Search Results

“... Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection is not, as its title might suggest, about people who like and love their oppressors. It is an account of the many ways in which the strong torment the weak of whom they claim to be fond. Overtly hostile acts produce victims, but affection also has aggressive impulses and it creates what Tuan calls ‘pets’. In both cases there is an abuse of power, but the occasions for its display are quite different ...”

“... Books and films about terror and torture are now both more numerous and better than they used to be. The reasons for this are probably bad news. There is more to talk about. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to find a volume as solid and responsible as Edward Peters’s Torture, which traces the history of torture from the extraction of evidence from slave witnesses in criminal trials to the Inquisition, and on to its use, after a brief interruption, in our century as part of the ideological wars of nation-states with their fear of subversion and the importance they attach to intelligence ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson left the Presidency he wrote to Dupont de Nemours: ‘Never did a prisoner released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the time in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself to the boisterous ocean of political passion ...”

“... Rousseau has been loved and hated, but has never been ignored. His name rings in our ears because he expressed every form of human resentment with such intensity and intelligence that his endless nay-saying is still illuminating and seems edifying. His versatility was such that there is a different Rousseau for every reader. Dislike, however, produced his most enduring personae – first the man who spawned Robespierre and then the godfather of Romanticism ...”

“... Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices is a wise, clever, thoughtful book about the danger and the value of various personal vices – cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery and others. Professor Shklar asks how important they are; which are worse than others; what they can positively do for society, and how their meanings differ from one society to another ...”

“... as Cold War liberals are discussed at any length: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar. It is a small sample from which to distil generalisations about the moral failings of an age, but that is what Moyn sets out to do.His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge being that they provided ‘a rationale for a Cold ...”

“... the scale and force of the event.The law is an unwieldy instrument for dealing with mass crimes. Judith Shklar observed sixty years ago that one of the reasons for the failure of de-Nazification in Germany after the Second World War was that lawyers believed they were dealing with ‘a handful of deviants’ rather than a ‘social movement’. This ...”

“... have shed Mill’s anxieties. One of the most distinguished liberal writers of recent years, Judith Shklar, defended what she called ‘a liberalism of fear’, which recognises just how badly human beings can behave and tries to erect barriers against it. The gloomy realism with which Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society encouraged ...”

“... was no reflection on the Social Democrats. In a piece that Williams wrote a year or two later on Judith Shklar, he agreed with her and with Montesquieu that ‘the real point … is not to paint the free citizen as a virtuous person, but to insist that without freedom everyone is intolerably paralysed or demeaned.’ This – what he described as the ...”

“... Cheers for Democracy was certainly one too few in the opinion of such critics as the philosopher Judith Shklar, who hotly disputed his preference for private over national loyalty. While denunciation was undoubtedly immoral under the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Shklar argued, it is both moral and necessary in democratic ...”

“... thinks that that itself is an injustice simply lacks a ground for the claim. Amartya Sen, echoing Judith Shklar, has recently emphasised that the sense of injustice itself merits public respect and, if nothing else, investigation. But in Risse’s theory the sense of injustice has no special claim on our attention, because justice is not primarily a ...”

“... and Democracy’ in his wonderfully measured new collection, Dennis Thompson quotes Judith Shklar, who described the politics of anti-hypocrisy as an ‘unending game of mutual unmasking’, in which everyone is bound to lose. Because democracy is a system of government that institutionalises distrust, as the price we pay for handing over ...”

“... can think of such feminists as making the case for a kind of ‘sex positivity of fear’, just as Judith Shklar once made the case for a ‘liberalism of fear’ – that is, a liberalism motivated by a fear of authoritarian alternatives.) But there is a risk too that repoliticising desire will encourage a discourse of sexual entitlement. Talk of people ...”