Judith N. Shklar, On Political Obligation (Yale University Press, 2019), 264 pp., $45.00

THE SUDDEN death of Judith N. Sklar in 1992 at the age of sixty-three deprived American letters of a distinctive and imposing voice. Her friend and colleague Stanley Hoffmann in the Government department at Harvard once remarked, “she was by far the biggest star of the department.” Her most important contribution to political thought was the “liberalism of fear,” an imperative to put “cruelty first” as the vice to be identified and eradicated. An exile from Riga who arrived in America in 1940 on a boat from Japan as an eleven-year-old with her family, she wrote in a detached yet moving style of the challenges and rewards of living removed from home. Utopian dreams that curdled into nightmares were a frequent theme and personal experience of Stalinism and Nazism infused her scholarship. She stands out for the wide range of her interests, literary and historical, enabling her to draw connections between authors separated by centuries and revolutions of thought. In an essay in Daedalus, for example, Shklar discovered analogous structures of meaning in the Five Generations of Hesiod and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality.

Shklar’s writing was never less than clear and approachable, qualities readily apparent in On Political Obligation, a series of lectures that have been edited by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess. They explain that Shklar would herself not have published these lectures in their current form. A number of the talks are either missing or presented in truncated form. Shklar had also voiced reservations about the publication of lectures by colleagues, as the editors note, for erasing the distinction between teaching and writing.

But Shklar did have a book in mind on the theme of political obligation and the lectures provide a map to the lines she might have pursued. The editors themselves observe, “the lectures 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.” If Shklar had a general theory of political obligation it is hovering at a distance. She focuses on particular authors and political figures whose works enter on the questions of “should I obey” and “what and how far can I legitimately obey.” We get to hear, at a distance, the voice of an outstanding teacher grappling with the life and death issues that link ancient Athens with contemporary America. Throughout, Shklar was commendably forthright in addressing the big questions that many of her colleagues shunned. But the lectures, an early draft, to be sure, of a book that Shklar was unable to complete, suggest that her answers were not always wholly persuasive.

TO HIGHLIGHT the complexities of moral engagement, Shklar delivered a lecture contrasting Ernst von Weizsäcker, a high-ranking official in the German Foreign Office with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the renowned theologian who helped found the Confessing Church that opposed Nazism. Weizsäcker, who sat out the war’s end in a cozy Foreign Office post in the Vatican, was arraigned at Nuremberg (where he was defended by his son Richard who became a leading figure in postwar Germany, first as mayor of West Berlin, then as president of the Federal Republic) and sentenced to a seven-year prison term for abetting crimes against humanity, which was later commuted. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, had links to the July 20, 1944 conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler, which led to his imprisonment and death at the hands of the vengeful Nazis.

Shklar draws on Weizsäcker’s postwar memoirs to limn the intricacies of his collaboration with a murderous regime; we get him as he understood or wished himself to be understood. He put on an outward show of loyalty by joining the NSDAP and the SS but his true fealty was to the Foreign Office, a redoubt imbued with traditions that harkened back to the pre-Nazi order. “[I]t was to preserve its traditional class and expert character that he wanted to stay there and serve it,” Shklar remarks. It’s a perfectly respectable observation except that it was, of course, Hitler who was calling the shots, as it were. She also points to a less interested source, Paul Seabury’s classic The Wilhelmstrasse, to remark upon Weizsäcker’s palpable contempt for Joachim von Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman turned foreign minister. Still, Ribbentrop turned out to be “a lot shrewder” than his aristocratic underling. That shrewdness came to light in Ribbentrop’s support for Weizsäcker to become state secretary. He knew what he was about. “[T]his man will obey,” he told Hitler. Obedience, in other words, was the moving principle of Weizsäcker’s career.

But this conflicts with Shklar’s earlier diagnosis that Weizsäcker’s real loyalty was to his class and the traditions of the Foreign Office. In blending the memoir and Seabury, Shklar offers an intriguing but muddled narrative. She seems to take at face value Weizsäcker’s avowal that he loathed war even though “he applauded all of Hitler’s aggressions, just not the way they were carried out.” Of course, the aggressions were inseparable from the manner in which they were executed. Shklar suggests that he was not an opportunist because “[h]e did have a set of loyalties in place that reinforced his obligations to the state, even Hitler’s Third Reich.” The German state “had a permanent existence quite apart from whatever government was in power at any given time.” Maybe Weizsäcker believed this or told it to himself to justify his obedience. He even had the gall to assert that in serving the government he was following his conscience, a claim accepted by Shklar, though it defies credulity to credit as conscience a readiness to truckle to whatever government happens to be in power.

