet socially conscious, we move on to a less Christian idealism that still gives structure to such thinking but substitutes a vision of the morally complete modern state as the object of our obligations. It is an idealism that sees the state as it does conscience in the individual: as higher faculties that set our duties for us. It does not have or claim to have an answer to the question “What do I do when faced with an unjust law?” Green recognizes the validity of the question, but he is convinced that each person must make up her or his own mind in such a case. Otherwise it would not be a moral choice. Moreover, he recognized the importance of differences in circumstances. A premodern morally unacceptable political order like tsarist Russia has far fewer claims on its citizens than a constitutional and democratic state like Britain. Obligation is thus both morally personal and too dependent on the facts of a given case to make it possible to prescribe rules for obedience and disobedience. The issue in a normally just state is different. It is necessary to make citizens recognize their obligations to the victims of the industrial world and to imbue them with a new sense of citizenship, in which the freedom of all from degrading conditions is also the freeing of each self from moral indignity. Obligation is not just obedience, it is the obligation to be just. And in the New World justice means active citizens in an active state, not merely the assertion of rights. Green had learned much from the American abolitionists, and it is to them that I will return.

Lecture 16: Obedience

we normally think of obedience as a response to another person or persons or to a divinity. Obedience is not just a one-shot relationship; it may be a character trait. That is, one might be an obedient person in general. Obedience may also be a matter of one’s place in an organization that demands this trait, and it may do so for two reasons: first, obedience is necessary for the group to function, to fulfill its tasks efficiently and appropriately so that all act in perfect accordance with the commands of their immediate superior; second, it might be part of the very purpose of an organization that its members obey because obedience is what the members of the organization are there to practice as a virtue. Let us call the first the functional rule of obedience. In this context the military comes to mind at once. The second might be called the ultimate rule of obedience, and the monastery or the Jesuit Order provides us with a perfect example.1 In either case the obligation to obey is unconditional. Until very recently the military made no 1. The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) was founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1539. See Thomas H. O’Gorman, S.J., Jesuit Obedience from Life to Law: The Development of the Ignatian Idea of Obedience in the Jesuit Constitutions, 1539–1556 (Manila: Loyola House of Studies, 1971); David Knowles, (1966) From Pachomius to Ignatius: A Study in the Constitutional History of the Religious Orders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 88–94; and W. J. Young, trans., Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1959), 287–295. On modern monastic life, Shklar recommended the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton’s The Monastic Journey (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977).

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exceptions, and religious orders’ only proviso was that the commands must not obviously be against the revealed will of God, which is, after all, unlikely. But there is a third type, what I shall call fatalistic obedience, that comes from the habitual and inherited belief that the whole universe is a pyramid demanding the submission of the lower to the higher tiers, which is less personal than the willed submission of the obedient person, or what I call ultimate obedience.2 These three, the functional, the ultimate, and the fatalistic, have to be looked at carefully, because on the whole you will find them intuitively hard to sympathize with. Let us begin with two types of complete obedience— that is, obedience for its own sake. This may come in two forms, fatalistic and personalized. In the first case obedience is the only thinkable way to behave in a hierarchical universe, in the second it is demanded by a Deity that speaks to us in our own language. Assume that the cosmic order is a perfect triangle. It does not matter how or why it is so. It just is that way, has been, and will be. All you know is that at every moment of your life there is someone above you and then someone above that person or being, and so on. Human beings are above animals, men above women, parents above children; members of the various castes, beginning with manual laborers, on to the traders, soldiers, and priests or scholars, from those who soil their hands up to those who never touch anything impure—all exist in a perfect ladder from the most impure to the purest, each level determined forever and since all time; it is fixed and unalterable. This is how the world is. There is simply no point in being anything but perfectly obedient to those above you in the ladder of existence. If that is how the world is and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt where your place is and must be, you have no choice but to accept it. It is perfectly fatalistic, but it is also entirely rational. This is the world in which purity and impurity as degrees of nearness to manual work determine each person’s place in the hierar 2. In this first paragraph Shklar sets out an order of argumentation to which she does not strictly adhere. The question of the first and functional form of obedience, military obedience, is excluded from this lecture and addressed in the lecture that follows (Lecture 17). The remaining two forms of obedience, ultimate and fatalistic, are discussed in the present lecture as ideal types, but these are then confronted with examples which partly undermine the ideal typical construction.

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chy, and obedience is less a virtue than an acceptance of the inevitable. It is beyond question, not willed but taken for granted. This is a model of a perfect caste order. The second model of unquestioning obedience is quite different. There is choice, but it is not a choice to obey, but one of faith. That is the story of Abraham and Isaac. God decided to test Abraham, and so he told him to take his son, Isaac, to a mountain and offer him as a human sacrifice to God. Because Abraham’s faith in God was perfect, he obeyed, and just as he was about to kill the boy whom he loved above all else, God replaced Isaac with an animal as a substitute sacrifice. There is much debate over whether Abraham believed that God would do this all along, but for us and many very profound commentators as well the point is that because Abraham believed in God as omnipotent, omniscient, and totally good he obeyed him without question and did as he was ordered to do. He did not decide to kill his child for any ulterior political or moral reason. Brutus killed his sons because they were about to betray the new Roman Republic and return it to a monarchy. That was a political sacrifice. Agamemnon in Greek tragedy sacrifices his daughter so that his army can set sail for Troy, which is a military sacrifice. A parent might kill a son who was grossly evil as a moral duty. That is not Abraham. He sets out to kill his little boy because faith in God is his first and foremost obligation, and it is unconditional and unquestionable. That is so because God is thus. Either you believe in him or you do not. Given such a deity, obedience may also be regarded as a profound virtue—indeed, even the greatest of all virtues. Not all theologians have thought so. Many Christian thinkers regard obedience as something demanded by justice and charity. That is, you obey those who have a right in society to give you orders and whose orders are not contrary to the laws of God and general morality. Or they say that obedience is a way of expressing charity, that is, following Christ’s example of humility and submission to God’s will; but again with the necessary qualification that the person who is expected to obey makes a judgment about whether the order is really Christian in character. Nevertheless even with these qualifications the disposition to obey is held in very high regard. Not the critical or analytical faculties but submissiveness is the great virtue to be cultivated. For pride is the great original sin of mankind, and pride con-



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sists in putting one’s own judgment and perceptions ahead of God’s will, not acting as Abraham and Christ did. Humility, the rejection of one’s own will and ideas, is inherently morally good. We should train ourselves to be unquestioning and eager to obey because that is part of a perfected character. This is not the fatalism of the triangular universe; this is a conscious decision to submit to the will of God by acquiring a character that is always more ready to obey, to repress its own impulses, will, and judgments in favor of those who are socially and ecclesiastically above you, your parish priest and local ruler, in most cases. This too is ultimate obedience. There are some organizations in which obedience is an ultimate virtue for its members, but the organization as a whole may have a purpose. This is true of monasteries or the Jesuit Order. There are far too many kinds of monasteries for me to generalize about them. I will mention only one, because in some degree it was the model for all others. That was the monastic order set up by Saint Benedict in the sixth century A.D. Its purpose was to enable the monks live a life of prayer, work, and obedience in a daily discipline. In the Benedictine life everything is done in perfect order as a service, so that the religious will, through devotion, help in the salvation of fellow human beings, and whatever is done is done for the love of Christ. The rules of Saint Benedict stress obedience to the abbot, who is the head of a monastery, as the first virtue: the first stage of humility is obedience without delay. The monk must hate his own will, his own ideas and inclinations. The only act of his own will must be to obey voluntarily. One obeys one’s superior out of love, which is the motive for complete and voluntary obedience. This is what God demands of all Christians, but only monks have committed themselves fully to such a life. No murmuring ever. If an abbot orders something a monk regards as impossible, he may inform his superior very humbly of the fact, but should he be ordered to do it anyway he must obey. In all of this one thing is completely clear: obedience is the ultimate virtue. It is an imitation of Christ. The personal will is inherently tainted, and to train it only to obey one’s superior is the end of self-­ perfection as part of service to God. The root of this obedience is not limited to the monastery. Left to itself the human will is sure to lead us astray; it was pride that inspired the first act of disobedience, and this will happen again and again unless obedience to Christ is practiced. The abbot’s will is

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not Christ’s, but it functions as such for the sake of obedience. And while not all later monastic orders were as strict, Saint Francis of Assisi said he wanted to think of himself as a prisoner in the hands of the monk friar who succeeded him as head of his order—a corpse to be shifted about.3 The Talmud also discusses obedience, and I will cite one story to illustrate that there may be different reasons for ultimate obedience, this one more in line with the direct relation of a pious Jew to God. A blind rabbi says that he would prepare a feast for rabbis who told him that the law exempts the blind from following its precepts, but that he would be even happier to prepare a feast for those who told him that the law had to be obeyed, not because it was a matter of principle, but because it was commanded. In the Talmud there is a saying of Rabbi Hanina: if one who is not commanded to honor his parents yet does so is rewarded, how much more so is one who is commanded and does so.4 He who is commanded and fulfills the command is greater than he who fulfills it though he is not commanded. Rabbi Joseph, who was blind, said that if he were told that the Halacha—that is, the law—exempts a blind person from its precepts, he would have given the rabbis a banquet since he does follow the precepts, though he is not obliged to do so. But after hearing Rabbi Hanina’s dictum, he would throw a banquet for those who rejected the notion of an exemption for the blind since they obey because it is commanded. The Society of Jesus was founded in 1539 by seven friends; all were teachers and missionaries, at the unconditional disposal of the pope. This organization is a spiritual army at the command of a ruler. It demands a long period of training before full membership can be achieved. Its head is generally elected for life. In many ways it resembles a monarchy. Loyola’s is the most disciplined nonmilitary centralized order. Its constitution states: “Let all make it their principal endeavor to cultivate obedience and to excel in it . . . not only to express commands.” This implies that just a sign 3. Saint Francis of Assisi invented the basic rules of monastic life. The order he helped found in 1209 was based on living a frugal and devoted apostolic life. Franciscans consist of both friars, who travel and preach, and cloistered orders. Like Benedictines, Franciscans have orders for both men and women. 4. Rabbi Hanina’s statement can be found in the Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Kamma, folio 87a.



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should suffice and that its soldiers have no will of their own but obey the commander’s will. The heart of the matter is that obedience is the root of all other virtues, because it is the act in which one renounces one’s own will and abnegates one’s own judgment in resignation to one’s superior, not because that superior is prudent or good but because he stands above us and is a surrogate for God, so that there is someone to obey. Thus it is not just obeying but internalizing the superior’s will as one’s own that counts. What are we to make of this case for ultimate obedience, obedience as a virtue for all Christians and especially for those who join a religious order? Various subsequent theologians have whittled away at the concept by arguing that obedience should be seen as a functional virtue in the service of justice and charity. We must indeed learn to be obedient, but as it is obedience to achieve an end, there is plenty of room for the exercise of one’s own judgment and reason to decide when, how, and whom to obey in any given situation. Only God’s revealed will is unconditional. Here obedience, though certainly praised and enjoined, is one virtue among others and one that must adapt itself to them. It is still an essential part of a good character and a praiseworthy disposition, but it is not supreme. In both cases we must ask, Where obedience is the first virtue or one among others, what becomes of obligation? Do we obey because there are rules that we accept as binding upon us, or are we so educated, trained, and programed that the inclination to judge and make up our minds disappears and we become basically fatalistic? Low self-esteem may not be exactly what is meant by humility, but it is pretty close to it. Clearly as a way of making active citizens or even for stimulating critical reflection upon social institutions and rulers, it may leave much to be desired, and it is undeniably one of the sources of tension within churches now and between the more traditional churches and liberal and democratic political attitudes. For example, Father Drinan represented a Massachusetts district in Congress;5 his superiors in the Jesuit Order decided electoral office was incompatible with their mis 5. Father Robert Drinan was an American Jesuit priest, human rights activist, and legal scholar who taught at Georgetown University. He was also a member of Congress and called for the impeachment of President Nixon. In 1980 Pope John Paul II asked all priests and their orders to abstain from political office. As a consequence Father Drinan resigned his seat.

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sion, and he resigned at once. He was not just elected; he ran unopposed with huge majorities, and though his was a largely Jewish district he represented his constituents’ attitudes and convictions perfectly. For him there was no problem with the order that he resign, no apology, and no murmur of complaint. His constituents were less than thrilled. You might discount the political implications of perfect obedience and say, for example, that there are, especially in a free society, other ends than politics. The creation of such a human type as the perfect obedient has an aesthetic value. It is a form of perfection. That would not appeal as justification to the religious mind at all, but it is an argument for cultivating a given personality. Others may argue that obedience is morally important as an instrument of self-control which we all need as a part of our development. That is an ethical and educative argument, and again it is very conditional and partial. I think that in fact only religion can justify perfect obedience. It is not an obligation but an expression of faith. It is Abraham in many guises, and you take it or leave it. The significant thing for us is that there are grounds for obedience that go way beyond obligation and especially political obligation, and that this is not rule-bound conduct but faith-bound submission. It has had an enormous impact on the ways we think about obedience and obligation and is therefore significant, but it stands outside our immediate subject.

Lecture 17: Military Obedience

if there is one organization other than a traditional Catholic monastery in which men and women must obey orders unconditionally it is the military. This is the case whether it be a volunteer or a conscripted military and whether it is a time of peace or war. The only exception, and it has become an important one, is if a subordinate knows that the order he receives from a superior is illegal or simply impossible to execute. This has been a part of the Anglo-American military codes since the late eighteenth century, but it was added to those of France and Germany only since the Second World War. We will spend a fair amount of time on these grounds for disobedience, as well as for types of refusal to serve in the military at all. But before we can get to that I want to give you an account of the nature and justification of military obedience and why mutinies and individual failures to obey superior orders are punished with the utmost severity. Moreover, there is here, as in the case of the Jesuit or the monk, an ideal at stake: the good soldier. Military obedience involves efficiency reasoning, of course, but there is the ideal of a good soldier as well—courageous, chivalrous, intensely loyal to his fellow soldiers, and obedient to his superiors. Orders are obligations except in the most extreme cases, and so deep is the ethos of obedience that most soldiers find it very hard to disobey on principle. Fear and panic are a different matter. The military exists to use force on behalf of the state, and it is organized

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to that end. Its dedication to the national interest must be unconditional. Because it acts for the state it must always be subject to political control, especially in a constitutional democracy in which the control of the military by civilian officials is a fundamental constitutional requirement. Therefore the hierarchical structure that ensures the political authorization of all operations is essential. Historically there have been considerable variations in the type and amount of discipline in the military.1 The Roman legions were very strictly organized. By Julius Caesar’s time they were professionals subdivided into functional units each with its own commander. The orders of commanders were transmitted by signal, and there was a high degree of coordination. Every superior had the power to punish his subordinates, and any serious neglect was punished by death. In Europe this system was revived only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Middle Ages, armies were tribal cohorts whose local interests determined what they would do, and their loyalties were to local chieftains, not to a central political authority. They were unstructured and knew no functional organization. Some even elected their leaders. By the end of the Middle Ages, towns and some of the wealthier princes began to employ mercenary troops, who subcontracted for lower ranks arranged in a hierarchy. As staying alive was their main objective, discipline was not severe. Such discipline as there was, was more a matter of peer pressure than orders from above. As the absolute kings began to rationalize their civil service, they began to Romanize their armies. They wanted dependable armies to carry out centralized decisions. Drill was introduced, and disobedience was made punishable by death. New military technology demanded a more skilled military officer class, so military schools were created. In the eighteenth century these schools were increasingly open only to members of the nobility for whom military service was the only employment available. Both class and education tended to separate officers from their subordinates to a new degree, increasing the demand for obedience. This was also true of navies, which became much more specialized. 1. Shklar’s recommended readings for this lecture were Nico Keijzer, Military Obedience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 140–171, 205–225; and J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 171–213.



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Officers developed a tight esprit de corps and rules of honor, while the common soldiers were increasingly drawn from the dregs of society who could find no other way of making a living. The rule not only in Prussia was that the ordinary soldier should fear his officers more than the enemy in battle. This distance between soldiers and officers survived the Napoleonic Wars, which to a degree ended the monopoly of the aristocracy. What was added was the effort to create machinelike armies that would be rational. Every man would have a task, lines of command would be clear, and the whole would function as a single unit in keeping with military plans drawn up by specialists in advance of wars, features which took account of immense technological changes as well as the capabilities of political opponents. In actuality things are not that neat. First of all, ease of communications means that there are multiple lines of command, in addition to the difference between staff and line officers. This makes life difficult for officers in the field, rather than for enlisted men. More important is the de-­ hierarchization created by the distribution of technical competence and expertise in a technologically sophisticated force. The presumption that rank and knowledge will coincide no longer holds in many cases. The decisive action has to be taken by men handling infinitely complex machines, not by an officer who may have no particular technological training. This renders the notion of superior orders inapplicable. In some ways police forces have always had to operate like this. The vital decisions and the chief responsibility lie with the cop on the beat, not with the officers who are in charge of the force in general. Nevertheless, to return to the military, even though consultation is replacing commands and technical expertise is cutting across command structures, the military is still a hierarchy, and every member of the armed forces is expected to obey the legal orders of his superiors. They are people who have the authority to issue orders. And authority, as we have noted, is not just power. It is socially and often legally recognized and defined power, power that is explicitly limited and structured to accomplish specified ­purposes. Military superiors are to be obeyed not only because they have the power to punish disobedient subordinates but because they have the right to issue orders. That right is due to the posi-

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tions these persons occupy in a military organization. A sergeant may issue certain orders because he is a sergeant, and the same can be said of a general or an admiral. It is understood as a matter of organizational necessity and of law, but in most military traditions deference to rank and respect for superiors plays a big part in generating obedience to superiors. This naturally varies; for example, ancient Rome with its paternal power was simply a more ­authority-prone society than is contemporary America. The way obedience is created in any army was thought until recently to be through discipline and drill. That is no longer regarded as functional, because initiative and discretion count for more. The inculcation of military values, on the other hand—that is, education and indoctrination— certainly do matter. That is what boot camp is supposed to do: replace a young person’s given identity with a new one that will make it possible for him or her to function as part of a group in combat and in response to orders. Of all the means of social control, by far the most durable and significant is cohesion of the immediate group, of deep bonds between the members of a unit. Fusion with the group replaces the ties that the recruit leaves behind him when he enters the military. Sometimes, however, loyalty to a group can lead to disobedience. A British unit in Italy during the Second World War refused an order to relocate because they believed that their leaving would endanger the men of the units who were to remain in place. They had been together for a long time and they could not bring themselves to leave the other units. It was a genuine mutiny, very rare in the British army.2 More generally, it is as a group that soldiers and sailors look to authority to guide them in the unknown situation in which they find themselves. What one should do depends a lot on what one thinks is happening, and it is part of military authority to define the situation and its demands for subordinates. That is why conflicting orders and indefinite lines of command are often resented. Finally, it is of no small significance for the sol 2. Shklar refers to the mutiny at Salerno, in which British troops were sent to help Allied forces under U.S. command but found themselves separated from their comrades and superfluous. All 191 men were found guilty but had their sentences suspended after new information came to light.



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diers to believe that their superiors have their well-being in mind and are themselves acting for recognized military ends. So, on closer inspection, military obedience is far from the insane notion that an order is given at the top of a perfect pyramid which will instantly be received at its base and lead to the action that the order demands. A lot happens in between, if it happens at all. For one thing orders must be clear and intelligible and come in the form of a specific demand, not a vague general suggestion. The order must not only project actions that are physically possible, it also must make a certain degree of sense. You can’t blow up a bridge that has already been washed away, so there is no point in going on with preparations to carry out such a mission. Furthermore, the order must have military purpose and be legal. An order to wash a private car belonging to an officer’s wife may be dis­ obeyed. It is not a legal order. An officer may not order a subordinate to pay a private debt. A superior may also not exceed his sphere of authority. An officer does not have the authority to issue travel orders. It is obviously not easy for most subordinates to have an exact idea of who has what precise authority, and in any case the military standing rules clearly state that in case of doubt it is to be assumed that an order from a superior is “clothed in legality” and must be obeyed. In principle an order from a superior must be assumed to be binding and may not be questioned. Subordinates are not to argue with their superiors. If they decide that the order is illegal they can challenge it, but they risk being charged with disobedience and may be indicted by a court martial. The assumption is that superior orders are binding unless proven illegal. However, under some military systems it is worse: for example, where subordinates are punished for disobedience even when the order was illegal. Disobedience can also be excused because of extraordinary circumstances. Sailors have been known to mutiny when they realized that their ship was so leaky it was bound to sink, though the captain had ordered them to sail. Here necessity acted as a successful excuse. Changed circumstances may be an excuse. Lord Nelson once disobeyed orders because he could see that the enemy had changed its plan, and he had to attack at once. He took it for granted that winning the war was the supreme object,

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not obeying the authorities.3 There was a platoon commander in the U.S. Army in the Second World War who disobeyed orders to send men to fix a telephone line since he was sure that they would have been killed by sniper fire, as two previous sets of men had been. He was sentenced for disobeying orders in wartime, but then pardoned since his judgment was not only right but in the best interest of the service, which is a vague but not unimportant norm. All these instances are meant to demonstrate that at the very least even the most rigid norm of obedience to superiors—that is, military obedience in time of war—is not without exceptions and conditions. Of all the limitations on superior orders, none is more important than the legality of the orders. Now illegality can take several forms. The superior may simply lack the authority to issue a given order, or it may not be a valid military order at all. Most sensationally of all it might be criminal, violating the rules of war as prescribed by both national and international law. Here the question is not whether one has a duty to obey, but whether one has an obligation to disobey, since one is ordered to perform a criminal act for which one may eventually be punished. If one is eventually put on trial for such an act, is it an acceptable defense to claim that one acted on superior orders? When it comes to waging aggressive war and committing crimes against humanity the answer at the trial of Nazi generals at Nuremberg was no, it is no defense.4 This may, however, have been a one-shot occasion, and for a more realistic understanding of the issue of the question of superior orders we should look to less extreme cases than those presented by the Nazis. (The Nazi crimes still dominate our thinking, but that may not be intellectually or morally wise because they were so extreme a case as to make us either paranoid or indifferent. In one case we say, “Watch out, here comes Hitler again,” when in fact it is only a tin-pot dictator. Or we might

3. There are at least two instances in which Nelson, a renowned admiral of the British navy, disobeyed orders. The first was at the battle of Cape Saint Vincent against the Spanish fleet in 1797, the second was during the battle of Copenhagen against the Danish in 1801. The latter case became legendary for the phrase “turning a blind eye”—referring to the fact that Nelson used his blind eye in order not to receive orders from the commanding ship. 4. Shklar refers here to the Allied military tribunals against the former Nazi leaders that took place after the Second World War (1945–1946) in Nuremberg.



