Judith Shklar, Friedrich Hayek, and the Liberalisms of Fear

Judith Shklar is commonly acknowledged to be one of the twentieth century’s major American political theorists. Less well known, however, is that from the beginning of her publishing career until nearly the end, she consistently turned to the Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek as a foil for her own work. I argue that despite Shklar’s extended critique of Hayek, her liberalism of fear is much closer to his view than she (or her many interpreters) admit—in part due to her consistent misreading, even caricaturing, of his work. In fact, a Hayekian right-variant of the liberalism of fear, once properly understood, overlaps with her left-variant to a remarkable degree. I also defend Shklar and Hayek against Samuel Moyn’s accusation that they are Cold War liberals who abandoned the Enlightenment at great cost to liberalism and to liberal societies more generally.