American Citizenship and The Faces of Injustice
Ryan, Alan
AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP: THE QUEST FOR INCLUSION, by Judith N. Shklar. Harvard University Press, 1990. 120 pp. $17.95. THE FACES OF INJUSTICE, by Judith H. Shklar, Yale University Press, 1990. 144...
...Shklar is quick to admit the obvious counter—of course we must beware of overdoing the search for scapegoats or we shall live in a world of resentful and superstitious terror...
...The reader is taken round a gallery of moral mishaps and moral responses, shown the pictures in detail, shown how to attend to their salient features, and encouraged to go and look at the world with eyes newly opened or newly educated...
...they will die in larger numbers because corrupt politicians pocketed the money that ought to have been spent on hospitals, or on the ambulances to take them there...
...What she says very well is that inclusion demands more than the vote, even though it certainly demands the vote, too...
...Shklar's picture of the American republic is that of a society built upon the ideal of inclusion...
...The gardener owns his plot, and Rousseau more than once observed that property was even more sacred than the political bond itself...
...Her villains include the bystander who fails to intervene when someone is attacked, the teacher who fails to denounce the colleague who hands out arbitrary grades, the people in the supermarket line who fail to stand by the fellowshopper who is cheated by the checkout clerk and given no help by the store manager...
...The boy is heartbroken and furious...
...The rationalist asks whether our twenty-year-old selves are really to be reproached for inflicting an unmerited early death on our fifty-year-old selves...
...She does with the idea of being able to earn one's own living things that conservatives have been too mean spirited to think and socialists have been rather afraid to say in case the conservatives twist them in wicked ways...
...Finding ourselves dying, we reproach ourselves for the misdeeds of our youth...
...It is the basis of those expectations that is the decisive point, and it is their account of that basis that puts Rousseau and Shklar in the same camp...
...Rousseau prided himself on being the foremost painter of the human heart who had ever written about man and society, and it is that quality in Rousseau that Shklar admires and that style of argument that she emulates...
...144 pp...
...One reason for taking the cheerful view is that human beings find it hard to live in a world where too much is put down to misfortune or blind bad luck...
...Part of the explanation is that the idle and the comfortable dismiss what befalls the less happy members of society as mere "misfortune...
...What in this is misfortune, what injustice...
...Shklar has an idea, which is never fully developed, but which has several attractive—perhaps rather disparately attractive—features...
...the pain is the pain of exclusion, the pain of being visibly held to be of no particular account...
...When an earthquake levels a city, the dead include many whose houses collapsed because they were poorly constructed, many who were forced to live in dangerous apartment buildings because they were the least well off in an iniquitous distribution of income and wealth...
...Still, such books are so obviously addressed by professors to professors that one sometimes wonders whether publication is quite the right term for what has happened to them...
...Our sense of injustice is aroused when we feel that other people might have rallied round to shield us from misfortune and just didn't care to...
...Perhaps the most fiercely anti-academic quality of both books is their hostility to general principles, universal truths, moral and political laws...
...Expectations, however, are part of the merely formal analysis of grievance...
...The paradigm case of the noncitizen is the slave...
...Injustice strikes the fine oldfashioned note of the dissenting minister rebuking SUMMER • 1991 • 435 Books his flock for moral and intellectual laziness...
...She takes a cheerful view of the American inclination to assume that somebody out there ought to be sued whenever anything goes wrong...
...The American obsession with being an independent, self-reliant, citizen of a republic has a meaning it could only have acquired in a society where slavery in the full and proper sense was a known institution...
...The old aristocratic conception of injustice relied on a concept of wounded honor...
...Both started out life as distinguished public lectures...
...It is a pity to abridge Shklar's own discussion of all these subjects, however...
...A second drive behind the concentration on injustice rather than justice lies in an unusual view of moral psychology...
...It usually adds at least a little to the sum of human knowledge...
...As these homely examples suggest, it is the buildup of everyday wrongs that upsets her, and the accumulation of what a previous book —of that title in fact—called "ordinary vices...
...The slave was forever shut out of such a society, and that was part of the peculiar injustice of slavery and the importance of the vote...
...More grandly, one might say that she provides a phenomenology of injustice and exclusion that helps us sharpen our sense of the virtues of democracy and social justice...
...There is no simple answer, but the outlines of a complicated one seem to be these...
...For both of them, modern injustice lies in the failure of solidarity...
...Shklar has an exceedingly sharp intelligence and is one of our most distinguished historians of ideas...
...Shklar follows Mary Douglas in thinking that the decision whether to allocate blame to mere nature or to human malignity follows culture rather than nature...
...Rousseau's story of young Emile's education in the concept of justice is, however, as ambiguous as most things in Rousseau, and more ambiguous than Shklar lets on...
...when they come up, the enraged gardener tears them up and throws them out...
...What is attractive about the books under discussion taken together is the way her argument about exclusion and inclusion carries across from the one to the other...
...These antipathies yield striking results...
...Injustice is particularly strong on this...