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say, “Why care at all, these are not the Nazis?” when they might be very bad people indeed, though, to be sure, nothing quite like Hitler.) The rules of war were also affected by the Nazi trials. The U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial says, “An order requiring the performance of a military duty may be inferred to be legal. An act performed manifestly beyond the scope of authority, or pursuant to an order ‘that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know to be illegal,’ or in a wanton manner in discharge of a lawful duty, is not excusable.”5 This was added to the Manual in the years following Nuremberg, but it was part of both international and national law before then. What is interesting is that it is by far the most explicit and sound rule in any system of military justice; all the others are more reluctant explicitly to recognize the duty to disobey and the responsibilities of the individual soldier. I mention this not in order to praise the U.S. Code of Military Justice unduly but to remind you of just how important and necessary obedience to superior orders is in the military. In addition, you should remember that the burden placed on the individual is intolerably heavy. He must be a lawyer as well as a soldier to fulfil his obligations, and avoid the drastic punishment that may follow the disobedience or obedience to superior orders. Often a soldier acts under duress— that is, he will be killed if he disobeys—and that, of course, is a legally valid excuse. There have in U.S. history been a number of cases in which the defense of superior orders was held invalid, and the most famous of these was the trial of Major Henry Wirtz, the Confederate commander of a prisonerof-war camp at Andersonville, Georgia. He was tried before a military commission in Washington, D.C., in 1865 for mistreating prisoners of war in violation of the law and customs of war. Wirtz had plenty of discretionary power, and he acted willingly and in full knowledge of the illegality of his conduct, according to the Judge Advocate, and he was found guilty and executed. In civil cases the rules are sometimes not applied as stringently; so, for example, stealing a mule during a civil war. Also, brutality by officers on the high seas is generally excused. In these cases superior orders 5. The Manual for Courts-Martial, United States, which is updated regularly, is the official guideline for the U.S. military concerning military law, outlining the general rules of military conduct and engagement.

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held. However, in a piracy case in 1813 the courts held that the subordinate should have known better than to obey. The doctrine that emerges from these cases is clear: limited responsibility. A soldier disobeys at his own risk, and he will be punished for obeying illegal orders, but the conditions that will be taken into account when he is tried will give the fact that he is meant to obey under most conditions real weight. As in other spheres of criminal law, necessity and unforeseen circumstances, or a higher end, may act as excuses for illegal action. Embargo laws may be broken to save a ship from sinking; a battle that would certainly result in disaster need not be engaged even if there is an order to move. Finally, in the United States is there a right to disobey orders that are contrary to the constitutional rights of a subordinate? Not always. Officers may not prohibit drinking or getting married, but they may regulate a gambling operation that is otherwise legal. And then there is conscientious objection, to which I shall turn eventually. There is one more significant issue: Are superiors responsible for criminal acts which they did not order, but which were committed by the men under their command? The Supreme Court said yes in the case of General Yamashita, whose men committed atrocities which he did not order and the extent of which he may not have known.6 The reason for such a decision is intimately tied to the rules of obedience. Since soldiers must obey, the standard imposed on those who give orders and are in command is greater than in civilian life. The more rigid the hierarchy, the greater the responsibility. Yamashita did not order the massacres, but he certainly should have known what was going on. If responsibility is limited for enlisted men, it is unlimited for commanders. It is not hard after all this to grasp why soldiers do and should obey. Because there are occasions of great brutality in any war, and because of the willingness with which the German military went about its business, there has for the past fifty years been an extensive literature on excessive obedience. One piece of work is particularly interesting: not only did Stanley Milgram find that the vast majority of his subjects obeyed, even in the face of serious personal doubts; when they refused to do so they claimed 6. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was one of the leading military commanders of the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II. He was found guilty of war crimes, particularly for the atrocities of his troops in the Japanese-occupied Philippines in 1944.



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to be obeying a higher authority, God normally.7 He also drew a clear line between conformity and obedience. Conformity comprises falling in with group behavior in a nonhierarchical situation, in which we imitate implicit norms without much thought. This is in contrast to obedience, in which there is hierarchy and explicitness of orders and voluntary action in response to them. The reason this is important for us, though Milgram did not grasp it at all, is that in the military both are intensely at work. Conformity to one’s peer group is, in fact, a far greater element in determining military conduct than obeying orders.

7. In 1961 the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted experiments at Yale University in which he tested the willingness of individuals to inflict what they believed was extreme pain under orders. The results became known as the “Milgram experiment.” See Stanley Milgram, ”The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, December 1973, 62–77.

Lecture 18: Loyalty and Betrayal

as previously noted, of all the ideologies that emerged from the Age of Revolutions none had as serious an impact on ideas of obligation as nationalism. It was not just that loyalty to the nation became primary, but that nationalist loyalty required that each nation be governed by members of the same national group and that only such a nation-state had any claim on the obedience and loyalty of its citizens. If nationals had not only to obey but also to feel loyal to such a state, it was not at all clear that members of other national groups who might be stuck within its borders had any such duty, or that either the state or their fellow citizens had any obligations to them. At the very least they became objects of suspicion, not least in the United States. Let us look at loyalty first.1 In a way I have been talking about loyalty all along, if by “loyalty” one means the consistent adherence to a cause that transcends one’s purely personal interests: family, morality, honor, citizenship, religion, church, rationality, nationhood, the state, and the various conflicts that they bring about. But a few definitions are in order. If only for the sake of clarity we should limit loyalty to an attachment to a social group. Individuals may and do receive our fidelity. We remain true to them 1. Shklar’s recommended reading for the seminar that accompanied this lecture was Morton Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 3–19, 105–131, 153–175, 219– 236.

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and to ourselves. Moral, political, or aesthetic causes call for commitment. Of the three, fidelity, loyalty, and commitment, fidelity is the most personal and expressive of our personality and emotional life. We are faithful to our spouses and to our friends, relationships in which there is at least in principle an element of choice. Once chosen we expect fidelity. Commitment may be just as enduring, and it also implies choice, whether it be to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or to the pursuit of pure mathematics. I use these examples to show that not all our commitments are directly social or need to have a direct bearing on human affairs. In all these cases there is a purpose that defines and regulates our conduct, and we will suffer the pull of conflicting commitments. Loyalty is, however, the source of the most conflicts of all, because it is given to groups, the sites of most political conflicts. Loyalty is less personality specific than fidelity, but far more so than some commitments. We are loyal to groups, to social entities, not all of which need have a particular moral or political purpose, and by no means all are chosen. Clan, nation, race, and class are not chosen; we are born into them. For our purposes, however, it is commitments that have a political bearing that matter. Among them nationality is by far the most important in the modern world. It was not always so. The fact that groups shared languages and cultural traits was not thought to matter in determining who ruled them or how. But since the nineteenth century, nationalism has been by far the most successful and the most significant in its impact on political obligation. Socialism and liberalism made adherence to the laws seem insignificant because primary obligation was to the future of a movement based on class domination, the survival of the fittest individuals, the laws of progress. History was to be the object of obligation. Nationalism was different in that it did not entirely push aside the obligation to obey the law; rather, it intensified the obligations we owed the state, if—and the “if” is what matters—it was a nation-state. It had to be a state whose territory was inhabited by people who had a common language, literature, culture, and history, and who must be governed by people who shared all these aspects of nationality with those whom they governed. Not the moral or political quality but the national identity of government was the primary issue. That was the only government that could claim legitimacy and demand obedience. National-

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ism as a political ideology must not be confused with a sense of nationality. Remember John of Gaunt’s moving speech about England in Richard II. Nationalism demands that members of a nation must belong to one and the same state, that all people speaking the same language must be united in a single political unit, the nation-state, and that they cannot owe allegiance to any other state. What makes nationalism so potent is that it draws no distinction between loyalty and obligation. One’s first loyalty is to one’s nation, and that means that one has an absolute obligation to the nation-state. Nationalism has a theory of loyalty, upon which the nation-state itself was built. One owed one’s primary loyalty to one’s nation; that was one’s emotional bond, and personal loyalty must be defined by one’s membership in a national group, which had a spirit of its own that was supposed to permeate one’s own psyche as well. Unfortunately very few governments of the world can, given the distribution of populations, claim that they rule over homogeneous nations, and the result has been two hundred years of political turmoil. In the eighteenth century, two things happened. Only governments that were nation-states were deemed legitimate, and the first political loyalty of individuals was directed to go to the nation to which they belonged. Obligation was thus predicated upon national legitimacy—not the moral or prudential character of a government, but rather the nationality of those who ruled. In America this came to be a very complicated matter. For obvious reasons an immigrant society does not have a strong sense of cultural nationality. But that does not mean that there are no impulses to create national loyalty; quite the contrary. There is an aspect of loyalty that is more specific and rooted in the history of America as a political society: it was born as a political idea among people of diverse national origins and subject to the laws of at least thirteen different states, with more to come. National loyalty thus came to rest on the belief that there is a national ethos to which all citizens of America should subscribe, and they do so not merely by obeying the law but by demonstrating the appropriate emotions through their conduct and personal life. I shall therefore talk only about America because for Americans the response to the demands of national loyalty is so complex; loyalty has always been a big problem. On one hand, a people of immigrants cannot claim the



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uniformity of culture that nationality implies; moreover, America’s founding ethos and continued assumption has been that considered consent, not nationality or loyalty, is the basis of its political institutions. On the other hand, nationality is something that one is born into, not a matter of choice at all, and loyalty is at least partly an intuitive emotion, not a wholly rational adherence to principles or rules. It is not just consent to justice but also emotional attachment to the given society to which one belongs. So, American national loyalty and the politics of consent are in some tension. That is not all. In economics, in religion, and to a large degree in popular belief the rugged individual is supposed to be the ideal American. Individualism, self-reliance, and independence are supposed to be the marks of Americans, and in fact they often are. So why are we obsessed with loyalty? Because nothing seems to hold such individuals together at all. Consent as the basis for association does not seem to be a sufficient bond. It can come and go, and this, in addition to the gospel of individual rights, creates a great deal of anxiety. There seems to be no obvious basis for enduring loyalty, and one has to be artificially created. In fact, of course, American citizens have not been less but rather more loyal to their country than have citizens of other countries. The insecurity about loyalty has been proportionate not to its absence but to the dreadful anxiety that ethnic changes in the composition of the population and fear of egalitarian radicalism have aroused from time to time, especially during and after wars. As a result, Americans have throughout their history demanded oaths of loyalty from their fellow citizens, both in order to create feelings of loyalty and to ferret out the potentially or actually disloyal among them. The difficulty with this practice is not just the nature of oaths as instruments of coercion and entrapment. The real issue may well be the definition of loyalty and disloyalty. Treason and espionage are readily defined. Aiding and abetting the enemy in time of war is treason and it is strictly specified in the Constitution, which was written, after all, by men every one of whom had committed treason. Espionage is selling secret information or sharing it with a foreign power, especially a hostile one. These are illegal acts that are breaches of obligations to obey the law. Disloyalty is not easily defined, however, because it is a state of mind, and it has never been clear what sort of conduct constitutes a failure of loyalty.

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The great fear in America has usually been that some minority might conspire to erode the consent to the existing institutions of government and the habits of thought held by established groups. Loyalty becomes an issue when there are radical agitators and foreign agents threatening what has been defined as the American way of life. It would be simple for us if one could argue that this is a ploy used by conservative and privileged groups to promote their own interests and improve their electoral chances. Unfortunately, American history is much more complicated than that. Even though it is true that Red Scares were at their height in the twentieth century when the Republican Party was in serious trouble and abated when it finally won a presidential election, that is far from being the whole story. Let us begin with history and then try to extract some theory. As you know, America began its independent life after a revolution against Great Britain. It was at the time composed of thirteen quite different colonies. A great many citizens of these future states had been and remained loyal to Great Britain, which is why they were called Loyalists. After the War of Independence many went into exile to Canada and some to Britain, but a good many remained. Many of them had to suffer punitive measures, but from the first there was an effort to render them harmless: they were made to take loyalty oaths. Now loyalty oaths have two functions. The first and not unreasonable one is to ensure the future loyalty of someone who has taken an oath on the assumption that it is a serious undertaking between a person and God. Loyalty oaths are also, however, a means of entrapment. If a conscientious person refuses to take a loyalty oath he proves his disloyalty and worse. A genuine traitor will, of course, have no scruples and will take it anyway, so refusal is far from proving anything about nonjuring persons; they may simply object to oaths. There is finally the possibility of discovering that someone took the oath falsely, and he or she could then be prosecuted for disloyalty and perjury. The trouble with the demand for loyalty oaths by the victorious rebels was that there was no clear standard about what constituted loyalty and disloyalty, especially in a civil war that divided families and localities, and even individuals, against themselves, at different moments in their lives. A radical republican like Tom Paine or a Massachusetts Minuteman might have a very different notion about loyalty



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from that of a conservative Federalist who was eager to establish law and order, such as Alexander Hamilton.2 Some years later their attitudes to enforced loyalty were reversed, as the Federalists saw disloyalty in Jefferson’s radical followers and in the impact of the French Revolution on American public opinion. The Alien and Sedition Acts, which were meant to protect Americans against these dangers, did not last long.3 Jefferson was elected and had them repealed. For the moment I merely want to notice that from the first the meaning of loyalty was disputed, and that it depended on both events abroad and on partisan conflict at home. I mentioned the fact that there were thirteen states, and I now should add that they were the centers of effective government and of political allegiance for a long time to come; how long is a matter of dispute among historians, but I am obviously on safe ground when I say until the end of the Civil War. To whom was an American citizen to be loyal? Indeed, was he a citizen of his state or of the United States in the first instance? The Civil War settled the question, but not painlessly, and it brought with it, among other things, a revival of loyalty oaths. As a way of settling who was and who was not a loyal American, Lincoln was clear about what he wanted in the border states and after the war. He wanted to extract loyalty oaths as a demonstration of future loyalty. The radical Republicans recognized that this was no way to keep the former slave owners and rebels out of government, and so they demanded a retrospective loyalty oath. That is, only those citizens of the former Confederacy who could prove that they had taken no part on the southern side of the war were to be permitted to hold 2. Tom Paine was a British-born author and pamphleteer whose books and essays, like Common Sense (1776), American Crisis (1776), and Rights of Man (1791), were widely read and helped to rally support for the French and the American Revolutions. The Massachusetts Minutemen were a militia that became important during the American Revolutionary War. Alexander Hamilton served as an adviser to General George Washington and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. 3. The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798. Pushed by President John Adams, they were hotly debated because they made it possible to quell dissent and silence critical voices arguing against the sitting administration (i.e., Adams’s).

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office. In effect, only black people and the not very numerous southern Unionists would be eligible. Electoral defeat in the North eventually put an end to that program. It went down with Reconstruction itself,4 but it was an ill-­conceived measure by any standard, because you cannot declare the majority of the citizens of several states of the Union disloyal. They had in fact been only too loyal for too long to their own section of the country. What this episode did was put the whole question of what constitutes loyalty in America in question again. The extent of the puzzlement can be seen in the fact that we still quarrel violently about the character of General Robert E. Lee. Was he a model of the spirit of loyalty, or was he a traitor who betrayed his country for a thoroughly evil cause? He was a convicted Unionist, opposed to slavery, and had had a distinguished career in the U.S. Army. Lincoln had, in fact, offered him the command of the Union Army. He refused out of loyalty to Virginia, his “own” state. He thus betrayed his own convictions and prolonged a horrible war. Yet he is much admired today as a model of loyalty or at least as a tragic hero, which means that we are prepared to admire loyalty without reference to its objects. It also shows what comes of putting national loyalty (in this case to Virginia, his home state) above rational consent or utility. The next episode in disputes concerning American loyalty was created by the upsurge of resentment and fear sparked by mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe and China beginning in the 1880s and culminating in the Immigration Act of 1926, which in effect stopped it. There had been earlier upsurges of what was called “nativist” feeling, especially in New England and New York, with the appearance of large numbers of Catholic Irish immigrants. How were they to be made into American citizens? Preventing their right to vote and offering them free compulsory education were, respectively, the negative and positive aspects of these fears. The so-called Know-Nothings who wanted to exclude and then to reeducate the immigrants into essentially Protestant Yankees were not, by the standards of the time, conservatives. They were interested in public health, 4. Reconstruction (1865–1877) was the period in American history that immediately followed the American Civil War in which various attempt were made to establish a new political agenda that would address the most important conflicts of the time, such as the political and social consequences arising from black emancipation.



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clean government, and decent working conditions, and were generally reform-minded. What they did have was a very clear notion of what a citizen should be like, and if a person did not resemble their idea of an American he was not a loyal citizen: his first loyalty was to the pope in Rome. The new Americans who came in the 1880s, unlike the Irish, did not even speak English. A good many of them spoke Italian, Polish, and Yiddish, and they were not Protestants either. As Theodore Roosevelt put it, “We have room but for one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns out our people as Americans, of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house and we have room but for one loyalty and that is loyalty to the American people.”5 That turned out to be, as he meant it to be, an extremely repressive policy, especially during the First World War. For among these foreigners there were not many who remained loyal to their European countries of origin, although some of them were indeed radicals. What was demanded of them was not that they meet their political obligations under the Constitution and the law but that they be loyal to the American people—hardly the clearest imperative. Radicalism was one way of failing in one’s loyalty, for instance. And there were all kinds of socialists, anarchists, and radical unionists among the new immigrants—not many, as a matter of fact, but quite enough to cause anxiety in a population whose sense of nationality was inherently insecure. The First World War was fought by the European powers with nationalist ideologies. Wave after wave of young men went to their deaths in the trenches of western Europe for the sake of their country. President Wilson attempted to justify American participation in terms of a crusade to make the world safe for democracy; but as democracy meant essentially America’s official values this was taken by the American public, and by Europeans also, to mean American nationalism expressed in its own terms. In America itself the war gave rise to an intense and largely privately organized concern for loyalty. Almost every state passed laws designed to seek out and punish the disloyal. There was a federal program as well, but most of 5. Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Richard Melancthon Hurd, 3 January 1919, reprinted in Roosevelt, Letters, vol. 8 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 1422.

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the spy and disloyalty hunting was done by voluntary organizations. The first victims of these activities were the German-speaking populations of the Midwest especially. They had been permitted to conduct German-language private schools, especially parochial ones, and there were bilingual public schools as well. All of these were forbidden because they encouraged loyalty to the enemy country. The nuns who ran some of these schools were not a danger to the United States, but they were not overtly loyal. Then there were all sorts of spies to be found. Anyone of German ancestry was suspect. And finally there were people of every sort of origin who were “un-­American.” They espoused ideas that might seem radical, or their lifestyle was odd, or they associated with black people or Jews, or they were intellectuals and what not. The reason for all this activism was the way the Justice Department operated. Lacking resources for domestic intelligence work, it was thought both useful and cheap to let private citizens form investigative committees that reported to the Justice Department, which could then act upon this information. The result did not turn up any disloyal persons or spies, but it gave every small-town bigot a chance to ruin the reputation and livelihood of those who did not fit his idea of a loyal American, which was an essentially Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Sunday churchgoer who liked spectator sports and whose ideas were in full accord with those of his local paper. He did not believe in race mixing, in income tax, in evolution, in trade unions, or in foreigners of any kind. And those who disagreed with him were likely to be disloyal. This may sound aberrant, but it is not. Draft boards were also staffed by volunteers, not by government employees. The concern for loyalty in the United States is not the result of strong government but of its opposite, weak government and suspicion of the government, especially the federal Executive branch. Loyalty is a citizen concern, not a government office. The worry about loyalty is fed by the fear that the government may be acting disloyally. Immediately after the First World War this fear was wholly replaced by fear of radicals, especially foreign ones, who were interned and deported without any effort at due process of law. When Harding, a Republican president was elected,6 the Red Scare abated somewhat, but not entirely, thanks to the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia. The continued effort to root out 6. Warren G. Harding, the twenty-ninth president of the United States, served from 1921 until his death in 1923.



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the disloyal now was taken over by congressional committees, the most famous of which was the House Committee on Un-American Activities.7 For our purposes only the name of that committee matters, “Un-American.” The question of loyalty and nationality were meant to be somehow merged in that term, but nothing can alter the fact that there is no way of establishing nationality in America, and Americanism became identified with conservatism of the more parochial kind. What there was of nationalism was reducible to a suspicion of the foreign born, especially if they favored radical social change. During the Second World War there was relatively little vigilante activity against European radicals, most of whom were, after all, veteran anti-fascists, but Japanese Americans were herded into concentration camps and subjected to loyalty oaths to make sure that they posed no danger to the United States. It was private pressure from civilians upon the military in California that forced Roosevelt to order the internment of citizens of Japanese origin.8 It was not a government intelligence operation, but a citizen initiative that led to this dreadful policy. With this history in mind and the fears created by the onset of the Cold War it is not altogether surprising that private and public fear of disloyalty reached fever pitch during the fifties. Senatorial committees, Executive loyalty security boards, the attorney general’s lists of subversive organizations, private organizational fear, and complicity in blacklisting and dismissing anyone suspected of belonging to a targeted group or associating with those who did, led to dismissals of teachers, screenwriters, directors, journalists—in short anyone even vaguely in the public eye. All this has quite erroneously been called the McCarthy era. The junior senator from Wisconsin would never have been able to gain the publicity and generate the fear he did if his party had not supported him and if there had not been 7. Created in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) originally investigated potential Nazi sympathizers and collaborators in the United States. Later it focused on Communists and Communist sympathizers. HUAC was abolished in 1975. 8. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans in February 1942. Most of the internees were U.S. citizens who had settled on the West Coast of the continental United States or in Hawaii. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan established a commission to look into this historical injustice. One of the outcomes was that each survivor was offered financial compensation.

