Political Evil and The Limits of Liberal Theory

Political Evil and the Limits of Liberal Theory
Matthew Cole
I want to begin by assessing two views of political life generally, and of
liberal democracy specifically, in terms of their resources and limitations in
responding to political evil. I will first take up the critical reconstruction of
liberalism developed in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Judith Shklar,
particularly in the former’s Moral Man and Immoral Society and the latter’s
“The Liberalism of Fear.” Their view of politics emphasizes the risk of
systemic cruelty and injustice, which they see as resulting from social and
psychological features that must permanently limit liberal aspirations. In
particular, this approach denies that moral doctrines concerned with either
rationality or self-transcendence should be important aspects of liberal
political philosophy. The two theorists share a conception of politics as a
sphere of practical activity both separable and separate from ethics and
morality. On their view, liberalism is best conceived as a normatively thin
institutionalism committed to the constraint of arbitrary power via legal and

political means. In the alternative view, politics proceeds from practical and
moral imperatives. Theorists such as Richard Rorty and Seyla Benhabib
argue that politics should aim at the transformation of participants and the
basic social structure. They make utopian politics central to their response to
cruelty and injustice: even as they acknowledge that their ideals may be
unattainable, they cannot imagine a politics which does not contemplate
them. What is at stake in the conflict between the two views is how to
conceive of political life if the problem of political evil is taken to be central,
rather than peripheral. I will present and comment critically on each view,
before offering notes towards a conception of political life which aims a little
beyond their impasses. Neither institutionalism nor utopianism, I will argue,
makes an adequate response to the persistence of political atrocity. For that,
liberalism must incorporate a theory of politics as critical engagement.
I use the term “political evil” to refer to the class of severe state brutalities
which defined the previous century for many political historians, and which
persist into this one: genocide, torture, forced starvation, arbitrary
imprisonment, and systematic oppression and persecution of many kinds.
Taking such atrocities as paradigmatic, Claudia Card has defined evil as:
… harm that is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2)

culpably inflicted (or tolerated, aggravated, or maintained), and that
(3) deprives, or seriously risks depriving, others of the basics that are
necessary to make a life possible and tolerable or decent (or to make a
2
death decent).1
When committed by a social group, institution, or governmental agent, these
harms qualify as political evils. And though neither Reinhold Niebuhr nor
Judith Shklar uses the term themselves, it describes precisely the sort of
actions which motivate their critical approaches to liberalism.2
I consider Niebuhr and Shklar’s critique important for contemporary
political theory because it speaks to the social and psychological origins of
political evil, thereby presenting a multi-dimensional account of its
motivations and consequences. By contrast, a liberal interpretation of
political evil as a severe type of injustice or rights violation only gets at the
third aspect of Card’s definition – risk/deprivation – while missing what is
significant in the fact that such harms are foreseeable and culpably inflicted.
These psychological dimensions of political evil have, historically, received
little attention from liberal philosophers. They are attended to in Kant’s
theory of “radical evil,” but in writing about that idea Kant did not mean to
comment on the behavior of social groups or political institutions. In all of the
liberal tradition, only Arendt addresses evil with the psychological and social
detail of Niebuhr and Shklar. But her theory makes a less aggressive revision
of the relationship between political theory and moral philosophy. For that
1
Card, Claudia. 2005. The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, New York: Oxford
University Press. 16.
2
Niebuhr often describes severe injustices and their psychological motivations as
“evil”, but never, specifically as “political evil.” Shklar only uses “evil” infrequently,
but refers once to her own “preoccupation with political evil” (1998. “Obligation,
Loyalty, Exile,” in Political Thought & Political Thinkers, ed. Kateb, George, Chicago:
University of Chicago. 38). In this paper, though, I will demonstrate that the
substantive aspects of Card’s definition fit with each theorists understanding of
political atrocity.
2
reason, her thought is less useful in this contrastive exercise, though I will
attend to some aspects of her political philosophy in the third section of this
paper.
