ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 integrates Shklar’s call to put cruelty first in the structure of what she called the liberalism of fear, the institutional setting within which cruelty is considered the summum malum. It also presents Shklar’s notions of cruelty and fear as very real experiences in the perspective of the victims, but also rather subjective and hence, contra to some of Shklar critics, it suggests that these notions are not essentialized substitutes for natural law, aiming at closing the political agon, but rather grounds for provocation and for the opening of the agon. This is what made her appealing to Richard Rorty’s critique of foundationalism. The chapter concludes by noting the anti-religious and anti-colonial origins of the liberalism of fear and its difference from other agonistic understandings of politics, in particular those of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin.