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decades of Red-hunting behind him.9 He had a vast amount of support from everyone, and it was not his antics, but their aim to root out radicals, especially the more left-wing New Dealers, that made his campaign the popular success that it was. The irony is that there really was a lot of espionage going on, but that was the province of the FBI and the CIA. Some of it was undertaken by Communists, but not by the type of people whom the state and federal loyalty boards persecuted; most of it was done by professional spies. One of the conclusions that this history of American loyalty leads to is that it is a highly reactive phenomenon. Loyalty is supposed to be expressed against a foreign enemy, cultural or military or both. Overwhelmingly until the Second World War that enemy was Europe—England, revolutionary France, the reactionary Europe of the post-Napoleonic decades, then Germany and the Soviet Union. If the European threat was feared by the conservatives it led to questioning the loyalty of American reformers. When the threat came from the European reactionaries and fascists the loyalty of Americans whose national origins were from these areas was duly doubted. On the whole it is a simple fact that national loyalty as a political weapon has been far more commonly used by right-wing politicians than by reformers; “America First has not been a liberal obsession.”10 Overwhelmingly, national loyalty is meant to preserve something that is already established, a national character and set of traditions. The second feature is how suspicious of established institutions loyalist politics are. The tradition of voluntary organizations, of citizen-centered, nonpublic politics is very much at work here. This is unique. In Germany, for example, the object of nationalism is to have a nation-state and to protect it against and to make it supreme over other nation-states. Not so American loyalty. The government is the chief object of scrutiny for those who are trying to root out disloyalty. American loyalty is an extra-­governmental ac 9. Senator Joseph McCarthy was one of the driving forces behind the second U.S. Red Scare (1950–1956). His vicious campaign, in conjunction with HUAC’s, against alleged Communists and their sympathizers received considerable support from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. 10. The exact source of this quote could not be identified. Similar phrases appear in various essays that Shklar’s colleague Michael Walzer wrote in the 1980s and early 1990s that were later published in his collection What It Means to Be an American (New York: Marsilio, 1996).



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tivity, because the government is regarded as either disloyal or ineffective, hampered by laws and scruples that make it contemptible if not outright complicit. Loyalty is far too important to be left to the government alone. The government, in fact, went into the loyalty business reluctantly, and only the rivalry between Congress and the Executive led the latter into the persecution of subversives, while in Congress it was usually only one or two committees that got into the investigation of un-American activities. Once this publicity catcher was established, it was impossible to oppose it without incurring the danger of being branded disloyal. It is one of those things that is easy to start and very difficult to stop. The majority of congressmen and senators, it is safe to say, would have felt quite relieved not to live under the disloyalty threat, but they found it easier to get on the bandwagon or to duck than to confront it, until it got completely out of hand, as in the case of Senator McCarthy, who finally doomed himself by attacking the loyalty of the U.S. Army. Even that took time. For when he insinuated that General Marshall, no less, was somehow disloyal, President Eisenhower did not come to Marshall’s defense, even though Marshall had been his former chief of staff of the army and was arguably the most distinguished American military officer of his generation. The idea of his failing in his obligations to the United States is ludicrous beyond belief. That brings us to the third and last point about national loyalty in America. Far from being the support of political obligation, the duty to obey the law and the constitutional authorities, it generally undermines them directly. If loyalty to voluntary groups, ideal cause, and fidelity are human virtues, and the capacity to remain committed is a necessity for the pursuit of moral and intellectual excellence, the truth is that political ideologies and the loyalty they inspire have made the past two centuries a hell on earth for many people, and even in America they have caused nothing but injustice. At most one can say that indirectly, and after much time and pain, it has aroused a reaction, mainly in the judiciary, which has reasserted itself against this usurpation of legal authority and has declared unconstitutional or illegal almost everything done under these loyalty programs. In the case of the Japanese Americans it did not do the right thing, and in fact, Congress passed an official apology only some fifty years after the crime. Better late than never.

Lecture 19: Civil Disobedience in the Nineteenth Century

in america the question of obligation did not die in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the contrary it was more alive than ever. That was due to America’s “peculiar institution,” black chattel slavery. Moreover, this was a period of intense religious creativity and activity, with all kinds of new Protestant sects forming, especially in New England. The Protestant conscience as a result was very much alive, and it had a morally charged issue to contend with: slavery and the necessity of abolishing it.1 It was not just a religious issue. It was a total political anomaly that in a country that could boast of liberal representative democratic institutions and all the blessings of liberty, there should be slavery. If political freedom set America apart from Europe, so did chattel slavery. The abolition of slavery was, in the words of Maria Weston Chapman, “the great work of Christianity in our age.”2 There were thus bound to be many types of abolitionism. There were even several types of religious abolitionists, ranging from those who broke away from existing churches, as a new moral awakening and as a The lecture was originally titled “Civil Disobedience I (Nineteenth Century).” 1. Shklar’s recommended reading for this lecture was William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Anti-Slavery Argument (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 459–473. 2. Maria Weston Chapman was an American abolitionist and member of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. These words appear in the society’s pamphlet number 14, which she signed as author, titled “How Can I Abolish Slavery; or, Counsels to the Newly Converted” (New York: Office of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1855–1856), 6.

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search for “immediate repentance,” to those who demanded “immediate emancipation”—that is, separation from all slave owners, to Quakers who had been at it, quietly plugging away, since the seventeenth century. Of all radicals none was more significant than William Lloyd Garrison. Perhaps he does merit the title of the “great liberator.” His position was problematic. He argued for the need to achieve personal purity, to wash the guilt of slavery from one’s own conscience. The most important point for him was not what would happen to freed slaves or to the country as a whole. Yet without him and his followers nothing would have happened. From the early 1820s on he stood at the forefront of the movement in Boston as their great orator. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch— AND I WILL BE HEARD.”3 Thus stated the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. The idea was immediate but nonviolent action to demand that slavery be abolished at once and unconditionally. “Immediate” did not mean instant liberation of slaves, but instant work to bring about the abolition of slavery. Some of Garrison’s followers turned against all political action because it was not transformative. Party politics does not make a new man. It offers no self-­ purification. Against these claims Frederick Douglass complained that he and other blacks were being used for white spiritual needs, not for practical political ways to end slavery.4 This was true in many but not all cases. For us the important point about Garrison and his followers is that they ­regarded the Constitution and the entire legal system as so tainted with slavery that they amounted to a compact with death and with the devil. There was no possible way in which a religious person could compromise with such evil or feel any allegiance to it. The Garrisonians’ ground for refusal was, however conventional. It was the word of God, as Garrison understood it. Such a stance was well within the traditions of Christian conscientious disobedience. 3. Editor William Lloyd Garrison made this statement in the inaugural issue of his Boston-based abolitionist paper The Liberator. 4. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, became one of the most prominent abolitionists and an advocate for women’s rights. He described his experiences in his three autobiographies, the best-known of which is Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).

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There were more secular arguments against slavery as well, of course: moral arguments based on natural rights, and social contract theory. Wendell Phillips, for example, was not looking for personal salvation; he was a radical politician and remained one after the Civil War.5 His argument was that no contract to perform immoral acts could be binding, and therefore there was no way that a person could swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, which in his view was a slave document. The Constitution is a contract between all the people of the United States, but it demands the return of slaves to their masters and so compels immoral acts. To vote, to hold office, even to obey laws based on so immoral a document would amount to adhering to an illegitimate contract. Phillips would obey most laws—­indeed, he accepted the principle of majority rule—but if a law was immoral he would not submit to it, but would accept the penalty for disobedience. This is the argument for clean hands through selective civil disobedience, but is also of interest to those discussing the theory of consent. Civil disobedience must ultimately be limited by conscience. Nor was it just about having clean hands. Phillips did concern himself with effectiveness, and he thought on the whole that resigning from constitutional office was a more impressive political act than trying to influence policy from within. This is a question that came to haunt many officials in Washington during the Vietnam War, and it is to a degree a pragmatic question. Another point worth noting is that while it may seem an invitation to anarchy to suggest that each one of us may decide when to obey a law or go to jail, the truth is that the test of morality is quite a stringent one. If slavery kept social contract thinking alive and well in the United States, it also preserved natural rights theory in full vigor. That was what Frederick Douglass stood on before and after the Civil War, and so did James Forten, Jr., an active black abolitionist from Philadelphia.6 Both had to find a ground 5. Wendell Phillips was an abolitionist and advocate for the rights of Native Americans and women. Phillips criticized President Lincoln for not being decisive enough about abolition. 6. James Forten was an African American abolitionist and wealthy Philadelphia businessman. He argued passionately for the civil rights of African Americans in the United States and against exporting the problem through colonization. He was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society.



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not only for abolition but also for an end to the persistent discrimination that free blacks had to endure in the North. To that end natural right was and remains the single most compelling argument, not least because of the Declaration of Independence. Denials of human rights were, in fact, eroding the freedom of whites as well, which allowed Forten to illustrate the central principle of human rights: they cannot be limited to some people and to only some political issues, both selected by the government. If you believe in the Declaration and in human rights then these apply to all men and that is that. Self-preservation is primary. Ownership in one’s own body is the basis of all private property and of law as an institution. Slavery would infect the whole system. There is also a moral argument for human rights that was pursued by abolitionists who made the Declaration their central theme: rights are human because only human beings can make free moral choices. Slaves cannot develop their moral faculties because they have no right to make choices; they are permanently infantilized. The slave was thus a person without obligations. He was under no obligation at all. To revolt on his behalf was therefore no more than to restore him to moral life and make a man and a citizen out of him, which was both a moral and a legal obligation. Indeed, some argued that the very spirit of the Constitution demanded this. But in itself that was not the sort of argument that drove people to disobey the law, or to resort to violence. Even Garrison was a pacifist for religious reasons. What really got people moving was the sense of being actively implicated in slavery against their will. The moral thrust to disobey and to reject the law came with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. A suspected fugitive slave in the North was subjected to a summary hearing before federal commissioners; there was no jury, no right to testify on his own behalf. Commissioners were given ten dollars for each accused found guilty and returned to his southern owner; otherwise they received only five dollars. The North tried to nullify this through personal liberty laws. Finding escape routes to Canada, passive resistance, freeing jailed slaves, or going to jail themselves was of no use. The law was held to be constitutional by all federal courts. Even before the law was enacted the moral issue for northern abolitionists was one of being implicated. Every time they put on a shirt in the morning they knew that a slave had picked the cotton. They were caught in a hateful web

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not of their own making. There was no way they could live in the free North without sharing in the sin of slavery. They shared a government, laws, commercial, and cultural relations with the South. Whatever they might wish, they could not escape being implicated in slavery. When they were finally asked actively to support the institution, that was too much, and they began to help escaped slaves go to Canada via the celebrated Underground Railroad. When caught they went to jail without resisting. Among them was one very extraordinary young man, a poet really, who as early as 1848 could not bear being implicated in evil, simply by having to live under a government that governed slaves. That was Henry Thoreau, who in that memorable year wrote “Civil Disobedience,” which has since become the very Bible of anarchists and believers in civil dis­obedience, Tolstoy and Gandhi among them.7 Let us look seriously at this extraordinary document. Thoreau begins with an appeal to his fellow citizens which immediately reveals the beliefs they share. Nothing was more universally accepted in his America than the adage “That government is best which governs least.” And Thoreau agrees, but at once goes on: if this is true, then a government that does not govern at all must be best of all. For the least-government notion clearly implies that there is nothing intrinsically good about being governed. At best government is an expedient device people have chosen to execute their will. In other words, only the consent of the governed can justify there being a government at all, and even then governments must demonstrate that their actions are indeed expedient. Those are not identical standards, consent and expedient and efficient performance, and Thoreau does shift from one to the other as it suits him. He begins with the question of the usefulness of government. The Mexican War is useless, and one must assume that no one consented to it.8 Only a few people started 7. Henry David Thoreau’s most famous book is Walden (1854), a report about the two years he spent in a small cabin by Walden Pond in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. As an abolitionist he refused to pay the Massachusetts poll tax (required, among other things, for a citizen to vote) because it supported a government and a country that either enforced or did not do enough to abolish slavery, and in 1846 he spent a night in jail because of his refusal. 8. The Mexican War, also referred to as the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), led to Mexico’s loss of a large territory that became today’s southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The peace treaty of 1848 also confirmed the Rio Grande as the border between Mexico and the United States.



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that war, and they are supported only out of tradition, which is not in itself useful. In fact, the government has done nothing that is really useful in America. And the extent to which “Civil Disobedience” is an American essay is made evident on the very first page. The government does nothing to keep the country free. It does not, for instance, support and encourage whistleblowers who warn it about policies and laws that might become or are oppressive and unwise. On the contrary, it persecutes these useful citizens who do so much to keep America free. The government did not settle the West. It also does nothing to educate the people. All these have been done by the Americans themselves. Moreover, if the businessmen of America had any guts at all they would not allow themselves to be regulated by the government. Not only does the government have no part in useful social activities, it also drags the people into useless actions like the Mexican War. If the American people were to limit the government to useful actions they would certainly not have consented to the Mexican War, which was as wrong as it was useless. Logically, if they were really interested in what is useful, Americans should be a “no government” people. At the very least they should do a lot more consenting and dissenting if they meant to keep a sharp eye on the government and its way of conducting public business. That is not, however, exactly what Thoreau had in mind. He was not a destroy-all-government anarchist, but a personal conscientious anarchist. He was ready to tolerate government as a useful institution as long as it did not in any way make him do anything that he did not think right. Utility is, as he had just shown, an anarchistic notion. But he is not an expedience man. He is not even interested in consent, but in right. In the opening salvo he has merely put everyone who believes in expedient political calculations on the spot. They are the real anarchists. That is the lesson of keeping sharp accounts. The argument for measuring government in terms of its cash value to the citizenry and also their likely consent to it worked very well for an unpopular war like the Mexican War, but it was not enough to deal with the issue that concerned Thoreau much more, slavery. Slavery was not inexpedient; it was wrong. On the second page Thoreau makes the second claim that he is not obliged to do anything that he does not regard as right. Only if it is in keeping with his conscience is he obliged to follow the directives of any other person, and especially the agents of the government. And his con-

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science tells him that what is right is not to abolish government altogether but to have a good government, “a corporation of conscientious men, a corporation with a conscience.”9 So good government is not impossible, but it would have to be a government that never asked anyone to do anything that his individual conscience rejected. That is certainly not majority government, which is merely the rule of the most powerful, and it is not merely expedient. It is righteous government. Normally, however, to serve the government not merely with one’s body or as a matter of expediency but with one’s conscience means to resist it and to be treated as an enemy by it. At this point we might pause to ask, Just what is this conscience of ­Thoreau’s? It is not tied to God, nor to a higher law, nor is it any sort of loyalty to a group or friendship. It is conscience wholly personal and unattached, and we have not met it since we heard Socrates in the Crito. To do justice to Mexico, but far more significantly, to the slave, there is no social appeal. Justice is listening to the voice of conscience, to an inner voice. There is no other source. The Constitution, the laws, the opinions of others are meaningless. Even most of the opponents of slavery will not do anything serious about it. They petition and they talk, which is not enough. They vote, which is but a sport, a gamble, and a joke. The jolly, gregarious well-meaning American is not the sort of person who can really be a part of a conscientious corporation, in fact, because to listen to one’s conscience and act upon it one must isolate oneself. To act disinterestedly means to act alone, and to give up all sense of allegiance not only to the government but to the vast majority of Americans, who are law-and-order people. The first step is to refuse to pay any taxes that might be used to support slavery and war. So it’s fine to pay the local highway tolls, but not a poll tax. This small-act asserting right is revolutionary in itself, because it transforms one’s relations to others, but above all it divides oneself: the divine is separated from the devilish part of oneself. To act against evil is self-­ transforming. The alternative is, moreover, dreadful; it is to be implicated in evil. I mentioned that when I spoke of the Fugitive Slave Law, no one felt the injustice more clearly than Thoreau. It is to be a majority of one, and 9. “Civil Disobedience,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New York: Penguin, 2012), 77 (emphasis in the original).



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the sense of that is to see that for the resister, slavery has been abolished. We have seen the inner transformation of other resisters, of Becket and Bonhoeffer, for instance. The experience of self-transformation is certainly very real. What we do miss in Thoreau is self-doubt. He is absolutely sure of himself. That may be a reflection of his situation. He was not facing a tyrant or certain death. He was a free man in what was then the freest country around, for all but the slaves, and Thoreau was not himself a slave. He felt enslaved to evil if he did not act, but that is not the same thing as being a real slave. His self-confidence is thus grounded in the fact that he is acting on his own moral behalf and with no serious danger. His lack of self-division is due to not demanding that anyone fight. At this point he is, on the contrary, calling for an end to a war. The call is for every other Massachusetts abolitionist to go, as individuals, to jail, and when the jails are full enough slavery will be done with. It will be a peaceable revolution. As a practical program this is absurd. We know that nothing short of the civil war could end slavery, but in 1848, when he wrote “Civil Disobedience,”10 peaceful revolution still seemed possible to many abolitionists. Nevertheless it does raise the question of whether the refusal to recognize “as my government which is the slave’s government also” is not, as Thoreau presents it, too self-directed a claim. It is I who am too good for such a government. It is I who was not born to be ruled by these jerks. We hear nothing about the slaves or, for that matter, about his neighbors, who might have consciences that sent them different messages from the one his did. It is his own sense of worth that impels him and nothing else. He does not want to rely on the state or on other people at all. To be heroic requires such isolation. These would be and are serious questions about Thoreau’s claim. They are answered by the extremity of the evil and the complicity of every court and every official in perpetuating slavery. “I was not born to be forced,” and all that boasting about his independence from the government may grate upon us, but he may be summoning us to have the courage of our convictions, and that does require an unusual amount of self-confidence.11 Perhaps the more difficult move in Thoreau’s case is his 10. It was published in the following year (1849). 11. “Civil Disobedience,” 78, 89.

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sense of being an exile in his own country and town. In prison he thinks he might be in another age and time, so remote is he from Concord and its inhabitants. It is exile because he insists that if he were to accept them as they are, rather than as he thinks they and he ought to be, he would be giving in to complete fatalism. He would have to say everything is as it has to be and there is no point in doing anything at all. As it is he feels less imprisoned in jail than he thinks are those who live in accordance with the rules of the official institutions and all the conventions of their time and place. What they do not realize is that they have created their own prison and resigned their rights to self-government to it, while he went to jail quite aware of what he was doing; he was denying that he had any obligations to a government that enforced slavery. Thoreau does use the words “human rights,” and he remains within the tradition of consent theory, but it is not Locke’s or Jefferson’s notion. They were both political men who looked to resistance on the part of groups, even majorities. Jefferson wanted consent to be reaffirmed more frequently and immediately than Locke had, but fundamentally they remained interested in just government, not in heroism for its own sake. This meant that Jefferson had no practical policy for the abolition of slavery beyond saying that it was a monstrous wrong and going right on owning slaves. Was the character of America’s wrong such that nothing other than a heroic individualism, even anarchism was really adequate? If we say that nothing less than exile and defiance was acceptable in Nazi Germany, then we must grant Thoreau’s case for personal heroism as the only way to respond to a very great evil that has the tacit support of most people and the very vocal support of a substantial minority. That does not mean that going to jail was the only move or even the best move available to him, but it was a plausible one. It was a better way of choosing exile than going abroad. On this account of the essay it is the extremity of the evil that justifies heroic individualism in a situation in which all else has failed. In such a situation we of course know that, as I said, nothing short of war can eradicate the evil. Thirty million died in World War II, and the carnage of the Civil War was appalling. Thoreau could have called for war—armed insurrection—as a more realistic response to slavery. In fact he eventu-



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ally did, giving full support to John Brown.12 That is, however, beside the point in reading “Civil Disobedience.” It is precisely the complete absence of threats to resort to violence of any kind that has made the essay so famous. It makes a case for civil disobedience, not for rebellion or revolution. Its appeal is to the heroic individual, and this is also its great and enduring strength, because there are moments when nothing remains to hold on to except personal moral heroism. It is perhaps the only possible position against the dreadful fate of being implicated in evil if one does nothing at all, or not all that one could do. In that sense, as Thoreau noted, it was also an act of self-liberation, a victory of one’s better over one’s worser self. This is, as I mentioned before regarding T. H. Green, “positive liberty.” Far from being a threat to rights, it is their necessary precondition. Unless we identify with the freedom of others, their right to negative freedom, to be allowed all the rights of citizens in a free society, even those who enjoy those rights are limited by being morally constrained, by being implicated in the oppression of others. Within each person, that sets up a moral struggle and a sense of inner oppression. To liberate oneself to act on one’s higher impulses thus both entails a victory over inner constraint and contributes directly to the ultimate liberation of the slaves. Without that higher self that Thoreau called his conscience he would have felt neither implicated nor compelled to do something about slavery. To sum up, the profound individualism of American political culture, combined with the institution of slavery, kept the problem of political obligation at the forefront of American politics at a time when it was no longer deemed relevant in Europe. Whether it was a Christian duty, the requirement of the Declaration of Independence, or the primacy of the personal conscience, civil disobedience was the least one could do to abolish slavery. 12. John Brown believed in armed struggle and insurrection to abolish slavery. After an attempted raid on a gun depot at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now Harpers Ferry, West Virginia), that he hoped would help spark an armed slave revolt, Brown was captured, condemned to death, and hanged. Thoreau wrote an article in response to the events, “The Last Days of John Brown,” for The Liberator (27 July 1860) in which he expressed his solidarity with Brown and the support for his cause (reprinted in The Portable Thoreau, 545–553).

