Ordinary Vices
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.
In the AI Story
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 not antiquarian. Shklar's concern throughout is with the contemporary political stakes of how we classify vices, what we privilege in political analysis, and what we allow ourselves to miss. Her conclusion — that cruelty must be placed first among political vices — is not a reading of the historical record but an argument about what the historical record demands of contemporary political theory.
The argument for putting cruelty first rests on cruelty's specific political function. Unlike hypocrisy, which corrodes trust but preserves agency, or snobbery, which wounds dignity but does not destroy the capacity for resistance, cruelty forecloses the victim's capacity to function as a political agent. The person subjected to systematic cruelty cannot resist, cannot organize, cannot articulate what is being done to her. Cruelty is therefore not one vice among others but the vice that determines whether the political conditions exist for addressing every other wrong. Placing it first is not rhetorical emphasis; it is a structural commitment about what political theory must be.
The book's continuing relevance derives from Shklar's refusal to limit cruelty to its spectacular forms. The cruelty that concerns her most is institutional cruelty — the suffering produced by arrangements of power that operate through systems rather than through identifiable persons. This emphasis makes the book unexpectedly applicable to contemporary forms of structural harm that Shklar herself did not analyze but whose character her framework illuminates. The AI transition's documented production of task seepage, displacement without transitional support, and the erosion of the cognitive conditions under which human flourishing depends all fit the pattern of institutional cruelty that Ordinary Vices equipped political theory to recognize.
The book's reception has grown steadily since its publication. Initial reviews were respectful but sometimes puzzled by Shklar's refusal to provide a systematic theory. Subsequent decades have treated the book's methodological caution as a strength rather than a weakness, and its central commitment — that political theory must begin from what must be prevented rather than from what might be achieved — has become one of the most widely cited methodological positions in contemporary liberal political philosophy.
Origin
Ordinary Vices was published by Harvard University Press in 1984, the product of Shklar's work during the late 1970s and early 1980s at Harvard. The book drew on her earlier studies of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Hegel, and provided the foundation for her subsequent works on legalism, injustice, and the liberalism of fear.
Key Ideas
Cruelty comes first. Among all political vices, cruelty occupies a singular position because it forecloses the victim's capacity for political agency.
Ordinary vices matter. The vices that operate constantly in ordinary political life produce more actual harm than the grand vices political theory has historically centered.
Method is philological and historical. Tracing concepts across canonical texts reveals what systematic theorizing conceals about the actual operation of political concepts.
Institutional cruelty is the dominant form. The cruelties that matter most operate through systems and arrangements rather than through identifiable persons.
Prevention precedes flourishing. Political theory must begin from what must be prevented before articulating what might be achieved.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Shklar, Judith. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
- Yack, Bernard, ed. Liberalism Without Illusions. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Forrester, Katrina. In the Shadow of Justice. Princeton, 2019.