The basic structure of Niebuhr and Shklar’s critique of liberalism is as
follows. (1) Political evil originates from moral-psychological and social-
institutional charactersitics inherent in political life. (2) Both the
psychological and social origins of political evil describe permanent limits on
capacities for individual and collective morality. (3) Rights-based and
educative liberalisms take too little account of these limits. (4) Rather than
attempting to fulfill moral imperatives through politics, liberals should focus
on the legal and political constraint of arbitrary power. (5) The ultimate
justification for liberal governance – and the final measure of its success – is
its ability to secure effective constraints on power, and thereby ameliorate
political evil. These conclusions begin from descriptive claims about how
humans interact with each other in social and political contexts. According to
Niebuhr and Shklar, taking political evil seriously requires an inquiry into its
origins – and once those are understood, liberalism’s foundational
understanding of social character will need to be revised. Insofar as they
allege that liberalism goes wrong in its basic depiction of social life,
mistaking permanent limitations for proximate, recuperable conditions, the
object of their critique is liberalism’s social and political ontology.3
3
For this understanding of ontological critique, see Markell, Patchen. 2003. Bound
By Recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 4.
2
The first level of their analysis is the moral psychology of the individual in
society. According to Niebuhr, “evil is always the assertion of some self-
interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the
immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order
of the world.”4 Though reason and sympathy can work against destructive
selfishness, they cannot fully supplant the natural drives to egoism so that a
person will “see the needs of others as vividly as he recognizes his own, or to
be as quick in his aid to remote as to immediately revealed necessities.”5
Niebuhr also argues that emotional and social contacts provide a stronger
basis for obligation than moral, civic, and institutional abstractions. This
tendency to prefer the concrete relationship to the pull of principle
“contributes to the moral chaos of civilisation, in which life is related to life
mechanically and not organically, and in which mutual responsibilities
increase and personal contacts decrease.”6 In describing society as
mechanical, Niebuhr attends to the ways in which institutions mediate
relationships and encourage their conceptualization as means rather than as
ends. The proximate bonds between kin and community exist in relatively
few of our interactions. The results are especially pronounced in politics,
where ties between governors and the governed, as well as those between
citizens, are almost entirely institutional.
4
Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1944. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A
Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense, New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons. 9.
5
Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1932. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and
Politics, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 28.
6
Ibid, 29.
2
Shklar is less interested in providing a comprehensive theory of human
behavior. Her argument is inductive, and, beginning with the social fact of
institutionalized cruelty, arrives at claims about the likely behaviors of
political actors. If, as she argues, the suspicion that the powerful will inflict
cruelties on the weak is “amply justified by every page of history,” then
Shklar’s description of political evil “need not assume anything about human
nature.”7 Nonetheless, her political theory cannot but ask “what the motives
of social agents are”, this making her social and historical account of cruelty
“insuperably dependent on psychology.”8 The definition of cruelty offered in
“The Liberalism of Fear” includes a claim about its motivation: it is inflicted
“in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible” of the perpetrator.9
Shklar’s notion of cruelty parallels Card’s definition of evil insofar as it calls
attention to the fact that the suffering of the victim is acknowledged and
calculated by the perpetrator. Shklar advises liberals to always suspect that
people, and powerful people in particular, will incline to such selfish behavior.
Both theorists supplement their psychological analysis by considering the
social and institutional practices by which groups of people arrive at and
pursue their ends. This allows them to account for atrocities which do not
follow from obvious individual selfishness, those in which the invocation of a
practical or moral imperative allows perpetrators to justify their crimes and
others to justify their complicity. To Niebuhr, such justifications provide
7
Shklar, Judith. 1998. “The Liberalism of Fear.” In Political Thought & Political
Thinkers, ed. Kateb, G., Chicago: University of Chicago. 10, 17.
8
Shklar, Judith. 1998. “Squaring the Hermeneutic Circle.” 89.
9
Shklar. “The Liberalism of Fear.” 11.