Lecture 20: Civil Disobedience in the Twentieth Century

civil disobedience is both a moral theory and a practice, and the two are inseparable. It is a way of justifying certain kinds of political disobedience, but what it involves exactly and its definition have always been derived from what some people have in fact done. For many people Gandhi’s conduct defined the notion of civil disobedience, but then in the United States it came to be overwhelmingly defined by the practices of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the writings and speeches of Martin Luther King. If civil disobedience is to be either justified or condemned we must have a clear definition of it.1

· Public acts of disobedience usually aim at specific laws or policies, not at the entire state; the latter comprise revolution or rebellion. · It must be “civil”—that is, the reason for disobeying must be political, neither entirely public nor wholly private. The motive may be religious, but the action is aimed at and is itself a political act. Private resistance to laws we have seen often: for example, in The lecture was originally titled “Civil Disobedience II (Twentieth Century).” 1. Shklar’s recommended readings for this lecture were David R. Weber, ed., Civil Disobedience in America: A Documentary History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 184–188, 205–225, 293–297; and William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and Morris I. Leib­man, Civil Disobedience: Aid or Hindrance to Justice? (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1972), 1–42.

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passive resistance to avoid offense to God. This is not a political act with a political aim, but an expression of faith. The ultimate motivation of civil disobedience may be religious, but in order to make it wholly an act of civil disobedience there must be a stated political reason; the law being violated must be presented as unjust or possibly so unwise as to be dangerous to the whole society. There is no doubt that Dr. King acted from religious motives and that his Christian faith structured his entire life and conduct; he spoke of it often. He was a clergyman and a minister. Nevertheless, when he defended his civil disobedience, he did so because the laws he was defying were unjust. What made them so were two features. First, they were a code made by the majority that is not binding on itself, but only on a select minority. Secondly, the minority had no part at all in the making of these laws and codes. In other words, discriminatory laws made by legislatures denied the vote and every other political right to the blacks to whom these laws applied. Thus Dr. King, whatever his personal reasons for acting, gave the injustice of the laws as the justification for civil disobedience. In contrast, a Jehovah’s Witness refusing to salute the flag does not claim that the law requiring it is unjust but only to be exempted from it. He expects the apocalypse soon and has the urge to withdraw from political activity in expectation of the Second Coming. He wants you to believe what he does, but not to improve the political system of the United States. Now in the United States, because state and church are separated, he will be allowed to do as he pleases as a matter of political toleration, but the law will not be altered. It is not regarded as unjust in itself, as racial segregation is unjust across the board. One can also make a case for civil disobedience against laws that are not unjust, but are unspeakably dangerous to society as a whole. I used to think that only a claim of injustice could be valid, but with the advent of technologies that might well be universally life-threatening, human safety may be a ground for such disobedience. I in fact think nuclear energy relatively safe, but Chernobyl is not a myth, and eternal watch-

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fulness is probably necessary. These technologies create a terrible problem for democracy because they are very hard to understand and so invite the argument that an elite must use disobedience to advertise the danger and alert the uncomprehending majority of the dangers it faces. · It must be civil in the sense of nonmilitary—that is, not physically violent. This obviously means no shooting, but beyond that the matter is not at all clear. What about nonviolent coercion, such as blackmail? For the American Civil Rights Movement that was a crucial issue between King and Malcolm X,2 the latter of whom began his career by calling for revolution as the only way to gain the rights of blacks in a state that he regarded as tyrannical in its effect. By contrast, for King nonviolence was the heart of the matter, though in practice it might be difficult to achieve. · The disobeyer manifests respect for law by accepting responsibility for his conduct by going to jail without resisting arrest, but he need not refrain from using all possible legal paths to his release and acquittal. · In a system such as that of the United States, with a system of courts in each state and within the federal system empowered to rule on the constitutionality of laws, civil disobedience may be used as a device for getting laws into the courts initially to have them eventually declared unconstitutional. This is tricky. Clearly it is disobedience until the courts decide, and the disobeyer may well lose his case. If he wins, then retrospectively he was behaving lawfully, and the rules that he disobeyed were illegal. Until that happens it is civil disobedience, and should count as such. The issue does, however, highlight one reason why civil disobedience is a peculiarly American phenomenon: the chances of being vindicated are quite good, though it may take a long time and mean a lot of grief and expense. 2. Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) was a radical African American activist and Muslim minister. He opposed what he regarded as the conciliatory, soft tone of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, which allegedly favored integration but left the power structure and white hegemony intact.



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Some people, however, say that testing the law in this way is not genuine civil disobedience, which must be aimed at getting the majority to rethink, to change, and to create new laws, and to do so such action in defiance of laws that are now in effect may put the disobeyer in jail. I don’t see why one is not making the system more democratic by getting the courts to declare discriminatory practices unconstitutional. The case is different if the disobeyer simply hires a lawyer to get him out of jail, on grounds that his motives were pure when he refused to pay his taxes as a protest against war. · The object of civil disobedience must be perfectly clear: to get a law or policy changed. That it may be a way of communicating with the majority that supports the law in question, that it is a way of advertising grievances, and that some devout persons might feel that they are witnessing before God is a side-effect. The aim must be to get the intolerable law off the books, or prevent its enforcement, to avoid grievous injustice or mortal danger. Some writers, such as Rawls,3 believe that it must be an appeal made in terms of a shared sense of justice, or, I would suggest, of injustice. Others have set broader demands. The prevailing sense of justice is what needs to be altered, and one must appeal against the majorities in the interest of a better common life, for example, a more fraternal, communitarian, and participatory society. This is, however, a demand for social revolution with only limited use of violence. It is not real civil disobedience; it accepts the existing order with all but some crucial practices. · It must be a last resort when all other avenues of political action have failed and normal political channels are clearly closed. It should be recognized as being demanded by the failure of the political system to respond to injustice, which is manifest and for which redress is not forthcoming. And because injustice is the 3. John Rawls was a Harvard political philosopher and colleague and friend of Judith Shklar. His best-known book is A Theory of Justice (1971), in which there is a section on Civil Disobedience. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice can be read as an argument with Rawls.

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issue, it does not only have to be the victims of the laws or policies who disobey, but all men and women who recognize the injustice and who have tried to get it removed. Injustice is everyone’s business in a democracy. Because this is a form of political action, even though not normal, and highly ethical in its character, participants must have grounds for expecting to succeed in their aims. They must, moreover, calculate the cost to those who are encouraged to engage in civil disobedience, and even more significantly the probable consequences in terms of the expected reaction of the opposition to the civil disobedient’s cause. If it will bring on a cycle of repression and a reign of reactionary backlashes, that is a serious consideration. Civil disobedience is not self-expression or keeping one’s conscience clear. It is political action, even if it does mean to right a recognizable public wrong. Thus in speaking of the Selma march in 1965, Dr. King made it perfectly plain that he had a practical sequence of events in mind. When nonviolent people march to exercise their constitutional rights they will be attacked by racists and accused, among other things, of breaking local ordinances. The sight of the violence is such that the American public will demand federal intervention, and the administration will react by intervening and initiating remedial legislation. This, he noted is not a tranquil process. He expected the march to turn out this way, and it did. In short, he acted with due political foresight. He also had a whole range of political moves in mind after the period of civil disobedience, when constitutional government had come to include the black citizens of the United States. It might seem that these sorts of actions are universal in their appropriateness and that they might occur anywhere. That is not the case. It is best to recognize and treat civil disobedience as an American phenomenon. Why look only to America? There was, after all, a great deal of civil disobedience in the Soviet Union,4 4. Numerous forms of protest and civil disobedience accompanied the political upheaval of the breakup of the Soviet Union. The process would eventually lead to the creation of the Russian Federation (without some of the smaller states toward the west and southwest, which managed to become fully independent, such as the Baltic States, including Latvia and its capital Riga, Shklar’s birthplace).



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and Gandhi certainly inspired King and others. In both cases civil disobedience was part of a much larger movement to transform unjust forms of government; in the case of the disintegrating Soviet Union to rid it of terror and the Communist Party and all its works, and in the case of Gandhi to get the British out of India. In the latter case the doctrine of nonviolence was the great source of attraction, and it is true that civil disobedience is meant to be so. But nonviolence is only one feature of civil disobedience. It has to be distinguished from many other forms of political disobedience, such as resistance to a whole political system, as well from other forms of political disobedience, such as rebellion and revolution. Genuine civil disobedience can occur only where the disobedient accept the government that is in place as being on the whole legitimate and just, so it cannot be part of a revolutionary enterprise, violent or not. It is a specific law or policy of such a government that is taken to be so unjust as to demand disobedience. This does not mean that it can occur only in liberal democracies, but it is only likely in such contexts because there exist both in the ideology and in the practices of such states provisions that make civil disobedience acceptable conduct under some circumstances. The emphasis on personal freedom and consent gives civil disobedience a political space not available under other systems of government. That means very few governments, mainly those of Britain and the United States. If the object is to change the law, civil disobedience can only function as persuasion, and the politics of persuasion are typically those of party politics in a representative democracy. That is not all. There is the so-called American dilemma, slavery in Thoreau’s case and segregation and denial of political and legal rights to black people after the end of Reconstruction. I have been mentioning Dr. King not because he is the only civil disobeyer who ever wrote, but because he is the most significant one. He led the most articulate and politically aware movement of civil disobedience since abolitionism, and it is no accident that both movements were civil disobedience undertaken in response to injustice done to black citizens. Basically the theory and the practice of civil disobedience are parts of the same Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as long as it was led by Martin Luther King. There were other incidents related to nuclear armaments and the war in Vietnam, but these and other protest movements were marginal as far as civil disobedience

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goes. The other and less original political phenomenon that has occasionally given rise to civil disobedience in the United States and the United Kingdom has been protest against wars regarded as unjust. In U.S. history every war has had its protesters. For many this has meant conscientious objection, not civil disobedience. Conscientious objection is, as I said, an expression of an individual’s personal beliefs as a member of a religious group, and is possibly a matter of mere conviction. Refusing to salute the flag because it is forbidden by one’s religion or refusing to bear arms on the same grounds are obvious cases. There is also the matter of sending children to school and refusing to give them medical treatment without which they must die, as has been the case among Christian Scientists.5 Here the object is not to affect policy or change the law. This is not political action at all, but a private act of religious belief that collides with the demands of law, and challenges the limits of toleration and the First Amendment. In these respects it is not at all civil and must be clearly differentiated from civil disobedience. We must also differentiate between revolution and resistance. We have talked enough about revolution to see the difference. A revolution is meant to overthrow an entire political system, and it will do so by whatever means seem likely to succeed, violent or not. Gandhi was a revolutionary, and all that American civil disobedience adopted from him was the doctrine of nonviolence, but even that has a different meaning in the context of Indian culture. “Resistance” is the vaguest of all these terms. It is organized political action aimed against an existing government that cannot be overthrown because its power is too great, but it is regarded as totally illegitimate by some significant part of the population over which it rules. One speaks of resistance to totalitarian governments, to military dictatorships of the South American type, and overwhelmingly to conquerors. In fact the term “resistance” derived its power after World War II because that is what the opponents of the Nazi invaders in Europe called themselves. Americans who spoke of themselves as resisters during the Vietnam War were gener 5. Christian Scientists argue from an idealist perspective that the material world and its manifestations (such as illness) can be overcome through belief and prayer. This does not necessarily include a prohibition on medical treatment; however, prayer is regarded as a stronger healing power than any medicine.



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ally in a radicalized state of mind and convinced that North Vietnam was a model state. Others simply misused the term in order to appropriate the positive connotations of the European resistance to Hitler. Civil disobedience is like none of the above. It is political action, unlike conscientious objection, and it does not aim at the overthrow of an illegitimate government, either by outright civil war, coup d’état, or more limited action. It tries to make a potentially just government more just. Both the Mexican and the Vietnam wars did evoke some civil disobedience, though it was far less well-defined than the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements. In both cases the protest against the war was directly related to the struggle for the rights of black Americans, first against slavery and then on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. In the latter case it was to great degree a case of copying tactics, which soon escalated. The difference between the two cases remains. The political case against war is that it is unjust, either because all war is regarded as such, since such massive violence cannot ever be just, or because of a selective decision that a specific war is unjust. In either case, again, the grounds must be based on political reasoning, not only on religious belief. Nonreligious pacifism was rather rare after World War II because the vast majority of Americans thought that they had fought a very just war, and those who objected to the Mexican War were proud of the American Revolutionary War. So it was a matter of the injustice or at least the lack of wisdom of these specific wars that evoked some civil disobedience. But whether this opposition could be justified as readily as civil dis­obedience to end segregation is not at all clear. What was done was the burning of draft cards, obstructing the work of draft boards, pouring red paint on or destroying draft records, and refusing to pay taxes. Not one of these tactics singly or in combination was expected to end the war, nor was this sort of action designed to persuade. It was a way of advertising the belief that the war was absolutely wrong. If the message got into the media then at least the protesters were going to be heard, and they were. And publicity and disorder did raise the political cost of the war, though that was not why it eventually ended. It ended because the civilian political elite decided that the war could not be won except at unacceptably high military cost, or that it was escalating out of control. Civil disobedience is an Ameri-

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can phenomenon because of the extreme individualism of its public ethos. Citizens are meant to stand up for their rights, and consent is regarded as the sole basis of just government. It thus encourages the citizen to protest laws and policies to which he or she could never consent and to reject laws that seem manifestly unjust. Then there is the position of the courts in our system of government. Judicial review of legislation and the judicial enforcement of the Bill of Rights against governments that violate it gives the aggrieved a chance to test the legality of these laws and ordinances, and to prove that it was the governing agency not the protesting individual who was acting illegally. It is a flexible legal system in which civil disobedience can succeed in getting into the legal process if it can mount a real appeal. Civil disobedience is a technique that is effective in the United States because of the frequency of elections and the tensions between local and national authorities. The failure of elected executives to maintain order may well cost them elections, and giving in to civil disobedience may accomplish that. To that extent it is a form of political blackmail. There are an exceptional number of lobbies, pressure groups, and organizations that facilitate organized participation in the political process, and civil disobedience as group action is one of these, though its methods are unconventional. That is because of the character of its constituency and the causes it pursues. After one hundred years of injustice it was the only political action that promised anything at all to southern blacks. It is only a temporary device. Reform in the United States comes in spurts, stops and starts. People tire of protesters. Moreover, when the initial goals are achieved, disobedience loses its effectiveness. It worked fine to desegregate public facilities in the South and to get the Voting Rights Act passed; after that, as Andrew Young put it, education and political action are the necessary next steps.6 The limits are also in the kind of policies civil disobedience can deal with at all, even in the United States. It cannot be an alternative to the legally ac-

6. Andrew Young is a politician and civil rights activist. He was one of the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became an ally and close friend of Martin Luther King. Young later became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.



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cepted process of government, simply because the cause seems urgent and the chances of succeeding are very low. On those grounds all vegetarians, funny money,7 Ku Klux Klansmen, and Nazi skinheads could break the law to promote their doctrines. It must make an appeal based on injustice done to an ascriptive group. In practice that means black and Native Americans. There is also the matter of scope. Poverty, racism, and general international or economic policies are far too broad in their aims. There has to be a specific injustice, and a direct link between the character of the law dis­ obeyed and the people disobeying it. Blacks disobeying discriminatory laws succeeded; whites protesting the war did not because they did not look like genuine civil disobedients to the courts or the general public. The fact that you disagree with a policy on moral grounds is not enough for civil disobedience; you have to prove that an identifiable group has been systematically treated unjustly and has no other means left. Promoting the general common good or preventing immoral laws or policies is not enough. The ballot and the normal forms of political pressure are available to citizens, and the fact that they are not likely to prevail is not an excuse for disobeying the law. It is also bound to fail, as the various campaigns for nuclear disarmament did. Highly local protests by communities against contamination or the closing of a park are effective last resorts, however. One baby carriage with a baby inside can stop a bulldozer and produce an injunction that will persuade officials to forget about the whole thing as not worth their while. In short, civil disobedience succeeds to the extent that it fits into the political culture and processes of the United States. These are so unusual that civil disobedience exists really only in the United States, but it is also structured by that fact at every turn. Indirect civil disobedience is not viable as a result; it is the use of sensational illegal action to highlight a cause. Refusing to pay the percentage of one’s taxes that go to pay for war is a mild version, pouring blood on Selective Service files is more sensational, blocking traffic on a very busy bridge leading to gridlock in New York is extreme. The idea is to inconvenience people until they give in, and it is a tactic not likely to work for anything but 7. “Funny money” is a colloquial term for fake money, or scams.

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a backlash. It is pragmatically unsound and morally unsustainable. Courts certainly refuse to treat these acts as forms of speech protected by the First Amendment; after all, they are not speech. Commercial advertising and pickets in strikes are speech; even burning the flag is now a statement of sorts, but refusal to pay taxes and blocking a bridge are not. It is a thin line, but common sense can see it clearly enough. The extent to which civil disobedience is determined by its American context can be seen in the ways it changed and in the responses of courts. King began by seeing civil disobedience as a means of nonviolent persuasion. That led nowhere. So he resorted to nonviolent coercion. Birmingham and Selma were chosen as places to hold protest marches because the sheriffs there were known to be brutal racists who would perpetrate violent acts against the marchers, which they did. Bull Connor and Jim Clark, the two sheriffs, did a lot for black voting rights when they set dogs on unarmed and peaceful marchers who were trying to register or protesting the jailing of those who tried to register. This was shown on television all around the world. It was designed to get the Voting Rights Act passed, and it did. That civil disobedience became a tactic is something that is not openly admitted even now, because this is thought to tarnish its moral character, but this is not really true. Civil disobedience is political action by a group that must take consequences into account at every step. What is problematic is not that civil disobedience may provoke violence on the part of its opponents but that it may spread the violence to a newly politicized population. Riots that followed civil disobedience in the cities were probably inspired by it. So violence may be seen as the next step in the struggle, and civil disobedience as merely a beginning. This can be called double effect or regarded as the unintended consequence of a moral act. But in politics foresight is part of morality. The second problem is not that of the inducement to violence but the question “What if everyone did it?” This is a bad question. If everybody resisted laws that were manifestly unjust we would have a more just society; such laws would decline in number. If the question is a prediction, it does not follow, for few people will in fact do it and law will not break down. The conduct of most criminals is not civil disobedience. It is covert, it is not a form of political action and it cannot and does not show that it aims at justice. Few if any ordinary criminals behave in a way resembling civil disobedience.



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What of the opponents of civil disobedients, the southern officials like Wallace and Barnett who blocked school entrances?8 Were they acting politically and out of conviction regarding what was best for their region and its institutions? It is said that they could not have survived a court test. But then neither did Dr. King in defying a valid injunction against marching in Birmingham. What of KKK members who burn crosses without physically injuring anyone? What of Right to Life activists who block entrances to abortion clinics and go limp when arrested? Going limp is sort of halfway between resisting arrest and accepting punishment freely. They sometimes notify police of their intentions, and they are certainly acting on moral motives. You might say that this is a case of conflict of rights, and civil dis­ obedience cannot settle that sort of essentially normal conflict. You are not going to convince a person who believes that abortion is murder and that he or she is defending the lives of the unborn. The people who are now threatened with having to shut down their clinics if they give advice on abortion will also try civil disobedience of some sort, I suspect, even though courts have already told them that the law is constitutional.9 They will have to be evasive, presumably. Being open in one’s defiance is not always possible. The Underground Railroad sending slaves to Canada had to be secret. And the abortion advisers may choose secrecy as well. You can take a patient out for a cup of coffee across the street and talk about anything at all. In fact, civil disobedience is contagious, which brings us back to the reason why civil disobedience operated as it did in the United States. For some ten years every law journal, philosophical review, and political review was full of articles related to civil disobedience. Dozens of books were written on the subject, but almost none after 1975. It was a subject generated mostly by the Civil Rights Movement and King and then again by war protestors. There was universal approval of King’s sort of civil dis 8. George Wallace and Ross Barnett were governors of, respectively, Alabama and Mississippi and vocal segregationists. When the courts ordered that the Universities of Alabama and Mississippi be integrated, the governors made repeated efforts to block the admission of black students. 9. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law that, among other restrictions, banned using public funds to counsel women to have abortions except in cases where their lives were at risk.

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obedience; not universal, but almost, in learned works and in the federal courts. That approval was ultimately based on a shared sense of justice. As Rawls says, one of the conditions of civil disobedience is that it must appeal to a shared sense of justice, and the denial of equal political rights to black Americans was seen as an injustice even by people who might have strongly racist attitudes. The reaction of the Supreme Court is revealing. It ruled that in the sit-in cases the sitters had been denied due process when they were convicted of disturbing the peace since they were very orderly in their conduct.10 Also they had been denied their right to free speech. In the demonstration cases the Court ruled the local ordinances to be unconstitutionally vague and again that free speech had been denied. The dissenters tended to argue that local authorities ought to be free to apply trespass rules as they saw fit. And eventually the tension between local government and the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution came into conflict, as in the case where a majority held that schools could not forbid children to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War. Locally elected schoolboards are democratic also. In any event the Court legalized civil disobedience and thus vindicated it as a way of making democracy live up to its own norms, getting the legal process moving and invigorating the law by asserting lawful rights. This brings me to two very serious ways of thinking about civil disobedience. One is tied to the courts. Since the object of civil disobedience is to assert rights, and since we do have rights against the government, these rights in case of a genuine conflict between authority and individual rights should prevail, and the way to achieve that is not to prosecute civil disobedients. What do you do in cases of conflicts of rights? You refer to a higher principle, which must be moral, and respect the dignity of human beings and equality of treatment by the government of all citizens. These are recognizably the themes of the Declaration of Independence. What happens to an ambulance on a blocked road system? There have to 10. See Garner v. Louisiana, 368 U.S. 157 (1961), one of the most important civil rights cases to come before the Supreme Court. The Court upheld the right to peaceful protest in the form of a sit-in, arguing that the protesting students had been denied due process under the 14th Amendment by the state of Louisiana.



