ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents Shklar’s first book as the inaugural act of Shklar’s lifetime engagement with the Enlightenment. Far from being the first link in a chain ultimately conducing to totalitarianism, the Enlightenment was for her the source of our hopes to contrast it. After Utopia displays both Shklar’s commitment to some of the values of the Enlightenment, and her skepticism towards some of its excesses. It does so via a critique of the Enlightenment’s critics in the 19th century (the romantics and the Christian conservatives), and their 20th century epigones (the existentialists and the Christian fatalists). With “modernity,” these critics threw away the passion and optimism of the philosophes and yielded instead to despair and a sense of the futility of political action in the face of the irresistible forces of culture, history, economics, and religion. Shklar resists these critics’ suspicion towards democracy, and their elitism in dismissing ordinary individuals as masses bringing havoc to government. Shklar includes Hannah Arendt among the existentialists espousing a politics of despair. Instead, Shklar defends the dignity and autonomy of politics. Her “ordinary individual” is not the interchangeable unit constitutive of the mass, but a concrete human being stripped of the inequality of rank with which the 18th century strove to do away.
