Dispersion of Power

Shklar's deepest institutional commitment — the commitment that runs beneath her analyses of cruelty, injustice, and fear — is to the dispersion of power among a multiplicity of politically active groups. The commitment is not a preference for pluralism as a cultural value. It is a structural conclusion derived from the historical record she spent forty years studying. Concentrated power, whether in the hands of a state, a class, an institution, or a technology company, reliably produces cruelty because the absence of counter-powers removes the structural constraint that prevents cruelty's exercise. The liberalism of fear is therefore not neutral about institutional design. It actively favors arrangements that prevent the accumulation of power in any single location, because every such accumulation creates the precondition for the worst outcomes the framework exists to prevent.