ABSTRACT
The conclusion opens by explicitly applying to Shklar three questions she herself had posed to the ideas she was pondering in her 1955 dissertation, “Fate and Futility”: how did a theory come to acquire its present character? How does it look at history? What does it see there? It retraces Shklar’s reasoned skepticism and her faith in politics, and resistance to its being fated and futile. It focuses its gaze on oppression and injustice, and hence I suggest that her liberalism of fear cannot be considered as minimalistic and unambitious. In fact, I suggest that Shklar’s vision of effective citizenship and of the empowerment of permanent minorities constitutes today a very promising answer to the anxieties expressed by the turn to populism.