By contrast, Bonhoeffer joined the German Widerstand, or resistance. Shklar worries that students may not be “easily drawn to this undeniably heroic figure” because his resistance came “with deep reservations” and because he resisted “for only one reason, that his faith as a Christian demanded it of him.” Why shouldn’t that prompt admiration for Christianity? She continues,

he came to reject the notion of obedience as in itself un-Christian and unfree. … To judge others it was not important whether they acted out of Christian faith or not. If they acted well they were free and responsible persons.

Personal integrity implies “following the example of Christ” and doing the right thing. In other words, following Christ’s example means inter alia to adhere to universal standards of justice. The contention that Bonhoeffer resisted only because of his Christian faith turns out to be rather misleading.

Nor is this all. “Faced with a regime,” she says “that was bent from the first on destruction, nothing but personal destruction is left…[c]onspiracy 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 very class of which Weizsäcker was a typical member. This makes it all the more peculiar to read her censure of Bonhoeffer for not being “more aghast at the blindness of his church, his class, and his nation.” Could one risk almost certain torture and death conspiring against Hitler and not have been aghast?

IF SHKLAR is somewhat contradictory in her assessments of Nazi Germany, her observations about ancient Greece and obligation also lead her into treacherous territory. She focusses on Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Crito. Sophocles produced his great play in the 440s BC, at the height of the Athenian maritime empire before it was shattered in a feckless war with Sparta; Plato’s dialogue was written not long after Socrates’ execution in 399 BC. Where the mythical Antigone, a girl in her upper teens, defies the laws of Thebes in obedience to other, more fundamental dictates, Socrates insists on submitting to the verdict of the Athenian court, abjuring the opportunity to escape from prison. Each work almost demands that we think about the meaning and nature of obligation.

Shklar’s discussions of Greek dramas can be uncertain. She refers to them as “religious rituals.” Actually, they were performed in the theater of the god Dionsysus and part of a ritual. What they lack, though, is the traditional and repetitive character of ritual. Each playwright strove to devise a novel treatment of a story that might in its main features sound familiar. Helen had to be kidnapped by Paris, or go willingly, and Troy had to fall; beyond that, anything goes. Near the beginning of the Odyssey, Homer has the son of Odysseus rebuke his mother for objecting to a song; “people like a song they’ve never heard before.” Certainly, this holds true of Attic tragedy.

There are other problems. Shklar says that when it comes to tragedies, the gods “have planned the entire course of events” that unfold in the dramas. Well, no. Consider the Oresteia. Aeschylus has Agamemnon decide to sacrifice his daughter in order to calm the contrary winds that are impeding his fleet from sailing to Troy; his wife decides to sacrifice him as soon as he, the great victor of the war, sets foot back in his palace; their son, Orestes, decides to avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother and so on. As for Antigone, she is self-motivated as are the other characters in the play.

The emphasis on human motivation makes for exciting drama. The spectators who turned up in the theater of Dionysus were the same men who gathered nearby to hear speeches and cast their votes as members of the ecclesia, the popular assembly. They were the government. They were aware that they got to decide on matters of life and death. The same holds for the law courts. The court that condemned Socrates had 500 members. They knew full well that they, not a god, were pondering to cast their ballots. Their relevance to the assessment of the tragic theater they frequented is unmistakable.

Shklar goes astray in declaring that “[t]he great fault of such men [and women] is hubris: excessive pride, immoderate willfulness that defies the gods, enrages them, and ends in disaster for the defiant male [and woman?]” Antigone, Ajax, Oedipus and other tragic “heroes” are arrogant types, but no god is punishing them for that. Ajax commits suicide because of his shame at being dishonored in the eyes of the army. Oedipus blinds himself at the discovery of his crimes. To see how jarring the intrusion of divine determinism is for the Antigone, consider the famous scene in which Antigone’s sister, Ismene, pretends that she has helped Antigone with the funeral rites for their brother so as to share in her punishment. Antigone retorts, “you can’t die with me; don’t try to claim for yourself what’s not yours!” Antigone had tried to recruit her sister for the “burial” and been rebuffed; now she alone can claim credit for defying Creon, the ruler of Thebes and her uncle, who forbade a proper burial for her brother, the rebellious Polyneices. However indifferent to her sister’s plight—a life of loneliness stretching before her—Antigone is right: she is the sole mover in attempting to defy Creon’s edict.