...Certainly, defeated expectation is one aspect of it, and it is what reduces young Emile to tears, until he understands that he had no business expecting to grow his beans on another's land...
...The sense of injustice can be overdone as well as inadequately cultivated...
...Once again, one wishes that Shklar would say more about the balancing act that squares the injustice of robbing us of the fruits of our labor with the injustice of forcing somebody to part with his or her property— or at least that she would press Rousseau a bit harder on which injustices are worse than which...
...Much of the pleasure of reading her lies in the innumerable asides and excursions off the main track that both lighten the main argument and lend it the relaxed authority that has for once translated so well from podium to page...
...The crucial question is what underlies his acute sense of having been treated unjustly and what underlies her willingness to take him so seriously...
...In essence, what Shklar offers is a series of vivid and pointed moral pictures...
...Shklar takes Rousseau's purpose to be that of showing the painfulness of injustice—little Emile 436 • DISSENT Books had lavished his labor on his crop only to see it invaded...
...American Citizenship is built round the great but still underdiscussed contrast between the condition of the slave and the condition of the citizen...
...Once again, it is Rousseau who presides over the argument...
...They seem remote from public life, untethered to matters of public concern, and cast in an idiom that no member of the public speaks or willingly reads...
...Their style is entirely personal, but not in the least conversational...
...That much is tolerably simple...
...it helps its author up the professorial ladder and disseminates the latest acceptable scholarship...
...What this entails is not a punitive conception of "workfare," which is as far as conservatives ever manage to get, but a commitment to the older ideal that work should be available for everyone...
...Nobody could quarrel with Shklar's emphasis on Rousseau's talents as a painter of the sentiments she concentrates on...
...the aristocrat had a strong sense of what was his due and felt outrage when his self-esteem was slighted...
...19.95...
...We die more comfortably reproaching ourselves with self-destruction than facing the fact that our death has no meaning, no moral color, and is the sort of accident that might happen to anyone and just happens to be happening to us...
...They say that where there is no responsible human agent at fault, there is no possibility of injustice...
...As an academic production it is often admirable...
...If Shklar has rather little to say about how to steer the proper line between the Scylla of moral obtuseness and the Charybdis of pointless resentment, she might doubtless reply that she can give us a compass and a map, but we must provide our own good sense in using them...
...The thought is that many political thinkers go on and on and on about justice but few ever attend to injustice...
...But it is quite as much Rousseau's purpose to tech Emile the sanctity of property...
...The self-respecting citizen must, save in very special conditions, be able to support himself or herself...
...The thought that the welfare provisions of SUMMER • 1991 • 437 Books Western European states do not reflect the dependent condition of the unemployed but meet their rights as members of an inclusive society is fighting against old terrors...
...An English radical who accused Pitt and his ministers of reducing freeborn Englishmen to slavery was rounding up the usual metaphors...
...If the main setting in which work was always there to be done was the slave-based plantation, a hundred and thirty years is not long to forget that institution and its horrors...
...All too often, the kind of essay in political thought that hits the bookstores wearing the wrapper of a distinguished university press makes one's heart sink...
...to the degree that they were treated as the property of their husbands, women suffered the same indignity...
...Judith Shklar's brisk little books are wonderfully unlike that...
...Rousseau's conception of justice is attuned to modern, democratic, egalitarian humanity...
...Little Emile's tutor encourages the boy to plant beans in the plot already cultivated by the gardener...
...The presiding saint is Rousseau rather than Paul, but the model is more lay sermon than what currently passes for political philosophy or the history of political thought...
...Drawing on Rousseau's Emile, Shklar holds that the individual's capacity to lead a moral life lies in the instinctive resentment all of us feel when an injustice is perpetrated upon us...
...In both books Shklar wields the tradition of political reflection as rational dissenters used to wield the Bible—as a source of moral insight about the problems of ourselves, here and now...
...But the line between misfortune and injustice is politically contrived...
...So strongly does Shklar feel this that she spends far more of her time attacking "passive injustice" than she does the fully paid-up active forms of wickedness...
...Shklar thinks that question futile...
...What Shklar's emphasis on the legacy of slavery adds is an account of why welfare recipients are so demoralized, why workfare has such punitive overtones, perhaps even why the United States is at once deeply committed to the Rousseauian ideal of independence through work and deeply terrified of organizing economic life in a way that makes the ideal realizable...
...An American who feared that the rise of big business would reduce northern workmen to the same condition as the slave was expressing an altogether more vivid sentiment...
...It is a lecturer's style, often a preacher's style...
...Both books may find less of an academic audience than they would have done if Shklar had forced herself to say rather more about just what she was up to, but one would not wish her to turn aside from what she does so well to explain how she does it...
...American Citizenship sounds a more upbeat note, encouraging us to recall the generous impulses implicit in American democracy, and urging us to extend them to those who have been excluded by race, gender, or their inability to find steady and worthwhile employment...
...But unlike conservative defenders of a curriculum built around the Great Books, she doesn't see the work of the illustrious dead as a storehouse of eternal truths and general principles...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