2
pretexts for the egoism of groups, demonstrating the same callous disregard
for others that designates individual evil. His thesis in Moral Man and
Immoral Society is that “in every human group there is less reason to guide
and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to
comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism.”10
Individuals in society are often forced to compromise and consider the
perspectives of others. But groups, in seeking cohesion, sanctify their ends in
terms of morality or ideology, allowing greater harms to be rationalized and
for those who obstruct a given end to be vilified. This understanding
motivates Shklar’s skepticism towards “causes,” since even the most
appealing “could function as instruments of torture or craven excuses for
it.”11 Likewise, she doubts the invocation of necessity in organized society,
calling it “the usual excuse for our most unspeakable public acts.”12
Bound up with the selection and justification of ends is the way that
societies allocate and exercise power in their pursuit. Shklar sees the need
for societies to allocate power unequally in order to achieve even basic ends
as another permanent source of potential harm. She writes that the cause of
systemic cruelty,
…is not sadism, though sadistic individuals may flock to occupy

positions of power that permit them to indulge their urges. But public
cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by
differences in public power, and it almost always built into the system
of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their
10
Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society. xi.
11
Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear.” 15.
12
Shklar , Judith. 1984. Ordinary Vices, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 30.
2
essential functions.13
Social and political groups also use force and its threat to maintain order.
This, Niebuhr reasons, guarantees that “the coercive factor” must be “an
inevitable part of the process of social cohesion” even as “the same force
which makes for peace also makes for injustice.”14 Given a set of objectives
and some distribution of coercive power, all that is needed for social
institutions to author potentially severe evils is in place. But these are also
the least conditions for any social or political order to exist. Socialization and
organization, in short, enable their own evils.
The expectation that socialization might suppress the impulse to do evil is
not compatible with either theorist’s moral psychology. Shklar is at her most
scathing when she indicts liberal doctrines which look “to the constant
fulfillment of an ideal pre-established normative order, be it nature’s or
God’s, whose principles have to be realized in the lives of individual citizens”
on the grounds that these views incline to two sorts of utopian hopefulness:
one in which “society would be composed solely of rights-claiming citizens”
and another in which “institutions of learning will eventually replace politics
and government.”15 Niebuhr identifies a similar lack of prudence in "the
moralists, religious and secular, who imagine that the egoism of individuals
is being progressively checked by the development of rationality or the
13
14
Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society. 6-9.
15
Shklar “The Liberalism of Fear.” 8-9.
2
growth of a religiously inspired goodwill and that nothing but the continuance
of this process is necessary to establish social harmony between all.”16
That mistake becomes especially dangerous when made the basis of a
political theory. Expecting a society of equals to treat each other humanely
might be foolish, but expecting the same in a society marked by distinctions
of power courts total disaster. Measures to prevent lawlessness and brutality
cannot be merely rational or moral. Of the prospects for political morality,
Niebuhr writes:
Since the increasing complexity of society makes it impossible to bring

all those who are in charge of its intricate techniques and processes,
and who are therefore in possession of social power, under complete
control, it will always be necessary to rely partly upon the honesty and
self-restraint of those who are not socially restrained. But here again, it
will never be possible to insure moral antidotes sufficiently potent to
destroy the deleterious effects of the poison of power on character.17
Niebuhr and Shklar therefore reject the rights-based and educative
versions of liberalism which depend on an overestimated capacity for
morality and self-transcendence. Rights-based theories suppose that people
might deduce sets of entitlements and interests to which all can agree and,
from that basis, rationally adjudicate conflicts within and between groups. In
this way, a rational, moral law higher than self-interest would check the
temptations to evil rooted in egoism and power. Having rejected the
psychological basis of that conviction, Shklar sees no argument for its
political antecedent, the liberal thesis that “[t]he paradigm of politics is the
tribunal in which fair rules and decisions are made to satisfy the greatest
16
Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society. xii.
17
Ibid. 21.
2
possible number of demands made by individual citizens against one another
individually, and against the government or other socially powerful
institutions.”18 Niebuhr likewise suspects the basic assumption that reason or
morality can harmonize self-interest and the general welfare. Such a
correspondence “is never absolutely true in an immediate situation; and
such identity as could be validly claimed in an immediate situation is not
usually recognized by proponents of a particular interest.”19
If the liberalism of rights takes the rational and moral capacities as its
foundation, the educative version justifies liberal politics by the idea that
participation might instill those capacities. Nonetheless, the liberalism of
personal development works from the assumption that “growing rationality is
a guarantee of man’s growing morality” and therefore runs against the same
limits as the liberalism of rights.20 And if egoism is one barrier here,
institutional power is another that is more potent still. Niebuhr doubts that
moral instruction can follow from participation in the negotiation of interests
when “the victorious will is at least partly fashioned and crystallized by the
ruling oligarchy which has the instruments to express it,” thereby making
moral argument indissociable from power.21 Shklar articulates a similar
concern, based in her understanding of social-institutional ontology, which is
that, far from learning to transcend self-interests through solidarity with a
political community, individuals may only come to identify with the equally
18
19
Niebuhr. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. 28.
