Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,465

This is the grave of Judith Shklar.

Born in 1928 in Riga, Latvia, Judita Nisse, her given name, grew up in a family wealthy enough to escape the Nazis, going through Japan (of all places given the time) and ending up in Canada. When they landed in Seattle flying from Japan, they were arrested for doing so. But her father knew a lot of people in New York and he used his connections to get them out quickly. She went to McGill and then was onto Harvard for a dissertation, which she finished in 1955. Harvard immediately hired her, though it took until 1971 before she was granted tenure, the first woman in the Government Department to receive tenure. The stories of early female faculty are almost always full of horrors (the historian Gordon Wood was known to simply refuse to speak to his female colleagues and I have heard this from multiple Brown people) and I am sure she had more than her share. She married her husband Gerald (a professor of oral pathology) and took his name. Harvard was confused with what to do with a woman having children, but they worked it out and allowed her to keep her job (which was hardly a given in the late 50s).

Now, I am no expert at philosophy, even liberal political philosophy. I’m just an unfrozen caveman historian after all. Given that the commenters here are a more philosophical lot, I will keep this brief and let you all just go ahead with it in comments. Shklar became an expert on the political philosophy of liberalism that developed in the 18th century and she continued her expertise through the 20th century developments in the field. Her main personal concern was the issue of cruelty. While I fully admit that I really have barely even heard of her before this (I was like, hey I think I know that name! when I took the picture, I am sure that the commenters here are largely big fans since she was so known for articulating a strong defense of liberalism, including the years when the right began attacking it more effectively and rolling it back at all levels of government. She also strongly believed that political philosophers too often ignored injustice, preferring to think through ideal visions of government rather than actual people engaging in actual government, often very badly.

Shklar’s books included After Utopia (1957), Legalism (1963), Men and Citizens (1969), Freedom and Independence (1976), Ordinary Vices (1984) and Montesquieu (1987). There are many, many essays and book chapters too.

In 1984, Shklar won a MacArthur Genius Grant. In 1989-90, she was president of the American Political Science Association, in one of its non-picket line crossing years.

Shklar had a heart attack in 1992 that killed her. She was 63 years old. She was still an active teacher and people at Harvard were genuinely devastated. She was known for very good teaching and had won teaching awards there. You can’t say that about a lot of first rate scholars, that’s for sure. This is short, but I am sure that the comments can be productive for a lot of people so let’s leave it at that.

Judith Shklar is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other APSA presidents in this series, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lucien Pye, the Sinologist who headed APSA in 1988-89, is also in Cambridge (of course; what would political science be without thinking the Ivies are all that mattered, not that historians are much better on this, after all, if the professions actually cared about the majority of its members, they’d name adjuncts or non-tenure track faculty as president since they would actually know what they are talking about in terms of the field’s problems) and Susanne Rudolph, an expert in South Asia who was president in 2003-04, is in Barnard, Vermont. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

I am now in LA on my grave/conference trip so if anyone wants to keep helping this series out, I appreciate it a lot! I picked up a mere 75 graves yesterday!