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be some limits on rights themselves, and these must take the form of laws. Another writer has suggested that we might have a special constitutional amendment to allow civil disobedience, but then it would not be civil disobedience, and it is difficult to see what such an amendment would look like. More plausible is the suggestion that in fact courts, juries, policemen, and all executive officials have a good deal of discretion to step beyond the legal definition of their offices and roles. Presidents can evade all kinds of laws in wartime. Policemen are wise to ignore illegal gambling in communities where it is completely accepted. Enforcing Prohibition was a disaster. Juries, on occasion, acquit, whatever judges instruct them to do. Supreme Court justices can overturn precedents when they see fit. Why not allow citizens similar discretion in obeying rules that seem unenforceable, unjust, or intolerable in some way? It is what was in fact done in the case of civil rights until the death of Dr. King. Against it is the principle that there must be one law applicable to officials and citizens alike. Otherwise we have official and private arbitrariness and far more oppression than we have now. The second way of thinking about civil disobedience is a philosophical one. From a historian’s point of view the philosophical discussion of civil disobedience is both insignificant and enormously important. It is insignificant because no general justification of civil disobedience is possible apart from the overriding morality of the cause in defense of which it is undertaken. In an almost just society, which is the only one in which it by definition occurs, there is in fact only one such issue, slavery and its aftermath. That is the case because one group is singled out for no relevant reason at all to be denied all the rights enjoyed by the rest of the citizens of a representative democracy under law. Since the entire history of the United States is deeply structured at every point by this phenomenon—just recall the Civil War—it is immensely important as a chapter in the struggle to overcome it, but not as a theoretical issue. Is there a different justification needed for civil disobedience than for revolution and resistance? To that I would answer, yes and no. One has to believe that there are limits to the obedience that one owes to the state. That has always been recognized in the United States anyway. No one today says “just obey”; rather, they say “obey unless,” thanks to Hitler. When King, in jail in Birmingham, ad-

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dressed his fellow clergymen in a letter, part of his defense was standard Christian resistance theory. However, he also added that the manner of the disobedience, its nonviolence, was meant to reinvigorate, to realize the accepted public values of the Department of Justice. He broke the letter of the law in order to save the spirit of the laws of this country. This is the one necessary justification that makes civil disobedience unique.

Lecture 21: Conscientious Objection

conscientious objection is not like civil disobedience.1 The conscientious objector does not want to change the law or to change policy. He, and so far it has only been “he,” because of the armed forces, only wants to act in accordance with his own beliefs as an individual. The archetypical conscientious objector is a Quaker, a Mennonite, or a Brethren. These are the historic peace churches. The Quakers are the most illuminating because their beliefs show us more clearly than any other what being a conscientious objector is about. Quakers do not believe in conscience but in the inner light, which is a direct infusion of the divine spirit that alone can move us to genuine faith. This is why one does not speak at a Quaker Meeting until the spirit moves one. It also means that Quakers think it wrong to proselytize or to try to convert other people to their beliefs. To say that they are individualistic is too feeble. In their social conduct they are exceptionally cooperative, charitable, and service-oriented. They are, in fact, model citizens except in one respect: they will not bear arms. Under no circumstances will they kill. And since the late seventeenth century, when 1. For a general overview of the history of conscientious objection in America, Shklar recommended Lillian Schlissel, Conscience in America: A Documentary History of Conscientious Objection in America, 1757–1967 (New York: Dutton, 1968), 49–54, 142–149. For a more philosophical argument Shklar suggested Michael Walzer, Obligations: Essay on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 3–23, 120–145.

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they first came to America to escape from persecution in England, this has caused them difficulties with their neighbors. The early tension arose over attacks by Native Americans in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Quakers were accused of benefiting from the defense offered by those who took up arms and confronted the dangerous enemy, to which the Quakers replied that they never had any trouble with Indians because, as they did not annoy them, the Indians did not cause them any harm. Peace, they argued, bred peace. Nevertheless both before and during the American Revolution, Quakers were often forced into military service, and when they refused to act were tortured and killed. Only George Washington, both as an officer in Virginia and then as the commander of the revolutionary forces, behaved with perfect decency and respected their scruples. The one point to bear in mind is that being a conscientious objector in America has never been easy. What is evident even at this early stage of the story is that the nature of the political conflict presented by conscientious objection is clear. From the point of view of those fighting in defense of their country the conscientious objector is a free rider of the worst sort. While he sits at home in comfort nursing his precious inner light, the conscripted soldier, especially, has to bear all the burdens of danger and misery that fighting a war involves. To the conscientious objector it is clear that the word of God is primary and that he, having heard it, can pay attention to no other. In the middle are those who believe that religious freedom, as it is constitutionally prescribed in the United States, must somehow be able to adjudicate between the demands of military defense and those of religious faith. This is particularly the case in the United States. Britain has been able to deal very easily with its conscientious objectors, but it does not have the number of denominations that the United States has, and it does not have the courts actively engaged in interpreting a constitution. Nor does Britain have the same tensions between local and central authority. The result is that the whole issue of conscientious objection is far more complex in the United States than anywhere else. This has become especially clear since World War I because that was the first time that nonreligious conscientious objectors emerged and the dreaded question of what is and what is not a religion under the First Amendment appeared. The one thing we do share with Britain is an aversion to conscription, and to that extent



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both countries in the First World War, when compulsory conscription was instituted for the first time, became hysterical in the face of conscientious objectors and potential draft evaders in general. In Britain that was not the case in the Second World War, but in the United States it persisted until we finally returned to an all-volunteer army. Even when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and President Jimmy Carter reinstituted registration for the draft as a show of force, there were immediate conscientious objectors to that requirement, though no inductions were contemplated. So like civil disobedience, I shall treat this as both philosophically and historically an American dilemma. In 1789, when James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights in Congress, he suggested that the following clause be added to the right to bear arms: “No person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”2 This amendment was not adopted by Congress because it gave the federal government too much say in the running of state militias, the only effective military force in place. It was seen as an incursion of the federal government into state authority. It would certainly have made the life of conscientious objectors simpler because exemption from military service would have been a constitutional right, which it is not now. Conscientious objectors depend entirely on acts of Congress for their status. “Military service in person” in Madison’s proposal permitted paying a substitute to fight in wars, as was legally allowed during the Civil War. It would also probably have exempted the absolutist conscientious objector from service of any kind. For from the first there were conscientious objectors who were prepared to do alternative service of national importance, such as work in hospitals, and some who would not do anything whatever that might directly or indirectly contribute in any manner to the war effort, or collaborate with military authority in any way. Refusing to register at all, they landed in jail. During the Civil War conscientious objectors who could not avoid the draft and then refused to do anything else were mistreated in military stockades, court-martialed, and in some cases killed, usually by angry draftees. It is not easy to be forced to serve as a con 2. In addition to drafting the first ten amendments to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights), James Madison, later to become the fourth president of the United States, was a co-author with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of The Federalist Papers.

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script while others seem to be permitted to do nothing because of a claim to an inner light. All the more so since Quakers, especially, were generally suspected of hypocrisy. They fared even worse in the First World War. The reason for this was not just the patriotic orgy I already mentioned, but also that the historic peace churches were not as accepted as they are now. There were several strange Russian sects, and above all there were socialists and anarchists and nonreligious pacifists who also demanded conscientious objector status. The Selective Service Law, however, stated clearly that this status could apply only to members of “well-recognized religious sects and organizations” whose members are by their beliefs forbidden to take any part in war. These people could be exempted from military service by their local draft board and assigned alternative service. Those who refused that service went to jail, and those who did it got no pay. The real problem was what to do about people who had developed scruples against military service without membership in one of the historic peace churches. Who was to determine whether they were sincere in their beliefs and how was it to be done? And what about the people who were revolutionaries, who were not pacifists at all, but objected to what they saw as a capitalist and imperialist war? One way to deal with these new conscientious objectors was to enlist them and make life intolerable for them, so that the very fact that they were ready to endure these hardships proved their sincerity. And in both world wars, noncombatant service done outside the armed services was unpaid. So the hardship of being a conscientious objector was always real enough, though not the equivalent of fighting overseas. Herein lies the political problem. I have not given you anything like a full history of the Selective Service Acts of the twentieth century or the ups and downs of the status of conscientious objectors in times of hot or cold war. I just wanted to indicate that the population at large tended to treat the conscientious objector with contempt, on occasion lynched him, and that when left to the army he had a very rough time surviving. Only members of the historic peace churches who prepared for alternative noncombatant service managed to get by. The reason for the distrust with which people, Congress, and the executive agencies treated conscience objectors is clear. They were not doing their duty to defend a free republic against its enemies, and in the Second World



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War and the Cold War that enemy was their enemy as well—a threat to religion and individual conscience if ever there was one. What case could their conscience offer against the duty of a republican citizen to share and share equally in the burdens of defending the freedoms of the republic? Why should others die for them while they sat and contemplated the inner light at leisure? The whole question was made the more intractable by the unfairness of the draft in practice. In the First World War the local boards varied wildly from place to place in their practices, and many were very much influenced by local pressure. Black soldiers not only were in both wars forced to serve in segregated units; they were treated with contempt by every official body. And while in the Second World War the system of exemptions worked more fairly and rationally, the Cold War draft, with its college student and other exemptions, was in no sense fair. The reason why this is important is that an unfair system is not in the best position to claim that conscientious objectors are free riders and shirkers who have no sense of civic duty and allow others to bear the burdens of public security. From the first, though Americans were far from tolerant as individuals or communities, it was always possible to find a place on this continent where any group could pursue its religious life in peace and quiet, and that was not possible anywhere else. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, as illustrated by everything James Madison said and did, especially in Virginia, there was a belief among the elite, at least, that absolute religious freedom, separation of state and church, and with it the legitimization of all beliefs as long as they did not run afoul of the elementary criminal law was a fundamental human right. This was written into the state constitutions and above all into the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The implication has been that religious diversity is something not just to be tolerated but to be welcomed, because it is an expression of a fundamental human right. We believe what we do, because we are as individuals the kind of persons we are, and it is an injury to the purity of faith and to the integrity of the human personality to in any way interfere with the religious life of any person. Hence the enormous number of denominations which began to flower from the early years of the nineteenth century and have never stopped. In principle the conscientious objector cannot be drafted in the

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United States. The Declaration of Independence, with its “pursuit of happiness,” which referred then to religion, and the First Amendment express a non-European view of religion. Its freedom and diversity are not to be tolerated merely but to be cherished; that is why the state does not regulate religion—it is not permitted to do anything at all in regard to religion. So far so good. The awful difficulty that did not really come up at first is, What is a religion? That turned out to be as much as if not more of a problem than where to draw the line between a legitimate action expressing belief and a crime. I do not mean to say that the limits of permissible religious activity have been easy to settle. In the late nineteenth century the Supreme Court held Mormon polygamy to be the equivalent of human sacrifice and as such a crime.3 That was, however, a very isolated case. The far more common case is the conscientious objector, and it is not only a matter of a refusal to serve in the armed forces. Conscientious objection can take the form of any refusal to obey a law not because it is regarded as unjust or politically wrong but because one’s own conscience rejects it. Other people are not urged to follow suit. The refusal to obey is entirely personal, even if the individual is a member of a church. The kinds of cases that have arisen are, for example, whether Christian Scientist parents have a right to withhold medical treatment that would save the lives of their children and allow them to die because they believe in faith healing. The answer is, in fact, no. May the Amish keep their children out of school, thus breaking the state’s compulsory education laws? Yes, they may. And then there is the vexed matter of saluting the flag in school. All these people were conscientious objectors who disobeyed the law to serve their personal beliefs, not to alter the beliefs of others or the laws at all. But no one doubts that the voice of religious conscience is what prompts them to act as they do. It is clear what they are doing, whether they are to be punished or not. The question is whether they have transgressed criminal law, especially where children are involved. What is in doubt is not the religiosity of these people but only their right to disobey the law. In the United States the claims of religion in these cases are taken 3. In Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), the Court upheld the criminal conviction of George Reynolds, a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), for bigamy.



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exceptionally seriously. That when the conscientious objectors end up in court they demand their First Amendment rights is itself a unique aspect of our constitutional system and the legal respect it accords religious self-­ expression. What the courts say in each case in which they accept a practice as a religious right is that religious freedom, even in conflict with the law, is so essential to the constitutional system of the United States that almost nothing can inhibit it. The life of a child is one of the rather few cases in which the criminal law asserts itself. On the whole the line between religious faith and political obligation tends to favor the individual believer. The problem with the conscientious objector who seeks exemption from military service was originally a question of readily recognized religiosity. Congress provided relief for those who belonged to pacifist sects, since that was all that was at stake. This did not work out very well, because there was too much local discretion, but the principle was clear. All that has changed as American society has changed. It is all quite different now, with more types of religious and many nonreligious claims for conscientious objector status. The old question of free riding and civic duty in a republic that protects every religion has become even graver because the new breed of conscientious objectors is no longer religious. Some new principle therefore has to be found to decide who is entitled to being recognized as a conscientious objector. Apart from members of the historic peace churches should anyone be exempted from military service simply because of a stated political or philosophical belief? How is the state to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate belief systems? For this is not the eighteenth century, and we live in a society where the diversity of private beliefs and opinions is not limited to religious doctrinal controversies. We are far more preoccupied with differences of secular moral and political belief. Conscience is not what it once was. It is not an inner light or the voice of God revealed in the Bible or even a stable universal moral system; it is the voice that says, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” but not as Luther did, because of the word of God, but because I am what I am—in effect, my own God. This is what a free society in the twentieth century is bound to be, but it is more the case in the United States than anywhere else, given its immigration patterns and religious history. As you may recall conscientious objection also begins earlier in the

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United States than anywhere else. Remember the patron saint of conscientious objectors, Thoreau? While there were conscientious objectors who were not members of historic peace religions in World Wars I and II, they predominated during the Vietnam War. By that time the Selective Service Law had been considerably liberalized. All a conscientious objector had to prove was that his refusal to serve was based on a belief in a Supreme Being. But this did not take care of conscientious objectors who were not overtly religious, and even more problematic were those who were not pacifists either, but only objected to a specific war: so-called selective conscientious objectors. What should be done about them? The difficulties are enormous. First, how is one to determine their “sincerity”? How can a court or any other public agency determine what goes on inside a man’s skull? Should they do so? Indeed, under the First Amendment may they? Is it not inquisitorial? There is, secondly, the question of fairness. Clearly, articulate and well-educated people are at a great advantage in making claims for philosophical objections to war in general or to a specific war. As long as being a member of a given sect was all you had to show, the issue did not arise. Most Mennonites and Brethren were poor, and the Quakers varied. Once you permit secular convictions to justify conscientious objector status the articulate and educated are the only people likely to be able to make a case. Third and finally, how can one decide what set of convictions is to count, and who is to decide that? Is it thinkable that all individuals who say, “I think this war is wrong,” are to be excused from serving in the military and even from doing alternative noncombatant service? Or from any other legally required practice that they happen to find repugnant? Surely no system of conscription can accept the notion that all must serve except those who can come up with a plausible reason for not doing so. Hence the desperate but futile demand of the courts that the prospective conscientious objector show that he is adhering to something “outside” himself, something that can at least be examined and evaluated. To cope with the “selective objector” some theologians have suggested that an argument made in terms of “just war” theory might be acceptable as grounds for legitimate conscientious objector status. This seems to me a ridiculous suggestion because it would require the government to admit that it was waging an unjust war under the definitions of international law.



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A draft resister who claimed he could not enlist because the Vietnam War was unjust was pitting his definition against that of the government, and here we run into the same difficulties as those who acted in civil disobedience campaigns to protest the injustice of the war. Another approach, which I find more convincing, is to say that the First Amendment is so broad that anyone who makes even the most tenuous religious claim has to be accepted as a genuine conscientious objector. That is because, given its latitude, one must favor the individual’s rather than the government’s definition of who is and who is not moved by religious or religion-like beliefs. Finally there is the wholly pragmatic approach, which says that the days of the genuine peace religions are over. The question on all sides is a purely political one. Is it in the best interest of the government to exempt those who claim to have a scruple of some kind against serving or isn’t it? The most coherent answer is Hegel’s. The modern state is so strong and the respect it shows in principle for subjective beliefs is so central to its public character that it can afford to allow these sects to refuse to do their duty, but this is in no way a matter of right. It is generosity that stems from the enormous strength of the modern state and the monopoly of the legitimate use of military force that it possesses. It is for the state to decide who is and who is not a full citizen, and essentially anarchistic sects can be tolerated at the discretion of the state. That is the Prussian legal order and, with modification, that of France and Britain. It is not that of the United States, which argues that these people are not expressing religious or similar beliefs at all; they are moved by political motives even if they act as discrete individuals. They will never be numerous; most people do, in fact, register for the draft and report when called up. The choice is simply whether it is too demoralizing to let a few conscientious objectors off for their own reasons, quietly and without a fuss, or whether it is not in the interest of a strong, self-confident liberal state to let them go their own way and to concentrate on the civic education of the vast majority of its citizens. In this way the state exhibits its respect for beliefs, religious and otherwise, assumes that the individual is a good judge of his own conscience, and accepts the claim. Let those who will, do alternative service, and let the rest off with some sort of deferment. This is a pragmatic and amoral response, to be sure, but it does get the state out of the business of deciding what is and what is

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not a sincere moral, quasi-religious belief. Alternatively one may abolish conscientious objector status altogether, but that is also difficult given the legislative traditions that were a response to the historic peace churches, which still survive, after all. The way the Supreme Court has dealt with the issue is as confused as one might expect. Take, for example, the 1965 case involving Seeger, Jakobson, and Peter, three conscientious objectors all of whom had Catholic upbringings but had moved on to the vaguest beliefs in the importance of religion for Western values or a rational cosmos.4 This was held to be parallel to religion, since it was not outright atheism, and thus to fall under the terms of the Selective Service Act, which only demanded belief in a Supreme Being. In response to this Congress amended the act explicitly to exclude mere philosophical or social beliefs, but this was of no avail: several district courts ruled it unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, and the government let it go at that. This was to be expected because it is in fact doubtful that the government can decide what is to count as religion. And so by the time the case of Welsh got to the Court, religion was no longer required; anyone who claimed that his conscience would torment him if he had to serve in the military was a conscientious objector.5 In the cases of Negre and Gillette the torment was not deep enough, however, because neither claimed to object to all wars, only to the Vietnam War, which they regarded as unjust.6 Both were denied conscientious objector status, and Negre was, in fact, sent to Vietnam. Since the end of that war only a few cases of explicit refusal to register under the order to do so were prosecuted by the government, and these convictions were upheld, even though the prosecutions were limited to open cases of defiance of the law, not mere failure to go to the post office. From a philosophical point of view one thing does seem clear. From the 4. In United States v. Seeger, 380 US 163 (1965), the Court ruled that a person could be exempted from military service based on belief in a Supreme Being; the decision resolved the three separate cases of Daniel Andrew Seeger, Arno Sascha Jakobson, and Forest Britt Peter. 5. Welsh v. United States, 398 US 333 (1970), held that a person could be exempted from military service based on ethical or moral objections to war. 6. Negre v. Larsen, 39 US 968 (1969) was consolidated in the Supreme Court ruling in Gillette v. United States, 401 US 437 (1971) with the results Shklar mentions.



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draft board up to the Supreme Court there is no principled way to settle the question of who is entitled to conscientious objector status. You might argue that it is a principle of the liberal state to protect the sanctity of the individual conscience and to prefer to err on its side rather than on that of the duty to defend a free and legitimate political order. That is, in fact, what the First Amendment and the religious history of this country do claim. That does not, however, solve the issue of who is to identify the voice of conscience. Who is to say this is and that is not conscience? This is sincere and that is not? If one accepts the principle of the absolute separation of church and state, there is no way that the state can decide what is a real religion unless it is clearly a criminal enterprise calling itself a religion to evade taxes or engage in the drug trade. And if the state cannot decide what a religion is, how can it decide what is and what is not a genuine secular belief in an age of multiple secular and quasi-religious belief systems? Is the government to appoint a sort of board of wise men to decide? Who would accept their authority? The difficulty would not disappear if there were a constitutional amendment making conscientious objector status a right, because the difficulty of defining those to whom the right applied would remain. So why not just look the other way when the claim to conscientious objection is made and say an army of reluctant pacifists is useless and forget about these people? Or put them all in jail as draft evaders and felons without qualification, abolishing the very idea of conscientious objector status? Or never have a draft at all, and least of all a selective service system, which exempts the rich and forces the poor to fight and which is, more or less, what we have had in all but the two world wars?

Lecture 22: Consent and Obligation

for this lecture no full text could be found in the Shklar Papers at the Harvard Archives or among the teaching materials elsewhere. The only available material consisted of keywords, which the teaching assistants were asked to use as board material. They are reproduced here to give the reader a sense of the course of the overall argument.

Lecture 22: Board Notes Democracy and tacit consent:1 1. Right to emigrate 2. Participation and procedures for fair compromises 3. Voting, litigating signals of consent Nonvoters consent to: 1. Elite chooses leaders, rest consent passively 2. Consent is to government that protects natural rights 1. Texts that Shklar recommended for this lecture included Peter Singer, Democracy and Disobedience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 13–61; M. B. E. Smith, “Is There a Prima Facie Obligation to Obey the Law?” Yale Law Journal 82 (1973): 950–975; and A. D. M. Walker, “Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (Summer 1988): 191–211.

