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The Faces of Injustice
Shklar's 1990 Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School, published as the book that definitively articulated the distinction between misfortune and injustice — and the political labor required to keep avoidable suffering from being classified as natural.
The Faces of Injustice (1990) is Shklar's most rigorous treatment of the central distinction her framework depends on: the distinction between misfortune and injustice. Based on the Storrs Lectures Shklar delivered at Yale Law School in 1988, the book argues that the classification of suffering is not a neutral empirical judgment but a political act, performed by those with the authority to classify in the interest of those who benefit from the classification. The book demonstrates, through sustained engagement with historical cases, that the classification of avoidable suffering as misfortune has been the most reliable instrument of political domination across the history of modern states.
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The book's central methodological move is the analysis of what Shklar calls "passive injustice" — the failure to act against injustice when acting would have been possible. The concept allows her to identify political harm produced not by active malice but by