Sophocles has Tiresias, a blind seer, enter to denounce Creon for having forbidden the burial of Polyneices. Failure to inter him had, in perfectly natural ways, led to miasma, or pollution, as dogs and birds of prey scattered pieces of the unburied man throughout Thebes. This might seem to point to divine disapproval, but for the Greeks, strictly speaking, there was no supernatural realm opposed to nature. This is clear from Hesiod’s poems, which Shklar treated with insight in her essay on “Subversive Genealogies.” It is why Chateaubriand believed that Christianity had made modern science possible by clearing nature of a host of intrusive deities.

THE ISSUE of burial has a prehistory in the Iliad and in Sophocles’ Ajax. In the former, we see Achilles forced to abandon his wrath at Hector and return to his earlier common humanity in permitting the burial of his enemy. In Sophocles’ drama, the seemingly absolute polarity between friend and foe that characterized popular morality is overcome as Odysseus persuades the Atreid commanders of the army to permit the burial of a warrior who had attempted to kill them. Antigone takes a new line not only in introducing a young woman as the protagonist of burial and with her the entire issue of male supremacy, but also the polis as a crucial element. Creon is far from an absolute ruler; he cannot take the city’s loyalty for granted. That is why he is seen issuing his decree to a handpicked group of elders known for their loyalty to whatever regime is in power. The response of the chorus to him is equivocal: “Yours the power to effect this towards those ill and those well-disposed to the polis/to wield any law whatsoever is your prerogative/as regards the dead and the living.” Though Creon possesses the legal authority, the wisdom of his action is left up in the air. The granting of such carte blanche, as the British classicist H.D.F. Kitton once observed, smacks of the tyrant in the eyes of the Greeks. The tyrant instills fear in his subjects; the conduct of the Watchman, ordered to guard the corpse, alerts us to this pervasive fear. He shuffles in, mumbles, finds it’s hard to give a straight answer, feels sorry for Antigone but is relieved to save his own skin by arresting her. He is afraid almost to the point of inarticulateness. The chorus displays hostility towards Antigone without openly favoring Creon—are they also governed by fear?

At one point Antigone responds to Creon’s dig that she is the only person in the polis who thinks as she does. Looking at the chorus, Antigone replies that so do they but are afraid to say so. Shklar notes this without comment. It deserves to be noted since in a few minutes Creon’s son, Haemon, soon appears to persuade him to rescind his decree. He fails. One of Haemon’s main arguments is that public opinion in the polis is increasingly on Antigone’s side and that the citizens are sotto voce praising her valor. Summoning the memory of his country’s past, a German critic has compared this climate of fear to the squelching of independent thought and speech during the Third Reich. Creon is flummoxed that a woman, his niece, could offer principled opposition to him. Her impassioned defense is beyond his mental horizon.

Antigone was no civil disobedient in a strict sense. However, she resembles one in the nonviolence of her defiance and the fact that, as Shklar notes, she hurts no one apart from herself. She champions the age-old rights and rites of the family, the group anterior to the polis. By driving Antigone and Haemon to their deaths, Creon has deprived himself and the polis of the progeny it requires for survival. It turns out that Antigone, not Creon, is the true defender of the polis.

IN PLATO’S Crito, Socrates engages in a dialogue with Crito about the nature of justice and injustice. Socrates is imprisoned and awaits his execution. Crito is an older, wealthy hanger-on who was in court when Socrates was tried on charges of impiety and corrupting Athenian youth. Convinced that Socrates will be executed on the following day, he bribes a jailer to win entry into the cell before the official opening hour. No one else may know of the visit. His intention is to persuade Socrates to flee during the next night. He can easily pay off the prison guards and the “sycophants,” the semi-official prosecutors who rake in cash by the barrelful by blackmailing the Athenian one percent. Socrates refuses.

