Bajohr's dual expertise produces an extension of Shklar's framework that Shklar herself did not reach. His observation that commercial AI systems are vocabulary-imposing systems — determining what can be said fluently and what cannot, what arguments are readily available and what require effort to construct — connects Shklar's concern about authorities who possess the unconditional right to impose beliefs and vocabulary on citizens to the specific political economy of contemporary language models. The fishbowl of the powerful is not merely perceptual; it is linguistic. The control exercised by system builders over the conditions of articulation is a form of power that standard accountability frameworks do not yet adequately address.
His work on literary production by AI — including his 2024 essay "Writing at a Distance" and earlier work on "Algorithmic Empathy" — develops the specific ways in which language models both enable new forms of creative collaboration and produce new forms of structural asymmetry. The writer working with commercial AI tools is not simply gaining capability; she is operating within constraints set by business models she cannot inspect, training data she cannot see, and optimization targets she cannot interrogate. Bajohr's analysis of this condition proceeds without the utopian or dystopian framings that have dominated AI discourse, keeping the focus on the specific institutional arrangements that shape what the collaboration can and cannot produce.
His translation and interpretive work on Shklar has emphasized aspects of her thought that Anglophone Shklar scholarship has sometimes underdeveloped — particularly the European intellectual background she brought to her American career, and the specific inflections of her concept of cruelty within Continental philosophical traditions. This scholarly foundation grounds his AI criticism in a political-philosophical framework more structured than most contemporary AI ethics work manages, and his AI criticism returns the favor by making Shklar's frameworks newly legible to readers whose primary interest is in technology rather than political theory.
Bajohr's position within both fields is important because it models the interdisciplinary work that the AI transition demands. Shklar's political theory without technical specificity produces analysis too general to guide institutional design. Technical analysis without political-theoretical grounding produces recommendations that fail to address the structural conditions producing the problems they attempt to solve. Bajohr's scholarship demonstrates that the combination is not merely possible but generative — that the frameworks Shklar developed across the second half of the twentieth century apply to twenty-first-century technology with a precision that justifies sustained scholarly effort.
Bajohr received his doctorate in modern German literature from Humboldt University of Berlin and has held positions at institutions including the University of Basel and Leuphana University Lüneburg. His published work includes books on philosophical anthropology, literary theory, and AI criticism, alongside German-language translations and editions of Shklar's writings.
Dual expertise enables rare bridging. Deep scholarly work on both Shklar and AI allows the extension of frameworks across domains most scholars treat as separate.
AI as vocabulary-imposing system. Commercial language models exercise a form of power Shklar identified but did not live to see realized in specific technological form.
Political economy of language. The conditions of articulation are shaped by business models, training data, and optimization targets the user cannot inspect.
Neither utopia nor dystopia. Bajohr's analysis maintains the structural focus Shklar's framework demands, resisting the binary framings that dominate AI discourse.
Interdisciplinary work is required. The AI transition cannot be adequately analyzed from political theory alone or from technical criticism alone; the combination is generative and increasingly necessary.