ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 turns to the rising of Shklar’s own voice from the background of her studies in the history of ideas on Hegel, Montesquieu, and Montaigne. It dwells on her famous call that cruelty be “put first” among evils, and on her definition of cruelty as the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional pain, on a weaker being by a powerful one, to argue for a radical rather than conservative reading of that call. Revolt against oppression, by definition, does not fit the semantic ground of Shklar’s definition of cruelty. The chapter also calls for skepticism about using Shklar’s call as a ready-made policy device: instead, Shklar characterized the response to her call as a walk in a moral minefield. Indeed, the difficulty in identifying the victim of cruelty demands much political judgment and contestation.