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Do minorities consent and to what? Against consent: 1. Applies only in face-to-face societies 2. Elections express preferences, not consent 3. Coercion is not consent Fair play: benefits of cooperation Gratitude: for benefits of political order Graded by amount of benefit? Are we obliged by individual laws as laws? No: only moral content obliges Yes: 1. Law sets political norms among strangers 2. Sets public penalties because it is a social in addition to moral norm 3. Part of legal system Obligation to imperfectly just democratic system: 1. Procedures for politics of bargaining among strangers 2. Justice and liberty as recognized public ends. Shared standards of judging public conduct.

Lecture 23: The Bonds of Exile

as you may remember from the beginning of the course, exile was an option that Socrates rejected, but it might well have been his sentence because it was a very common one in Athens, especially in the city’s democratic periods.1 The form that exile often took was “ostracism,” and it was not a form of punishment for a political crime but a simple vote by the assembly to get a too powerful or too popular citizen out of the city before he could cause trouble. (I shall be saying “he” throughout this lecture since women were totally excluded from political consideration.) Plutarch says of ostracism that democrats dedicated to equality “did not regard ostracism as a punishment, but rather as a means of appeasing and blunting that spirit of envy, which delights in bringing down the mighty and finds an outlet for its own rancor in this penalty of disfranchisement.”2 When such a citizen went into exile he usually left some friends behind, and not only might they continue to protect and advance his interests as best they could at home; he too might in his turn behave in a way that would at least not cause them any harm, even though he might feel that his obligations to the city had come to 1. Two published variations of this text appear in Political Thought and Political Thinkers. The lecture we present here was clearly part of Shklar’s political obligation course, and it contains some noticeable differences when compared with the two previously published texts. 2. Plutarch, “Themistocles,” in The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Penguin, 1960), 99.

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an end. In some cases ostracized citizens were invited to return, and many did so. So there is a real question about the obligations and loyalties of such exiles. The second question is, If you were forced into exile by an unjust decision of a legitimate government, would you still feel bound to behave in such a way as to do the best for those of your countrymen who had been your friendly fellow citizens, or would you just work for a foreign power no matter what that meant for your former fellow citizens? In both cases you would be testing personal loyalty against obligation, active and lapsed. Who is, in fact, an exile? All kinds of people leave their country of birth and citizenship, but not all are exiles. Immigrants may be voluntary re-­ settlers who think they can have a better life in a new country. Many people who came to America did so for the sake of its economic opportunities. They had no intention of returning to the places from which they had come. Expatriates as a rule do contemplate return, as a possibility at least. Many American artists prefer to live in Europe, but they often return home for visits and eventually to die. Then there are refugees. These may be populations on the run from the ravages of war and famine. Others flee persecution. Their chances of returning are slim, whatever their wishes might be. Then there are political exiles, a special group of refugees, people expelled against their will by the governments of their countries for political reasons, their opinions, their party affiliation, or their race, class, or nationality. They are émigrés, like the American Loyalists who fled to Canada, the French royalists who fled the Revolution of 1789, the Russians who fled communism after 1917, and the German Jews who escaped from Nazism. All the many dictatorships of the twentieth century have exiled people. There are also exiles within the borders of a country, like populations put in detention and concentration camps—for example, Japanese citizens who were put in camps in the United States during World War II and slaves, whose physical movements were severely restricted and who had no rights at all. A wrongfully imprisoned person can be called an exile: for instance, Captain Dreyfus, who was sent to the penal colony on Devil’s Island, whereas jail in France would have cut him off from society just as effectively. People kept in “preventive detention” are exiles, and so were millions who were sent to the Gulag in the Soviet Union. The people I want to concentrate on, because they put the problem of

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obligation into relief, are political exiles, people involuntarily removed from their country, either by being forced to leave on pain of death or shut up in a camp or prison that is to all intents a foreign space within the geographic limits of their country. This is the concentration or detention camp. At the moment Nelson Mandela is the most famous ex-political exile; another was Andrei Sakharov, who was sent under close supervision to a provincial town.3 Most do not get to be ex-exiles: most political prisoners die. The classic exile is someone who has been turned out of the country and is living unwillingly abroad. Do such people retain obligations to the governments that have exiled them? Many do, such as the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, but most of them had to stay in the United States. In fact, many political exiles who have been forced to go abroad do not want to seen to be betraying their country. That means that they cannot settle down as citizens of their host country, and should the latter go to war with their country they face serious problems because they can be treated as traitors. A lot of the Russian exiles sprung to the defense of the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded it because their loyalty to their country was greater than their hatred of Stalin. The fact is, if exiles wish to bring about political change in their country they must somehow manage to demonstrate loyalty to it, which becomes increasingly difficult with the passage of time. They may plot and pray to overturn the government that exiled them, but with time this possibility becomes unlikely, and they tend to become irrelevant and just bicker among themselves. The more pressing question is to what exactly exiles owe loyalty. Today it is primarily to the nation, to an image of a better people and country than the actual one. But clearly exiles have no obligations to the actual government. They may have a sense of obligation to the state or its constitution, and so to a form of government, but certainly not to the rulers who have exiled them. Even with this distinction in mind the émigré’s situation is a delicate 3. Before becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years incarcerated as a leader of the African National Congress. He was released in 1990. The physicist, human rights campaigner, and Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov was condemned to live in internal exile, 1980–1986.



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one. If you are dealing with a despotic regime it will have exiled as well as domestic opponents. Who is to be the primary agent against the regime? It is often argued that only a domestic overthrow is legitimate and appropriate because it draws on the population that is suffering the brunt of the oppression. Outside attack is always perceived as at least potentially foreign and alien. On one hand, if there are large populations of refugees, then the exile has far greater access to them than do domestic opponents of a regime and can create a genuine government in exile. On the other hand, a certain pall of defeat hangs over exiles, as does their indebtedness to their host countries. The indigenous opposition may also resent the exiles’ relative safety. Some political leaders can achieve wonders from a jail cell at home, which exiles cannot emulate. Modern exiles typically lose their citizenship, which puts them into a terrible situation; without a passport you live in a perpetual limbo. For the regime that exiles them this has a great advantage because it has created de-nationalized enemies and subversives who can be pictured as posing a danger to the entire country, not only to the regime. The exiles must side with the enemy. At the very least they will sooner or later become citizens of their host countries. Thus Willy Brandt, a leader of the German Social Democrats, had to become a Norwegian citizen, but after the war he resumed German citizenship because he said he had not cut himself off from the true Germany.4 By that he meant that for the political exile there remains a potential country to which he continues to give his allegiance. That allegiance may be an obligation to restore the constitution that was overthrown by the exiling regime, or it may be to something less specific, like the “true country.” Brandt eventually became chancellor of West Germany, but the defeat of Nazi Germany was entirely the work of foreign armies. What little internal opposition there was had been wiped out, and exiles played no particular role in the war. In contrast, countries occupied by Germany like Poland or the Netherlands had governments in exile, and those who had gone into exile with 4. Willy Brandt was a German socialist activist who during the Nazi years escaped into exile to Norway and Sweden, where he took part in resistance activities. He later became one of the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

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them naturally retained their allegiance. For those who remained in occupied territory the exigencies of daily life made such allegiance simply impossible. The great advantage of governments in exile is that they can keep loyalty alive in the refugee population at large; however, their effect upon domestic politics remains slight. To illustrate these matters let me tell you the stories of two exiles—Themistocles and Aristides, —and some of the opinions that were held about them by the historians who tell their stories. According to Thucydides and Plutarch, Themistocles was not a character we would consider admirable.5 He was ambitious and liked money too much, but he was undeniably brilliant, and it was thanks to both his foresight and guile that the Athenians beat the Persians at sea and then built a wall to protect them eventually against Sparta. However, he was not trusted, and so the democratic assembly of Athens ostracized him. He maintained his friendships and bore the city no resentment, but he never returned. He went over to the Persians, became an adviser to their king, dressed in Persian style, and never seems to have given Athens a second thought. He died much honored in Persia. He was in some sense a traitor, but Thucydides, who tells us of his career, has nothing but admiration for the man. He describes him as intelligent, prudent, and adaptable, a perfect survivor who never threatened the internal peace of either Athens or Persia. When he defected to Persia he simply ceased to take any part in Athenian affairs. He served each state well, and did well for himself. He certainly was the supreme survivor. If you think, as Thucydides did, that civil war is the most horrible thing that can happen, and that civilization is very thin ice, with savagery and murderous rage just below the surface, then loyalty and obligation are not to be regarded as virtues nearly as important as adaptability, moderation, and prudence. And so Thucydides tells us that Themistocles was the most admirable politician he had known. The background to this judgment is that every Greek city was torn by conflict between oligarchs and democrats, or between a party of hereditary 5. The Athenian general and statesman Themistocles lived ca. 525 to 460 B.C. He was a leader in Athens’s successful defense against the invasion of a vastly superior Persian force. His deeds are described in The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, who was born the year he died, and his biography appears in Plutarch’s Lives, composed in the first century A.D.



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aristocrats and the general city population consisting of artisans and rural yeomen farmers. Each party conspired against the other with their opposite numbers in other cities, so that all wars soon became or were on the verge of becoming civil wars as well. Loyalty to the city was intense among the people, but not among the aristocrats, who were often at odds with each other and prone to treason as a personal act. The practice of ostracism did nothing to make them more obedient. Some, however, behaved quite differently from Themistocles—for example, Aristides. Aristides was Themistocles’ contemporary and constant rival.6 Themistocles supported the democrats, Aristides the aristocratic party. Just, honest, and steadfast, he never did anything to promote the advantage of his friends, refusing to do for them what he would not do for a stranger. He had no attachments, and no interest in money either, again unlike Themistocles, who stole the treasury blind. His eminence was such that he too aroused jealousy and was ostracized. But as he left Athens he prayed that the city would need him again and would recall him. At no time did he contemplate going over to the enemy, and in due course he was invited to come back. When he did, he did nothing to revenge himself on his enemies. He was in due course universally known as “the just.” Notice that in order to meet his obligations he had no political friends; in fact, he sided with his enemy Themistocles when he thought him right. Moreover, he did not conspire to prevent the establishment of a democratic government in Athens when he saw that this was what the people really wanted. In short, he showed no loyalty to class, party, or friends, just to Athens. Here loyalty and obligation seem to be as one, and neither is enfeebled even by exile. That is what was meant by being just. Ignoring praise at every stage he avoided all those actions and preferences that could disturb the frail civil peace of Athens. Thucydides never mentions this paragon; perhaps he thought him a fool—there is no way of knowing. Plutarch seems to have admired him. It is perhaps too easy to think well of Aristides because Athens was after all a wonderful place. Socrates mentions that as one of the reasons for not wanting to leave it. The affection for countries that treat exiles unjustly is 6. Aristides lived from ca. 520 to ca. 468 B.C. His biography appears in Plutarch’s Lives.

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not uncommon. Take the case of Captain Dreyfus.7 He was accused and found guilty in 1894 of having passed secret French army documents to the Germans. He was palpably innocent, but he was a perfect suspect because he was a Jew. Even though he was obviously innocent no court would clear him. The army argued that the innocence of an individual was less important than the honor of the corps, which could never admit that many of its officers had perjured themselves. The French officers felt that their primary obligation was to the army and to France, not to the Republic—that is, the political order that they were supposed to serve. Moreover, they managed successfully to persecute anyone who published evidence proving the innocence of Dreyfus, now on Devil’s Island. Finally, the government was forced to pardon him, and in 1906 an appeals court finally quashed his sentence. When war broke out in 1914, Dreyfus immediately rejoined the army and served with distinction. At no time did he ever cease to be anything but a super-patriotic, loyal French citizen. He merely wanted his honor as a loyal officer reestablished. It never seems to have occurred to him that he was living in a corrupt society and serving in a criminal officer corps. His sense of obligation was theirs, in fact. Here is an example of obligation that is clearly placed above justice. It is an interesting case because it is claimed by a victim, not by a beneficiary, of a system of injustice. The point is that he was not an exile from a systematically oppressive regime or an imposed one, like those of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Nor was his position that of Willy Brandt. Nevertheless, he might have led a political campaign against the way the French army conducted itself. Alternatively he could have emigrated. In some ways the problems of exiles are like those of everyone else faced with having to decide whether or not to obey. It is hard to set up exact rules, because the degree of evil in the government, as well as pragmatic 7. Alfred Dreyfus was a French army officer of Jewish-Alsatian extraction who was falsely accused of espionage for the Germans, condemned for treason in 1894, and sent into exile in French Guyana. One of the reasons for his conviction was the antiSemitism of the French Republic’s military and legal professions. Dreyfus’s conviction sparked protest and a public petition by the Dreyfusards, a group of intellectuals led by the writer Émile Zola. Not least due to the protest and public outcry, Dreyfus was pardoned by the French president in 1899 after a rather undignified retrial had confirmed the original verdict of treason.



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questions of consequences, enter into the matter. German Jews certainly were under no conceivable obligation to Germany, even after the destruction of the Nazi state, but Dreyfus’s case was different because France was not a criminal regime, though no one could argue that it had not betrayed Dreyfus for twelve years. He, at any rate, felt that his obligations remained binding upon him. So, oddly enough, did many Japanese Americans. One question to ask is what happens to one’s personal loyalties when one’s obligations to a state end. This can happen, for instance, when a state exiles a citizen. What happens to remaining loyalties that one may have to one’s friends in one’s city? Do one’s loyalties have to end with one’s obligations? And in what ways do the two interfere with one another? Another question is, If you were forced into exile by an unjust decision of a legitimate government, would you still feel bound to behave in such a way as to do the best for those of your countrymen who had been your friendly fellow citizens, or would you just work for a foreign power no matter what that meant for your former fellow citizens? In both cases you would be testing personal loyalty against obligation, active and lapsed. I should also say something about the view that both obligation and loyalty are politically unimportant. This latter position would suggest that the only thing to watch out for is the avoidance of civil war at any cost. Peace comes before anything, and loyalty, especially since it implies passion, may interfere with that. Even the question of obligation is not all that significant because that whole way of thinking is politically dangerous. Once the conversations between Socrates and Crito are understood, it becomes clear that the idea of obligation creates trains of thought that take your mind off the main issues of politics. Factions, parties, class war, coups, juntas, conspiracies to seize power, and, of course foreign war are the real political issues. Obligation interferes with clear thinking about them. Loyalty, with its emotional component, may be even worse, and friendship especially is a danger.

appendix i: why teach political theory?

this essay is not about teaching any specific subject. It is about teaching itself. If some imaginary dean were to ask me why I should be paid to teach political theory, I would naturally offer him only the most conventional reasons for pursuing my vocation. First of all I would remind him that one of the main purposes of a liberal education is to integrate the young into the literary culture of our society. And no one would argue that the history of political theory is marginal to our intellectual heritage, to our collective self-understanding, or to a sense of the continuing presence of the past. Just about every university course that contributes to the general education of our students, whether it deals with literature, the fine arts or the human sciences, invariably has a political theory component—often, it must be said, rather crudely handled. The subject simply insinuates itself into every intellectual corner. Clearly there is a real need to have it taught properly, since it must be a part of an educated person’s repertory. Among the ways of learning how to think coherently and critically about politics, none is better than the study of the great authors from Thucydides to the present. Self-education will, in this case, fail. The autodidact always misses the obvious and the insulated analyst of concepts is always in danger of re-inventing a

This text was first published as pages 151–160 in Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now, edited by James Engell and David Perkins, Harvard English Studies 18, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The text did not form part of the lectures published in this volume but appeared a few years earlier; it nevertheless gives us an insight into how Shklar conceived of scholarly activities such as teaching and writing and how they relate to each other. For an evaluation of her argument in the context of the lectures published here see the Editors’ Introduction.

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primitive version of the wheel. He may also become the prisoner of a single vocabulary, which would be a disaster, given that our accumulated political notions constitute a veritable Tower of Babel. The only way to avoid banality is to encounter, in an intense way, the intellectually wholly other, and to discover how superior to the present and the familiar the utterly remote can be. What could be more challenging than Plato? On the practical side, I would then point out to the now subdued dean that reading books is not enough, and that there must be a personal exchange for deep learning to actually take place. A teacher must be visibly there to move the students in the first place and then prove to them that a sane and intelligent adult can really care deeply about such things as the history of political thought. It is an Emersonian act of representation, in which the teacher gets the young to recognize and become part of a wide intellectual world, but also accepts that the questions and demands of individual students require respectful answers, and even occasionally a rethinking of received wisdom, especially one’s own. Such, then, would be the perfectly sound and not unconvincing talk I would give in my official capacity. I would walk away perhaps richer, but also quite ashamed of myself. For while I would not have lied I would not have been entirely truthful either. I would not have told the dean what it may not be his business to know, why I really teach political theory, or, indeed, why anyone teaches any canon of great literature. The only reason for teaching political theory is that one is utterly, and possibly irrationally convinced that it is enormously important—and one loves it. It is not for the sake of the students and not even for one’s own, apart from one’s intellectual obsession, that one can, year after year, think and think about, and explain and explain the contents of books written unimaginably long ago. It is a complex response to a primary passion. Something has set it off, possibly an ideology to which one is committed or its collapse, or historical experience, such as the Second World War lived in Europe or the Depression in America, or the felt need to find new political expressions for an altered and only half understood political world. In any case there must be some personally experienced public events to create an enduring interest in asking the vital question, “how can one think about this at all?” If that becomes an unshakable preoccupation and a passionate quest, then one will teach political theory. In different, but related ways I believe this to be true of all literary studies. There are easier and betters ways of making a living than teaching, and prestige and fame are not among its rewards. It does not recommend itself as a way of getting on in the world. One may enjoy the company of young people, and good teachers usually do, but the relations between students and teachers are highly stylized and brief. To enter upon an academic career because one thinks that it offers an attractive, genteel, and untroubled “life style” is to head for Waterloo. Unless one is emotionally absorbed in one’s subject, teaching is dull, and the normal irritations of academic life may become intolerable. To look forward to a career of being a general all-purpose mentor to the young, or worse, an eternal undergraduate, is to court self-contempt, intellectual decay, and the condescending pity of one’s younger colleagues. Even the young become tiresome as the difference in age grows greater. One loses the sense of their individuality and begins to treat them as instances of the same category of



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being. Such impersonality may bother the student, but it may be less damaging than the too personal manner of teaching in which the bull-session and manipulation replace teaching. In short, unless the impulse to teach is generated by the love of the subject, political theory in this case, it must fail for both the teacher and the student. Nothing else can make the flow of students through the classroom, the seminar, and one’s study worthwhile. For the teacher there has to be an enduring intellectual incentive, for the student, something more genuine than mild entertainment. To teach this literature as if it were a precious gift that one gives to every new generation of students, one must really want to read it over and over oneself, because each reading reveals new possibilities, new perceptions, and new ideas. If there is nothing exciting in those books for the teacher, there won’t be anything interesting in them for the students either. And if the teacher creates unresponsive students, she cannot expect to get the one thing they can contribute to our mutual encounters: questions and challenges. Nor will the teacher have the occasional pleasure of seeing an immature mind become absolutely accomplished. The only reason to teach political theory is the conviction that a complete person must be able to think intelligently about government, and that the only way to rise above banality is to learn to think one’s way through the works of the great writers on the subject and to learn to argue with them. To see how political ideas fit into the republic of letters generally, into the political systems within which they took place, and finally to see what is dead and alive within this accumulated wealth of psychological and social speculation is to be intellectually transformed, and to have something completely and immediately relevant to think about at any time of the day. If I did not believe that, I would quit teaching at once and go into business. Someone might suggest that writing offers a better way to tell the world about political theory and especially to contribute something directly to it. This is not the trivial and commonplace notion that, given the limits of time, one should do one’s “own work,” or “research,” rather than teach. Teaching students is as much one’s own work as anything can be, and research is something that natural scientists do. Very little if anything that a political theorist does can be described as an addition to factual knowledge about the world, as experimentation or as discovery. It is therefore pretentious and silly for us to talk about a conflict between the demands of research and teaching. If there is a choice to be made at all, it is between two modes of teaching. And while it is true that life is short, I do not see why there should be a particularly great difficulty in dividing one’s time between two kinds of teaching and any of the other things one might want to do. Time is not, I suspect, the real issue at all. It is merely a way of talking about the fact that some teachers cannot and do not write anything at all, or nothing worth reading. In fact, there are two ways of teaching, directly and indirectly, and both are psychologically necessary for a full scholarly life because they make different demands upon the teacher. To address an indeterminate and anonymous audience of readers is very different from talking to visible students. It is not a conversation. One cannot take back in two minutes what one has already said, so the level of clarity has to be higher and there is no room for spontaneity. One means to say something that has not been said before and present it in a way suited

