PERSON
Judith Shklar
The political philosopher who fled Riga one step ahead of annihilation and spent four decades arguing that the first obligation of any political order is not to build the good society but to prevent the worst—and whose liberalism of fear has become the sharpest available instrument for interrogating what AI is already doing to people.
Judith Shklar came to political philosophy through exile, and exile is the education she never stopped drawing on. Born in Riga in 1928, she fled the Baltic as a child in advance of the Nazi and Soviet occupations, arriving in Montreal after a journey through Japan and the United States that deposited in her the specific knowledge of someone who has watched a political order fail its people before the ideology that destroyed it was even fully articulated. From that formation she built a political philosophy of unusual modesty and unusual force: the
liberalism of fear, which does not begin where most theories begin—with a vision of the good society, a blueprint for flourishing—but at the bottom, with the question every refugee learns to ask: what is the worst that can happen, and what structures prevent it? Her central move