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Ordinary Vices
Shklar's 1984 landmark examining cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy — the book in which putting cruelty first received its first full articulation as a foundational principle of political philosophy.
Ordinary Vices (1984) is Judith Shklar's foundational analytical work, the book in which her mature political philosophy first found systematic form. The book examines five vices that political theory had historically treated as secondary concerns — cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy — and argues that rigorous attention to these ordinary vices reveals more about the actual operation of political power than attention to the grand vices of tyranny, corruption, and violence that political theory had traditionally centered. The book's opening move — its insistence on putting cruelty first as a political priority — became one of the most influential methodological interventions in late twentieth-century political philosophy.
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The book's method is philological and historical rather than systematic. Shklar traces the treatment of each vice across canonical political-philosophical texts — Montaigne, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Emerson, Hawthorne — showing how the vices have been understood differently across traditions and how these differences reflect underlying political commitments. The method is