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to one’s peers. Still one is teaching political theory, because in one way or another, one writes to instruct one’s readers. The greatest difference in writing rather than talking is that one can concentrate entirely on getting it right. In that respect it is more like teaching graduate students, who, one hopes, will be the political theorists of the future. Because they are colleagues-in-the-making, they force the teacher to acts of self-clarification and self-education at the highest level. That is what happens when one writes about any aspect of political theory as well, whether it be placing texts in historical context, a conceptual analysis, an explication of a text, or an argument about a set of ancient issues in the light of current experience. Not to do this at all is to doom oneself to intellectual stagnation and a sort of aged infancy, which cannot but damage one’s performance as a direct teacher. And staleness, of course, sets an awful example to graduate students. The issue thus cannot be whether to teach or to write, but how to engage in two ways of teaching simultaneously or alternatively. Some teachers can successfully write up and publish their lectures. Some of my most distinguished colleagues have written some of the best books this way. They think them through on their feet and then transform them into readable prose. For them the distinction between direct and indirect teaching hardly exists, and they often are the most accomplished and interesting lecturers. If they do anything indifferently it is the seminar and tutorial, simply because their strength is public pre­ sentation, in speech as well as in print. I, however, like many other scholars, must keep the two kinds of teaching completely apart. If I do not, my lectures become well-turned little essays and are hard to follow. Moreover, my better lectures, which do serve the needs of undergraduates, no longer seem to me fit for publication after I have given them. Writing up my lectures would strike me as simply warming up an uninteresting soup. What I like doing most, and probably do best, is small-group instruction. I enjoy teaching seminars for both undergraduate and graduate students. Ten to twenty people around a table, week after week, soon work together in an easy way, and though there should be a tense and even competitive spirit afoot, a lot can be achieved in discussing a single text in a group. Political theory lends itself particularly well to such teaching because it is naturally and inherently controversial. The best texts, however, do provide a core of inner unity, so the discussions do not fly all over the place. I find such instruction difficult but very rewarding when it goes well, though painful when it does not work out. In some mysterious way I also get ideas for articles and books out of these sessions. Even devoted teachers have long periods of doldrums. What to do? Because political theory as a subject is always in motion, given its responsiveness to events, one cannot remain idle. Getting on with something new is important even before routine has made teaching a chore. Even going to a good conference a couple of times a year should be seen as a way of recharging the batteries. Is book reviewing a total waste of time? Not if one picks the books carefully. It is as good a way as any to keep up with the field. To escape from tedium one might avoid teaching the same courses too often or repeat them only every second year. Students can always be told in advance and can plan accordingly. They will be the beneficiaries of revised notes, rethinking, and an altogether livelier teacher. Teaching in a university quite unlike one’s own can also



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be very invigorating. Absence notoriously inspires fondness. In any case something must be done. The worst thing that can happen to a teacher is just to rot away. The importance of remaining actively engaged with political theory, by writing about it oneself and reading what others write, is particularly great when teaching graduate students. Talking to them about one’s own writing is the best way of showing them how an article or a book is actually put together. Moreover, they help with their aggressive critical attitudes and with the generational differences they bring to bear on any discussion. Nothing is better for teaching the really good graduate students than making them realize that their ideas matter and that soon they will be ready to teach and write independently. What neither they nor the undergraduates need is to consume information served to them by a passive teacher who is neither actively contributing to the literature of political theory nor interested in new work of any kind. Whatever teaching political theory may be, it cannot merely amount to the relaying of some body of accepted wisdom which requires nothing but transmission from teacher to student. An element of inconclusive struggling between young and old is a very necessary part of the process of graduate education especially, and it cannot occur unless the teacher is also creative as an author, with all that implies psychologically and intellectually. The awful alternative to teaching as enjoyment with others is the repetition of the same wretched anecdotes and the same stale doctrines year after year by a teacher who cannot offer a graduate student a genuine picture of what real thinking is like. That is the certain fate of the political theorist who never writes at all or even fails to write about a fair variety of topics. Teaching political theory, like any profession, has its built-in hazards, and there is no point in pretending that they do not exist. Tedium, indifference, and stagnation are the typical afflictions of older teachers. They will not be fatal if the instructor r­ eally feels an unabated passion for political thinking, for she can easily protect herself against the onset of a passing ill humor. If, however, she has really ceased to care about the subject, then there is no chance of recovery. Indifference is not the only way to fail to teach honestly. The other extreme is also tempting and fatal in its own way. There is always a big demand for the guru-teacher at any university. Many young people seek leaders, superior parents, inspiration, and above all the feelings of whole-hearted discipleship. Most of us, either for lack of talent or by following plain good sense, find it easy to resist this call to serve as a prophet, but not all do. Political theory, being so close to ideology, particularly attracts students looking for a guru-teacher, and teachers who have both strong personal convictions and better than average rhetorical powers may find the prospect of a devoted following irresistible. The “masters” are not doing those students a favor because they end up retarding their maturation and closing their minds to the rich variety of alternative views. That they are betraying the scholarly vocation might also be a consideration, but most of all the gurus have ceased to care for political theory; they are basically interested in themselves, in their message, in their followers, and in their renown. If there are many ways of being a bad teacher and also of losing interest in teaching, there are also many gratifications. Every student is a new challenge and it is a de-

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light to see the young catch on to the difficult texts and ideas, especially if they began as virtual tabulae rasae. And while a bad seminar session is pure hell a good one is surely a treat. Among the pleasures of teaching graduate students is that one does not lose touch with the best ones. They soon become one’s colleagues and friends, the ups and downs of apprenticeship and late adolescence long since mercifully forgotten. It is the experience of renewal, of keeping political theory alive, and changing. The same thing does not occur in one’s relations with undergraduates, and that is undeniably one of the more unfortunate facts about teaching. One never can really know what impact, if any, one has had on the young people who take notes in one’s lectures, come to tutorials regularly and talk to one during office hours. They are usually very bright. That does not alter the likelihood that in a few years they will neither remember nor care about what I or anyone else taught them. Our effect upon their development may be profound, because we see them during a very intense and significant period in their lives, but it is an unknowable and forgotten little piece of their life’s experiences even while at college, not to mention in “the real world.” Our specific contribution is fleeting and forgettable. Two years out of college your students will remember you, but not what you said or got them to read, even if you impressed them in some enduring way. The negligible and indirect bearing one’s work has on students cannot but give one a sense of futility at times. The best way to cope with such feelings is to concentrate on the learning that does go on visibly, even if its future functions must remain obscure. I place my bet on the students’ being altered for the better, though in unknowable ways, by my teaching. And who would not say that knowledge, however digested, is not better than ignorance? And ignorant is what the young would be and remain if we did not teach them. Basically it depends upon us whether the entire college career of a young woman or man is significant and improving or not. Do we actually have a right to act on any other assumptions? Some of the afflictions that threaten teachers are not entirely within our control, but there is one that is wholly self-inflicted and also contemptible. That is what I call the new snobbery. The old snobbery was bad enough. It tended to be the special preserve of humanists, political theorists among them. Its chief components were racism, antisemitism, and a fawning preference for the sons of the rich and famous. Deeply unintellectual, it was sometimes perfectly compatible with the more traditional forms of scholarship and fine teaching for the happy few. It did little to prepare anyone for the actual world and it was morally repulsive, with implications that eventually became quite clear. There is little left of that, because in time it became strangling and threatened the intellectual prospects of any university and the advance of the human as well as physical sciences. It has now been replaced by a different virus. It tells the world that clever young women and men should not become unglamorous schoolteachers, but should use the university as a platform from which to impress the world of affairs, to affect the public at large, and to find wealth and fame through the certificates of expertise that a university appointment yields. They will, so to speak, be instructing the entire nation by their advice. Write for conspicuous publications, meet, consult, attend, make money, and get your name into the newspapers, they tell us. The young will certainly yearn to be seen with them, will



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complain of their all too frequent absences, and if they ever do get to hear a lecture by the celebrity-professor they will get nothing, and not even realize that they have been cheated. Teaching is openly looked down upon and despised in a manner not unlike the disdain that the hereditary nobility of Europe used to feel for manual labor and trade. Except, of course, that the new snob is supposed to be a teacher and has simply sold himself, very successfully, it must be said, as something else and better to a gullible public. The consequences of the new snobbery for the life of the university are fairly serious. It embitters the relations between the old and the young, the tenured and the untenured, in a wholly destructive way. In an institution where there are many justifiable and functional differences of prestige and rank, according to distinction, accomplishment, and age, it is particularly unnecessary and damaging to add useless and destructive ones. The untenured faculty is forced not only to do all the teaching, but they must hear their seniors openly refuse to teach and make derisory remarks about the poor mediocrities and the junior faculty who do it all. And with the association of ideas being what it is, teaching, when it is identified entirely with the young and untenured, is regarded with a diffuse contempt. Its source is surely the uneasy hostility that many an aging male feels and displays for the young, whom at another level he may well fear as successors. That is in itself a recipe for ill feeling. To add to it, when promotion time comes around, teaching is suddenly taken into account, but because the university authorities still require some proof of teaching skill, not because it is universally valued. Adding to the demoralization of the young teacher is the pathetic effort of his seniors to look like natural scientists without actually doing analogous or similar work, and a general attitude of looking down at the merely local scene. This is the self-hating fantasy of many humanists and social scientists, and it does no one any good at all. There is no proof, moreover, that in spite of much pompous talk about research projects, grants, and the like these people actually produce better work or even publish more than those who quietly teach in classes and in writing. Like the old snobbery, the new variety expresses a very deep loss of self-esteem. And that brings us back to the beginning: to teach without loving one’s subject at all, or caring for it a lot less than for other gratifications, whether material or intangible, is neither easy nor satisfying. Moreover, those who are neither scholars nor teachers now present a real menace to any university and to education generally. That is why the response of those who really understand what teaching is all about must simply be real self-­ respect grounded in the knowledge that they alone constitute the real world of learning now.

appendix ii: a note on sources

the harvard archives contain the Papers of Judith N. Shklar (3.5 cubic feet in ten containers). They contain also her lecture notes and teaching material, speeches, drafts of published and unpublished papers, and other important material. They contain in HUGFP 118.8 Correspondence and other records, 1971–1983 (2 boxes); in HUGFP 118.40 Speeches and other papers (1 box); and in HUGFP 118.62 Lecture notes and course materials (7 boxes). The names of the files are reproduced exactly as they appear in the finding aids.

Conscience and Liberty (Berkeley Lecture) Conscience and Liberty (HUGFP 118 Box 21).

Lecture 1: Weizsäcker and Bonhoeffer MRIntroduction: Weitzsaecker and Bonhoeffer (full text, HUGFPP Box 7); additional copy supplied by Joseph Reisert (JR).

Lecture 2: Antigone “Antigone” (full text supplied by JR), additional notes (in HUGFP118, Box 11).

Lecture 3: Crito Socrates (full text, HUGFP Box 21); additional copy supplied by JR.

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Lecture 4: Friendship MR.Friends (full text; HUGFP Box 7); additional copy supplied by JR; additional notes: Friendship (HUGFP118 Box 10).

Lecture 5: The New Testament and Martin Luther MRSword (full text; HUGFP, Box 7); additional copy supplied by JR; additional notes: Suffering the Secular Sword (HUGFP118 Box 21).

Lecture 6: Divided Loyalties MRBecket and dual loyalties (full text HUGFP Box 7); additional notes: MRBeck2; Divided Loyalties: Becket and ML King (HUGF118 Box 7).

Lecture 7: Honor and Richard II MRShakespeare Richard ii (full text, HUGFP Box 7); additional copy supplied by JR; additional notes: MR2 Shakespeare’s Richard ii (HUGFP118 Box 7).

Lecture 8: Tyranny MRtyrant (full text, HUGPF Box 7); additional copy supplied by JR; additional notes: MRTyr2 (HUGFP118 Box 7).

Lecture 9: Thomas Hobbes Hobbes (short text, supplied by JR); additional notes: Hobbes (HUGFP118 Box 10).

Lecture 10: John Locke MRLocke2 (lecture fragments/notes, HUGPF118 Box 7).

Lecture 11: David Hume MRHume2 (lecture fragments/notes, HUGFP118 Box 7).

Lecture 12: Jean-Jacques Rousseau MRJJR2 (lecture fragments/notes, HUGPF Box 7).

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Lecture 13: Kant and Regicide Board notes, supplied by JR.

Lecture 14: Hegel and Ideology Ideology and Obligation (full text, supplied by JR).

Lecture 15: The Positive State MRideal The Positive State (full text, HUGFP Box 7); additional copy supplied by JR; additional notes: MRIDEAL2 (HUGPF Box 7) and Mrideal2 (HUGPF118 Box 7).

Lecture 16: Obedience Obedience (full text, HUGFP118 Box 11); additional copy supplied by JR.

Lecture 17: Military Obedience MRMILIT (full text, HUGFP 118 Box 7); additional copy supplied by JR; additional notes: MRMILIT2 (HUGFP Box 7)

Lecture 18: Loyalty and Betrayal mrloyal (short text, HUGFP 118 Box 7); two additional text variations supplied by JR which differ considerably from Harvard Archives material; additional notes: MR: Loyal3 (HUGFP118 Box 7).

Lecture 19: Civil Disobedience in the Nineteenth Century MRThoreau, text supplied by JR; additional notes: MRThor2 (HUGFP118 Box7).

Lecture 20: Civil Disobedience in the Twentieth Century MrCivil Disobedience; text supplied by JR; additional notes: Mrcd2 (HUGFP118 Box 7).

Lecture 21: Conscientious Objection Conscientious Objection; text supplied by JR; additional notes: Mrcon2 (HUGFP118, Box 7)



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Lecture 22: Consent and Obligation Board material supplied by JR; additional notes: MrCon2 (HUGFP18, Box 7)

Lecture 23: The Bonds of Exile (not given to students) Mr.Exiles/The Bonds of Exile (full text HUPFP118, Box 10); additional copy supplied by JR.

index

abolition, abolitionism, xviii, 2, 7, 8, 11, 13, 129, 137, 166–70, 173–174, 181, 183 Afghanistan, 193 Agamemnon, 140 Alfieri, Vittorio, 35–37 America Alien and Sedition Acts, 159 Anti-Slavery Society, 166, 167, 168 Bill of Rights, 184, 193 blacks, 183, 188 citizenship, 12 Civil War, xviii, 2, 11, 13, 14, 129, 151, 158, 159, 160, 168, 173, 174, 189, 193 Confederacy, 130, 159 Congress, 129, 143, 163, 165, 193, 194, 197, 200 constitution, constitutional, unconstitutional, 2, 7, 17, 56, 157, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172, 178, 179, 180, 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 195, 197, 200, 201 Declaration of Independence, xxiii, 169, 175, 188, 196 dilemma, 181, 193 Executive, 18, 163, 165, 184, 189, 194 federal government, 18, 193

founding ethos, 157 Fugitive Slave Law (1850), 129, 172 immigrants to, 156, 160, 161, 205 Immigration Act (1926), 160 individualism, 157, 174, 175, 184 Japanese Americans, 163, 165, 205, 206, 211 Know-Nothings, 160 liberty, xiii, xviii, 110, 136, 166, 169 loyalty to, 156–157, 160, 164–165 Native Americans, 168, 185, 192 political culture, 175, 185 politics, 7, 175, 167, 181 Protestantism, Protestant sects, 130, 166 public opinion, 159 pursuit of happiness, 110, 196 Reconstruction, 13, 160, 181 Selective Service Act and Law, 194, 198, 200, 201 Supreme Court, 12, 152, 187, 188, 189, 196, 200, 201 Underground Railroad, 8, 170, 187 Union, Unionists, 160, 161 Voting Rights Act, 184, 186 American Citizenship (Shklar), xii, xiii, xiv, xvi

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American Revolution, 110, 127, 159, 183, 192 Amish, 196 anarchism, 122, 174 Andersonville, Georgia (prisoner-of-war camp), 151 Anouilh, Jean, 35, 36, 37 Antigone (Sophocles), xxiii, 2, 25–37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 53, 61, 70 Chorus, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 Creon, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 70 Eteocles, 27 Haemon, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37 Ismene, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43 Oedipus, 27, 31, 34, 35, 36 Polynices, 27, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36 anti-Semitism, 20, 210 Apology (Plato; see also Socrates), 3, 41 daemon, 3, 41, 47 trial of Socrates, 39, 40, 43, 45 Aristides, 208, 209 Athens (see also Greece), 38, 39, 40, 45, 47, 48, 53, 204, 208, 209 Austria, 18 authority, ix, xiii, xxiii, 3, 30, 38, 41, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 82, 86, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 108, 134, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 165, 188, 192, 193, 201 public, 2, 60, 61, 94, 122, 125, 127 Bacon, Francis, 56, 106 Barnett, Ross, 187 Becket, Thomas (see also Eliot, T. S.; Murder in the Cathedral), 4, 70–81, 173 Archbishop of Canterbury, 73, 76, 77 Constitution of Clarendon, 76, 77 Henry II, 73, 75, 76, 77 John of Salisbury, 74, 75, 81, 94 tempters, 78–80

225

belief, 14, 23, 48, 62, 64, 72, 82, 106, 114, 115, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130, 133, 134, 139, 156, 157, 165, 170, 183, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 personal, 182, 191, 196, 199 Bentham, Jeremy, 111, 115 Berkeley, xv, xviii, 1, 18 Berkeley Lecture (“Conscience and Liberty”), 1–14 Berlin, Isaiah, xviii–xx, 2, 8–11 Two Concepts of Liberty, 8–11 betrayal, xiii, xxiii, 51, 58, 154 Birmingham, Alabama, xxiii, 79, 186, 187, 198 Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 59 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, xix, xxiii, 15, 20–24, 69, 85, 173 Brandt, Willy, 207, 210 Brethren (religious sect), 191, 198 Britain (see also England; United Kingdom), 6, 12, 21, 56, 58, 73, 76, 77, 79, 84, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 97, 102, 103, 107, 111, 116, 129, 130, 134, 135, 137, 156, 158, 164, 181, 182, 192, 193, 199 Brown, John, 175 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 58, 140 Burke, Edmund, 11, 12 Caesar, Julius, 58, 61, 63, 64, 124, 146 California, 163, 170 University of, 1 Calvin, John (see also Reformation), 94, 96, 101 Calvinism, Calvinist, 94, 95, 96, 112 Cambridge (UK), xv, 2 Canada, 158, 169, 170, 187, 205 capitalism, industrial, 130, 133, 134, 135 Carter, Jimmy, 193 Catholicism, 95, 113 Cavell, Stanley, xvii Chapman, Maria Weston, 166 Charles I, king of England, 95, 99, 102 execution of, 95, 99, 102, 106

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Charles II, king of England, 95, 107 China, 160 Christ, Jesus, 20, 22–24, 53, 61, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79, 82, 84, 89, 91, 93, 100, 140, 141, 142, 196 Christians, Christianity (see also Reformation; and individual denominations), xix, 4, 20, 21, 22, 23, 53, 60–69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 92, 126, 130, 137, 140, 141, 143, 166, 167, 175, 177, 190, 196 asceticism, 77 Bible, 60, 97, 98, 197 Catholics, 4, 62, 68, 94, 95, 100, 101, 113, 145, 160, 200 Christian Scientists, 182 City of God, 70 Confessional Church, 21, 22 contracts, 72, 98, 100, 106 covenants, 45, 98, 100 emperors, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 73, 100, 101, 103 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 73, 84, 92 mercy, 67, 68 oaths, 4, 5, 61, 72, 73, 74, 91–93, 96, 100, 106 Papacy, 66, 96 Pope Alexander III, 76 Pope Gelasius, 72 Pope Gregory VII, 73 Pope John Paul II, 143 princes, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 78, 96, 99, 100, 101 Protestants, 15, 61, 100, 161 resistance, 60, 69, 75, 85, 94, 95, 190 sects, 5, 66, 166, 195 secular sword, 61, 65, 66, 75 sin, sinners, sinning, 35, 44, 58, 61, 64, 65–69, 83, 86, 91, 92, 110, 136, 140, 170 soldiers, 21, 65, 68, 70, 74 Cicero, 4, 54, 55, 56, 57

citizenship, xvii, 23, 137, 236, 205, 207 civil disobedience, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 7, 166–190, 191, 193, 199 Civil Disobedience (Thoreau), xxi, xxii, xxiii, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175 civil rights, 13, 168, 184, 188, 189 Civil Rights Movement, 176, 178, 181, 183, 187 civil war, 4, 51, 52, 108, 183, 208, 209, 211 English, 95, 96 Clark, Jim, 186 coercion, 157, 178, 186, 203 commitment, xvi, xxii, 4, 13, 65, 118, 155 common good, 108, 132, 133, 135, 185 communism, Communist Party, 122, 127, 205 communitarian, xxi, 132, 179 conceptual analysis, xi, xiii, xviii, 2, 8, 14, 116, 143, 213, 216 Concord, Massachusetts, 14, 170, 174 conflict, ix, xi, xviii, xix, 3–6, 9, 10, 23, 25, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 53, 54, 60, 62, 70–73, 75, 78, 81, 85, 88, 99, 112, 115, 121, 122, 124, 125, 148, 154, 155, 159, 160, 187, 188, 192, 197, 208, 215 conformity, 136, 153 Connor, Bull, 186 conscience, ix, xiv, xviii, xix, xxi, 1–14, 20, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 47, 48, 78, 80, 129, 137, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175, 180, 191, 194, 195, 199, 201 religious, 64, 65, 67, 68, 78, 81, 130, 196, 197, 200 “Conscience and Liberty” (Berkeley Lecture; Shklar), xv, 1–14 conscientious objection, 191–201 conscription, 192, 193, 198 consent, 202, 203 tacit, 45, 109, 111, 113, 202 conservatism, conservatives, 14, 75, 97, 115, 122, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164 Constantine, 60, 61, 62, 64



index

227

constitution, 16, 40, 41, 96, 97, 99, 103, 108, 113, 114, 124, 127, 137, 142, 146, 152, 206, 207 Establishment Clause, 200 First Amendment, 182, 186, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 231 contracts, xix, xxiii, xxvi, 6, 45, 46, 48, 49, 72, 98–100, 102, 103, 105–120, 135, 164 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 51 Coriolanus, Gaius Marcius, 51, 52, 55 courage, xvii, 3, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 91, 173 Courses of Instruction (Harvard, 1991– 1992), ix, xvii, xviii, xix Cox, Harvey, xviii crimes, xv, 15, 23, 27, 28, 57, 74, 91, 102, 133, 150, 152, 165, 196, 204 Crito (Plato; see also Socrates), xxiii, xxv, 3, 38–49, 50, 52, 53, 59, 70, 109, 172, 211 duty, 44–49 justice, 41, 42, 45, 48 law, 37–48 Oligarchy of the Thirty, 40 trial of Socrates, 39–40, 43, 45 Cromwell, Oliver, 95, 107

disobedience, disobeying, 44, 62, 65, 67, 113, 120, 137, 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 166–190 civil, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 166–190, 191, 193, 199 extraordinary circumstances, 149 motivation, 177 mutiny at Salerno, 148 orders, 46, 100, 145–153 passive, 69 public acts, 176 punishment, 30, 61, 63, 68, 69, 86, 151, 187, 204 refusal to pay taxes, 172 dissidents, 22, 206 Douglass, Frederick, 167, 168 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 12 Dreyfus, Alfred, 205, 210, 211 Drinan, Robert, 143 duty, duties, xxiv, 3, 4, 6, 7, 17–20, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 53, 65, 74, 87, 94, 97, 90, 99, 100, 102, 104, 109, 110, 117, 122, 128, 129, 134, 140, 150, 151, 154, 165, 175, 194, 195, 297, 199, 201 Dworkin, Ronald, xiii, xvii, 21