This might seem confusing. In his defense speech—the Apology—Socrates, as Shklar points out, had struck a defiantly independent note that at first blush might appear to be backing Creon’s inflexible position. But we are dealing with a dramatic composition that centers on a character known for his irony. Appearances may be deceiving. Plato’s drama has Socrates engage Crito in a dialogic interchange of the sort familiar from other early dialogues, though this one is more superficial. He reminds Crito of the agreements to which they have come earlier to the effect that it is better to suffer than inflict injustice, something he would perform in seeking to escape. To demonstrate to Crito that it would be unjust, he pretends to be summoning the august voice of the Laws of Athens, which proceeds to develop a doctrine of unqualified obedience or something close to it.

Shklar’s narrative runs smoothly with an important exception. Socrates often mentions his daimonion which warns him against some action he is on the point of undertaking. When the sign does not appear, he is confident that his action is proper. There is reason to believe that the charge of impiety was linked to Athenians’ suspicion that Socrates was indulging in some kind of private worship. This renders dubious Shklar’s conjecture that impiety was merely a cover for political motives. More serious is the conversion of the daimonion into daimon. It may refer to a minor god. The diminutive form daimonion distances itself from a full-scale daimon; it is more playful, a bit like the English diminutives of puppy or kitten, almost begging to be petted. Whatever kind of sign Socrates believed he was receiving, it was not, as Shklar would have it, his conscience. Its signals are negative; it provides no explanation for that signal or for its absence nor is it the outcome of any thought process. Socrates does not remain in prison because of his conscience. To say that “he stays in prison because he is doing what it (the sign) commands” is misleading since the sign issuing a positive command is never mentioned in the Crito.

It is evident that Shklar does not like Socrates. Crito’s first argument that Socrates should not submit to the court’s verdict is that in so doing he will abandon his companions. “At no point,” says Shklar, “does Socrates make the slightest gesture of friendship to the grieving Crito… It is as if friendship were entirely insignificant… Socrates comes across as a perfectly awful man.” Not exactly. Plato makes good the omission by recounting the last day of Socrates’ life in the Phaedo, when he has Simmias complain that in consenting to die with such equanimity, Socrates is abandoning “us,” which would naturally include Crito. Socrates’ response? “I gather that I shall have to defend myself as though I were in court.” The proofs to be given for the immortality of the soul and his philosophical biography are the reasons he provides for leaving his friends.

There are cogent reasons to think that these difficult proofs would have transcended Crito’s mental reach. He is among the unphilosophical figures whom Socrates confounds in the “early dialogues” such as the religious fanatic Euthyphro or the naïve rhapsode Ion. They are foolish, but, in reading them, we come to realize that so are we in thinking we know things that, in any true sense of “know,” we don’t. This dialogue is a bit different from these others, which leaves Socrates’ interlocutors in a state of perplexity. Socrates must leave Crito with the positive conviction that he is right to obey Athenian law. To accomplish this, he recruits the Icritoaws, who provide specious but rhetorically effective arguments. Their authority overwhelms Crito. Shklar dissects the pseudo-arguments of the Laws with great skill and acumen but without even mentioning that they don’t derive from Socrates.

Was Socrates really an awful person? He goes out of his way to try and reason with Crito in ways he can comprehend. The considerations brought forth by the Laws are narrowly tailored to the life and habits of Socrates, such as the central argument of tacit consent: by remaining in Athens, Socrates has agreed to abide by all legal judgments. This is the famous “love us or leave us” proclamation. Crito buys it.

FRIENDSHIP FORMS a central theme in Shklar’s lectures. She probes how far friendship can override the obligations of citizenship and the defense of one’s country in her seventh lecture. She emphasizes that she uses the word “very expansively to cover family members as well as elective affinities,” an ironical allusion to Goethe’s novel, perhaps, in which those affinities didn’t work out very well. Her own gift for friendship is apparent in asseverating that “while most writers on friendship exclude spouses and other immediate family relations, there is no reason at all to do so.”

Cicero, whose essay Laelius de Amicitia is at the heart of her discussion, would have demurred. Friendship was for him an exclusively male preserve. Friendship between women were of zero interest to him. Following the Ides of March, Cicero enlists Laelius, a paragon of republican virtue from the golden age before the civil war. The occasion of Laelius’ encomium of amicitia is the death of his friend Scipio, another superlatively virtuous Roman who offers an implicit comparison between the tyrannical Caesar and an upright Scipio. The bond between Laelius and Scipio was perfectly compatible with patriotic devotion to the res publica. What especially engages Cicero’s interest and that of Shklar are the instances in which the private and public are at odds.