Dante, 58 Brutus and Cassius in Inferno, 58 “Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants” (“Junius Brutus”), xxiii, 98, 99 democracy, democracies, xiii, xiv, xix, xxi, 39, 40, 143, 161, 178, 180, 188, 202 American, xiii constitutional, 17, 146 liberal, xiv modern, xx, xxi representative, 181, 189 Revolution, Age of, 21 dictatorships, xiv, xix, 182, 205 disloyalty, 61, 74, 93, 113, 157–159, 162–165

education, xi, xvii, 9, 44, 46, 52, 119, 127, 132, 134, 153, 136, 146, 148, 160, 184, 196, 199, 213, 216, 217, 219 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 165 Eliot, T. S. (see also Murder in the Cathedral), xxiii, 4, 78, 79 emancipation (see also slavery, slaves), xiii, 160–167 England (see also Britain), 6, 21, 56, 73, 76, 77, 79, 84, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 97, 102, 103, 107, 111, 116, 129, 130, 134, 135, 156, 164, 192 Enlightenment, xxvi philosophy, xix, 111, 116, 120 espionage, 51, 57, 157, 164, 210

228

index

Europe, Europeans, xiii, xvi, xviii, 3, 19, 20, 65, 66, 69, 73, 94, 100, 111, 113, 119, 121, 124, 125, 127, 134, 146, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 175, 182, 183, 196, 205, 210, 214, 219 exile, exiles, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xix, xx, xxiv, xxvi, 3, 29, 31, 35, 48, 49, 77, 78, 90, 95, 96, 97, 107, 158, 174, 196, 204–212 Faces of Injustice (Shklar), xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvi, 179 faith, faithfulness (see also religion), 3, 20, 21, 22, 24, 53, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 81, 93, 95, 100, 102, 126, 140, 144, 155, 177, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197 fascism, 7, 122 federalism, 12, 18, 159, 161, 162, 164, 169, 178, 180, 188, 193 feudalism, 72, 73, 74, 83, 85, 87, 88, 93, 99, 100, 124, 127 fidelity, 61, 154, 155, 165 Foreign Office, German, 16–19 Forster, E. M., 58, 59 Forten, James, Jr., 168, 169 France, 5, 12, 35, 74, 77, 85, 94, 95, 97, 102, 106, 107, 119, 145, 164, 199, 205, 210, 211 Francis I, king of France, 94 freedom, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 36, 64, 107, 117, 120, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 166, 169, 175, 192, 195, 196, 197 negative, 10, 12, 14, 175 personal, 118, 123, 136, 181 positive, 135, 137 Freedom and Independence (Hegel), xiv, 125 free market, xiv, 134 French Revolution, 6, 12, 35, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 159 friendship, xix, xxiii, xxv, 3, 5, 42, 43, 48, 50–59, 78, 86, 132, 172, 208, 211, 251 Fullerton, Jon, xxii

Gandhi, Mahatma, 170, 176, 181, 182 Garner v. Louisiana, xxiv, 188 Garrison, William Lloyd, 7, 13, 167, 169 Germany, 15–17, 19–21, 69, 73, 107, 124, 130, 145, 164, 174, 207, 211 Gillette v. United States, 200 Glorious Revolution, 113 God, gods (see also Supreme Being), 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 53, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 113, 114, 115, 124, 130, 131, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 153, 158, 167, 172, 177, 179, 197 government, governments, ix, x, xviii, xix, xxiii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 51, 56, 58, 60, 64, 66, 67, 68, 72, 75, 76, 84, 107–110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 136, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161–165, 169, 170–174, 180–185, 188, 193, 198, 199–210, 202, 205–211, 215 Greece (see also Athens; Sparta), 26, 28, 36, 41, 54, 125, 204 city-states, xix, 208 drama, 25, 26, 27 philosophy, 54, 124 tragedy, 140 tyrants, 28, 32, 35, 36 Green, Thomas Hill, xix, xxiii, xxv, 6, 129, 131, 133, 137, 175 Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, 131 Gulag, Soviet, 205 Halacha, 142 Hamilton, Alexander, 159, 193 Hanina, Rabbi, 142



index

Harding, Warren G., 162 Harvard University Archives, xii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 105, 202, 220–222 Core curriculum, ix, xvii, xviii, xxii, 1 Shklar lectures, ix–xxvii Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, xiii, xiv, xxiii, 3, 6, 26, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 41, 124–128, 131, 199 Henry VIII, king of England, 62 heroism, 33, 174, 175 Hitler, Adolf, 32, 85, 150, 151, 183, 189, 206 resistance against, 4, 15–23 Hobbes, Thomas, 105–107 De Cive, xxiii, 106 state of nature, 116 theory of obligation, 108 Hoffmann, Stanley, xii, xvii, xviii Holmes, Stephen, xvii honor (see also Richard II), xxiii, 4, 5, 28, 31, 63, 74, 77, 78, 82–93, 96, 111, 142, 147, 154, 208, 210 Huguenots, 94, 192 Hume, David, xix, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 6, 105, 111–115, 116, 120 idealism 124, 129, 130, 131, 137 ideologies, xxiii, 7, 115, 121–122, 156, 181, 214, 217 Age of, 129 idolatry, 53 imperialism, 122 India, 181, 182 individualism, xx, 135, 157, 174, 175, 184 injustice, 17, 41, 42, 47, 54, 68, 80, 163, 165, 172, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183 Israel, 63, 82, 86 people of, 71, 72, 97, 98 Jefferson, Thomas, 110, 111, 114, 159, 174 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 177

229

Jesuit order, Jesuits (Society of Jesus), xxiii, 138, 141, 142, 143, 145 Jews, 61, 63, 65, 162 German, 16, 21, 205, 211 Judaism, xix Judas Iscariot, 4, 58, 89, 91 justice, xiii, xvii, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 6, 11, 23, 25, 29, 32, 33, 36, 45, 48, 54, 68, 74, 79, 80, 110, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 126, 137, 140, 143, 151, 157, 162, 172, 179, 186, 188, 190, 203, 210 Kant, Immanuel, xviii, xxiii, xxvi, xxvii, 105, 111, 124, 119–120 Kantorowicz, Ernst, xxiii, 112 King’s Two Bodies, xxiii, 112 Keynes, John Maynard, 136 Kierkegaard, Søren, 53 King, Martin Luther, Jr., xxiii, xxiv, 70, 78, 79, 80, 81, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 189 Kleist, Heinrich Freiherr von, xxiii Ku Klux Klan, 185 laissez-faire capitalism, 135, 136 law, laws, ix, xix, xxiii, xxiv, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 14, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 57, 58, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 84, 87, 88, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 108, 109, 112–115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 134, 137, 140, 142, 148, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 168–172, 176–190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203 League of Nations, 16 Lee, Robert E., 160 Legalism (Shklar), x, xii liberalism, xx, 9, 122, 123, 133, 134, 155 liberalism of fear, xiii liberty, ix, xv, xviii, xx, xxv, 1–14, 80, 110, 117, 133, 203 individual, 35

230

index

liberty (continued) negative and positive, xiii, 10–14, 136, 175 personal, 12 Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 159, 160, 168 Locke, John, xviii, xix, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 2, 105, 108–110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 132, 134, 174 love, 28–31, 34–37, 42, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 63, 65, 66, 80, 87, 92, 118, 125, 140, 141 loyalists, British American, 110, 158, 205 loyalty, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxv, 3, 6, 7, 19, 20, 24, 31, 34, 48, 86, 87, 92, 93, 106, 108, 129, 154–165, 203, 208, 209, 211 nationalist, 154, 156, 157 oaths, 158–159 to clan, family, or kin, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 52, 85, 87, 88, 172 to friends, 43, 54, 211 to nation or state, 53, 58, 154, 156, 157, 158, 160–165, 206 to social group, 25, 93, 148, 155, 172 Loyola, Ignatius of (see also Jesuit order, Jesuits), xxiii, 138, 142 Luther, Martin (see also New Testament), xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 4, 60, 62, 66–69, 70, 75, 94, 96, 197 Lutheran church, Lutherans, 21, 96 Madison, James, 193, 195 Magna Carta, 93 Malcolm X, 178 Mandela, Nelson, 206 Mansfield, Harvey, xvii Marcos, Ferdinand 84 Marshall, George, 165 Mary, Queen of Scots, 95 Mary I, queen of England, 95 McCarthy, Joseph, 164, 165 McCarthy era, 163, 164 Men and Citizens (Rousseau), xiv, 116

Mennonites, 198 Mexican War, 170, 171, 183 Milgram, Stanley, xxiii, 152–153 military, 30, 52, 61, 64, 75, 76, 101, 128, 138, 140, 145–153, 163, 164, 165, 182, 183, 198, 199, 200, 210 German, 17, 21, 22 obedience, xxiii, xxv, 139 service, 6, 192–194, 197, 200 Mill, John Stuart, 135 Minutemen, Massachusetts, 159 Montaigne, Michel de, 5, 54, 57, 98 Montesquieu (Shklar), xix Moral Reasoning (Shlar), xvii, xix, xx, xxii, 1, 105 Mormons, 130, 196 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), xxiii, 4, 78, 79 1984 (Orwell), 9 Napoleonic Wars, 147 nationalism, nationalists, 77, 122, 154, 155, 156, 161, 163, 164 National Socialism, xix, 7, 15–22, 122, 130 nations, nationhood, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 71, 154 Negre v. Larsen, 200 Nelson, Horatio, 149, 150 Netherlands, 207 New England, 5, 7, 8, 110, 160, 166, 167 New Jersey, 192 New Testament (see also Luther, Martin; Reformation), xxiii, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 125 Luke, xxiii, 63 Matthew, xxiii, 63 New York, 160, 185 nonviolence (see also violence), 81, 178, 181, 182, 190 Nuremberg trials, 150, 151 Nussbaum, Martha, xvii



index

oaths, 4, 5, 61, 72–74, 91, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 103, 106, 157, 158, 159, 163, 168 obedience, xiv, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 3, 4, 6, 7, 18, 22, 29, 30, 40, 42, 44, 46, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 77, 85, 93, 94, 97, 101, 102, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 134, 137, 138–144, 154 Christian, 64, 68, 69, 83, 93, 141, 142, 143 fatalistic, 139 military, 139, 145–153 perfect, 144 ultimate, 139, 141, 143 unconditional, 45, 61, 62, 64, 113, 120 obligation, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xxi, xxiv, xxvi, 1, 2, 4, 6, 18, 20, 25, 28, 32, 33, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 58, 60, 62, 63, 67, 73, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 100, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 143, 144, 145, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165, 166, 169, 174, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211 political, ix, x, xii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxii, 1, 50, 52, 83, 85, 92, 106, 122, 127, 129, 131, 144, 155, 161, 165, 175, 197, 204 reciprocal, 99 social, 134 to be just, 137 to nation or state, 19, 134, 135, 155, 156 Obligation, Loyalty and Exile (Shklar), xii, xv, xvi Old Testament, 71, 75, 82, 86, 96, 98 Abraham, 140, 141, 144 Daniel, 96 David, 71, 74, 82 Isaac, 140 Job, 106

231

Moses, 71 Nathan, 82 people of Israel, 71, 97, 98 Samuel, 71, 74, 82 Saul, 71, 74, 82, 97 order, 30, 33, 36, 37, 44, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 73, 76, 82, 84, 88, 93, 100, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 150, 151, 159, 172, 179, 184, 199 monastic, 141, 142 political, 33, 50, 57, 100, 126, 137, 201, 203, 210 Ordinary Vices (Shklar), xiv ostracism, 204, 209 pacifism, 183 Paine, Tom, 12, 158, 159 Parliament, English, 97, 99, 102, 103, 106, 128 passion, 8, 12, 13, 26, 35, 41, 114, 115, 168, 211, 214, 217 Pennsylvania, 192 Persia, 96, 208 Philadelphia, 110, 168 Phillips, Wendell, xxiii, 22, 168 philosophy, xi, xvii, xix, 33, 39, 48, 52, 54, 109, 111, 116, 124, 125 political, xvi Pitkin, Hanna, 1 Plato, xix, xxiii, 3, 39, 52, 53, 54, 214 Apology 3, 39, 41 Crito, xxiii, xxv, 3, 39, 41–48, 50, 52, 53, 59, 70, 109, 172, 211 pluralism, 9 Plutarch, 51, 52, 204, 208, 209 Poland, 20, 207 political blackmail, 184 political psychology, xiv, xvi political theory, ix, x, xi, xii, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxvii, 74, 106, 213–219 Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Shklar), xiii, xv, 7

232

index

politics, xvii, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15, 26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 51, 55, 56, 57, 92, 106, 111, 115, 116, 121, 124, 125, 126, 128, 144, 157, 164, 167, 175, 181, 186, 203, 208, 211, 213 poverty, 131, 135, 185 power, ix, 3, 4, 9, 16, 19, 21, 26, 31, 33, 34, 41, 56, 61, 64, 67, 68, 72, 74, 79, 81, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 116, 117, 122, 124, 135, 136, 146, 147, 148, 151, 157, 161, 178, 182, 205, 211, 217 Prince (Machiavelli), 35, 86, 87, 92, 93 Protestantism (see also Christians, Christianity; religion), xix, 95, 130, 137 Quakers (Society of Friends), 167, 191, 192, 194, 198 racism, 122, 185, 218 Rawls, John, xiii, xxii, xxiv, 132, 179, 188 Redeeming American Political Thought (Shklar), xiii, 10 Red Scares, 158 Reformation (see also Calvin, John; Luther, Martin), 60, 61, 62, 66, 94, 95, 127 regicide, xxiii, 92, 105, 119 regimes, 4, 8, 9, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 54, 56, 64, 84, 85, 119, 127, 130, 207, 210, 211 despotic, 207 Reisert, Joseph, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, 220 religion (see also faith, faithfulness; specific religions), xix, 3, 5, 6, 7, 33, 34, 65, 99, 106, 112, 118, 122, 130, 131, 135, 144, 154, 157, 182, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 official, 66 Wars of, 5, 102, 107 republics, republicanism, x, xiv, xx, 51, 52, 55, 116, 119, 120, 122, 123, 132, 158, 159, 194, 195, 197, 210, 215 Roman, 52, 55, 58, 140

resistance, 4, 19, 21, 41, 60, 69, 75, 85, 94, 95, 98, 113, 127, 169, 174, 176, 177, 181–183, 189, 190, 207 responsibility, xvii, 23, 26, 117, 147, 152, 178 revolution (see also American Revolution; French Revolution), xxi, 16, 38, 80, 84, 95, 109, 113, 114, 119, 123, 136, 154, 158, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 182, 189, 194 Richard II (Shakespeare), xxiii, xxv, 5, 82–84 Aumerle, 89, 92 Bishop of Carlisle, 89, 91, 93 bodies, natural and divine, xxiii, 82–85, 89, 92, 93 Bolingbroke (later Henry IV), 5, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 as a Cold War play, 86 Duchess of Gloucester, 87, 92 Duke of Gloucester, 86, 91 Duke of Northumberland, 88 Duke of York, 85, 92 Elizabeth I, 83 honor, xxiii, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 93 John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, 85, 87, 88, 156 Lord’s anointed, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 Margaret of York, 84 Mowbray, 87 Plantagenet kings, 84 Tudor era, 83 Tyndale, William, 83 Wars of the Roses, 84, 92 rights, xiii, xviii, xxi, 2, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 33, 36, 39, 97, 99, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 118, 134, 135, 136, 137, 152, 157, 169, 174, 175, 180, 184, 186, 187, 189, 205 civil, 176, 178, 183, 187, 188, 189 natural, 2, 7, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 131, 133, 168, 202 political, 181, 188 unalienable, 136



index

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 136, 163 Roosevelt, Theodore, 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xiv, xix, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 7, 12, 105, 111, 116–118, 119 division of labor, 116 General Will, 117, 118, 119 On the Social Contract, xxiii, 116, 117, 119 royalists, French, 205 rules, 11, 16, 25, 32, 38, 40, 48, 66, 83, 87, 88, 101, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117, 135, 137, 141, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 157, 174, 178, 188, 189, 210 Russian Federation (see also Soviet Union), 127, 130, 137, 162, 180, 194, 205, 206 Saint Augustine, 4, 54, 60, 62, 64, 70, 71, 74, 75 Saint Benedict, 141 Saint Francis of Assisi, 142 Saint Paul, 4, 60, 62, 63, 64 Saint-Just, Louis, xxiii, 120 Sakharov, Andrei, 206 Sandel, Michael, xvii, 132 “encumbered self,” 132 Scotland (see also Britain; United Kingdom), 95, 111, 112 self-clarification, xi, 216 self-confidence, 173 self-education, xi, 213, 216 self-rule, xxi self-transformation, 173 Selma march, 180, 186 seminars, Harvard, xvi, xxii, 216 Sen, Amartya, xvii Shakespeare, William, xix, xxiii, 5, 51, 83, 85, 86, 92 Coriolanius, 51 Richard II, 5, 82–93 Shklar, Judith Nisse, ix–xxvii on lecturing, xxiv, xxv

233

on research, x, xi, 215, 219 on teaching, x–xii, xvi, xviii, xx, xxv, 202, 213–219 Shklar Papers, xii, xxv, 220–222 on writing x–xii, xvi, 213, 215, 216, 217, 219 Singer, Peter, xxii, xxiv, 202 Skinner, Quentin, xv slavery, slaves (see also abolition, abolitionism; emancipation), xiii, xviii, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 30, 63, 64, 88, 117, 129, 135, 137, 159, 160, 166–175, 181, 187, 189, 205 social Darwinism, 122 Social Democrats (German), 207 socialism, xiii society, 6, 9, 25, 29, 51, 57, 59, 83, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 144, 147, 148, 156, 157, 175, 177, 179, 186, 189, 197, 205, 210, 213 political, 117, 156 Society for the Prevention to Cruelty to Animals, 155 Society of Jesus (see Jesuit order, Jesuits) Socrates (see also Apology; Crito), xxi, 3, 5, 7, 38–49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 61, 70, 109, 125, 172, 204, 209, 211, 220 in The Clouds (Aristophanes), 39 trial of, 39, 43 Sophocles (see also Antigone), xix, xxiii, 2, 25, 26, 35, 36, 37 sovereignty, xxi, 103, 108 Soviet Union (see also Russian Federation), 127, 164, 180, 181, 295, 206 Sparta (see also Greece), 39, 96, 119, 208 ephors, 96, 97, 110 kings, 96 Stalin, Joseph, 206 state, states, xiv, xix, 4, 6, 7, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 28, 30, 33, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 65, 69, 70, 108, 110, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128,

234

index

state, states (continued) 129–137, 142, 145, 155, 156, 159, 160, 161, 164, 173, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 188, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 206, 208, 211 positive, xix, xxi, xxiii, 129–137 welfare, 6, 130, 133, 135 Stauffenberg, Claus von, 4 Supreme Being (see also God, gods), 198, 200 Talmud, 142 Themistocles, 204, 208, 209 theology, xviii, 22, 53, 93, 101 political, 82, 92, 93 Thoreau, Henry David, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 7, 13, 14, 170–175, 181, 198 Thucydides, 107, 108, 208, 209, 213 Tolstoy, Leo, 170 traitors, 2, 27, 75, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 102, 103, 158, 160, 206, 208 treason, 4, 27, 74, 79, 87, 92, 95, 113, 157, 209, 210 Treaty of Versailles, 15, 16 tyrannicide, 75 tyranny, tyrants, xxiii, 5, 9, 28, 32, 35, 36, 57, 67, 68, 71, 75, 76, 80, 81, 83, 88, 94–103, 107, 109, 173, 178, 221 United Kingdom (see also Britain; ­England; Scotland) 58, 129, 182 United States, xxiii, xxiv, 10, 11, 51, 56, 57, 121, 129, 130, 151, 152, 154, 159, 162, 163, 165, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 189, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 205, 206 army, 150, 160, 165, 193, 194 Code of Military Justice, 151 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 51, 164

House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 163 Justice Department, 162 United States v. Seeger, xxiv, 200 University of Wisconsin, xv utility, utilitarianism, 44, 55, 111, 115, 135, 160, 171 Vatican, 18, 19 Vietnam War, 168, 181, 182, 183, 188, 198, 199, 200 violence (see also nonviolence), 5, 20, 23, 66, 73, 75, 80, 94, 116, 133, 169, 175, 179, 180, 183, 186 Virginia, 160, 175, 192, 195 virtue, xiv, xx, 4, 78, 101, 110, 112, 119, 134, 138, 140, 141, 143, 165, 208 Wallace, George, 187 Walzer, Michael, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 7, 120, 164, 192 war crimes, 15, 153 Wars of Religion (French), 5, 102, 107 Washington, D.C., 151, 168 Washington, George, 159, 192 Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 187 Weimar Republic, 15, 16, 19 Weizsäcker, Ernst von, xix, xxiii, 15–20, 23 Welsh v. United States, xxiv, 200 Wirtz, Henry, 151 working class, 124, 131, 135 World War I, 15, 58, 134, 161, 162, 193, 194, 195 World War II, 15, 18, 136, 145, 148, 150, 163, 164, 193, 195, 214 Yamashita, Tomoyuki, 152 Young, Andrew, 184