Unfortunately, her lack of interest in the essay as a drama and in its historical context renders her discussion less useful than it might have been. Friendship, contends Laelius, is incompatible with the policies pursued by a frequent target of Cicero’s vituperative rhetoric, Tiberius Gracchus. These were policies of agrarian reform bitterly opposed by members of the senatorial aristocracy and wealthy equestrians with whom Cicero had cast his lot. Cicero’s rather utopian aim was to force a union of interests, his cherished concordia ordinum. Caesar’s demise may have offered Cicero an opening for the resurrection of this scheme. In any case, Caesar’s amici (friends) might be detached from venerating his memory and enrolled in the republican column. The tug between the claims of friendship and country, the theme of Cicero’s dialogue, is beautifully illustrated by the letters exchanged between Cicero and Gaius Matius, whose devotion to Caesar never flags. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Matius gets the better of Cicero. He underscores Cicero’s argument that friendship must play second fiddle to the country’s interest, observing that it was anything but certain that Caesar’s assassination was in that interest. How right that turned out to be as republic gave way to principate with Cicero as one of the first victims. By introducing these letters, Shklar might have provided her auditors a chance to plumb an ethical dilemma.

ANOTHER DILEMMA concerning obligation that Shklar dwells upon is in Shakespeare’s Richard II. It centers upon “that of a ruler, an anointed king specifically, to his divine self and office, and what he owes himself.” Shklar is alluding to the thesis of Ernst Kantorowicz’s celebrated The King’s Two Bodies. In his first chapter, Kantorowicz examined the tragic downfall of Richard under the lens of the medieval doctrine that the king was unique among mortals, resembling Christ in possessing a divine along with a mortal body. His natural body may dissolve; his divine self is eternal. That gives a new twist to Richard’s self-pitying soliloquies: not only is he Christ’s anointed deputy, he is also in some sense a divine being. Kantorowicz himself did not point to a line in the play that explicitly refers to the two bodies. None of the rebels mentions it. That Richard, like Saul and David, is “the Lord’s anointed” and may not be overthrown except by the Lord is an insistent theme, but from anointment it does not follow that the anointed is blessed with a body—not a soul—that survives his natural one. Richard 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?” It seems supererogatory to suppose with Shklar that Richard has in mind his two bodies. Rather, he has painfully won insight into his common humanity; Lear is in the offing.

Shklar goes on to observe that only the women in the play “feel ties of personal loyalty” and that the “lack of political friendship” on the part of the men is a sign that Shakespeare’s world is moving into a new and Machiavellian era. Divine right is on the way out. Power politics is in. But Bolingbroke’s rise had little of the deviousness about it that would be “Machiavellian.” The kingdom virtually fell into his lap. The play’s true interest rests in Richard’s response to his dethronement. The epithet “Machiavellian” should not be stretched to cover any act of sly and cruel ambition.

SHKLAR COMES to her own in the lectures devoted to modern times. She examines why Americans who are “...rather more loyal to their country than have [been] the citizens of other countries” regularly indulged in orgies of ferreting out disloyal subversives. In discussing Henry David Thoreau’s On Civil Disobedience, she strikes the appropriate balance between admiration for individual conscience with distaste for intense self-centeredness. Her intellectual prowess is also on display as she traverses the life and writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that her writings continue to attract notice. Writing in July 2018 in Foreign Policy, for example, Jacob T. Levy declared that

in the wake of the political catastrophes of the 20th century, she saw more clearly than most what was truly important to the liberal political project. Without building a system or offering a blueprint for utopia, but also without retreating into anti-political disdain for the fallen world, she offered a theory rich with real political wisdom. That kind of wisdom has been neglected, and is needed, in the defense of liberal governance against authoritarianism today.

Indeed, Shklar’s work on obligation and the right of citizens to freedom of fear has acquired a fresh salience. It would be a pity if it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Her collection of essays offers a welcome, if necessarily incomplete, opportunity to revisit the urgent themes that she devoted her life to exploring and explaining.

Gunther Heilbrunn is a retired classicist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Image: Reuters