20
Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society. 37.
21
Ibid. 46.
2
immoral and irrational interests of a larger group.22 Participation in social and
political institutions may only exacerbate the drive to cruelty, give
expression to human evil on a magnified scale. This is the bleak suspicion
expressed in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians: its protagonist, on
observing the expansion of the empire’s cruel prisons does not suspect a
reversion to pre-social barbarism; rather he has seen “the black flower of
civilization” in bloom.23
Niebuhr and Shklar instead imagine a liberalism that prevents political
evil by placing legal and political constraints on the exercise of power.
Liberalism is, for Shklar, founded not on political morality but on the
antagonistic relationship between citizens and state agents, and within that
context it must “restrict itself to politics and to proposals to restrain potential
abusers of power in order to lift the burden of fear and favor from the
shoulders of adult women and men, who can then conduct their lives in
accordance with their own beliefs and preferences.”24 Likewise, Niebuhr
defends liberal society insofar as it “arms the individual with political and
constitutional power to resist the inordinate ambition of rulers, and to check
the tendency of the community to achieve order at the price of liberty.”25
Liberalism has its first and last justification in the design of institutions which
maintain freedom by impeding the individual and collective tendencies to
22
Shklar . “The Liberalism of Fear.” 18.
23
Coetzee, J.M. 1982. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin Books. 79.
24
Ibid. 13.
25
2
oppress, intimidate, injure, and coerce.
It is possible to identify four traits which characterize Niebuhr and
Shklar’s underlying view of politics – the view which, they propose, theorists
who take political evil seriously must adopt. First, politics is instrumental: it is
valuable insofar as it accomplishes valuable objectives. This denies that any
inherent value should be attached to political participation itself. Second,
politics is institutional: prescriptions for the function of social and political
institutions must be separated from prescriptions for the virtues, habits, and
behaviors of citizens. These traits are established by Niebuhr and Shklar’s
description and critique of the liberal program. Third, politics is normatively
thin: political prescriptions can and should be separated from the deep
theories of value appropriate to ethics, civics, and religion. Fourth, politics is
non-utopian: political theory should not attempt to answer questions about
the good life or the ideal society. The normatively thin, non-utopian character
of politics is what Shklar has in mind when she argues a distinction between
the type of prescriptivism appropriate to a “political doctrine” and that
appropriate to “a philosophy of life such as has traditionally been provided
by various forms of revealed religion and other comprehensive
Weltanschauungen.”26 Niebuhr’s contrastive writing on politics and religion
operates to similar effect, though, importantly, his notion of religious
morality refers not merely to the theological, but to a class of widely
visionary and idealistic philosophies. Such high aspirations belong to the
26
2
“individual moral ideal” and cannot be determinative in political theory.27
Rather, he enjoins a “frank dualism” between individual and social codes of
justice and morality.28
Such a political theory is open to a number of criticisms, but I want to
focus specifically on its shortcomings relative to its own metric of evaluation:
its use in mitigating the cruelest abuses of social and political power. A first
line of criticism has to do with the relationship between normative ideals and
legal-political prescriptions, and is highly similar to one Charles Taylor has
pursued against Isaiah Berlin’s theory of negative liberty.29 Taylor
demonstrates that conceptualizing freedom as the absence of external
constraints is inadequate, since this makes it impossible to explain why some
constraints are intolerable while others are trivial. That distinction rests on
the strong evaluative judgments that people make about what activities are
significant, which in turn rests on a substantive picture of what a good life
entails. Similarly, a liberalism which aims to prevent political evil must
defend evaluative distinctions between tolerable and intolerable uses of
state power. At the heart of Niebuhr’s concern with injustice and Shklar’s
concern with cruelty is precisely a notion that giving state agents license to
commit some types of actions makes it impossible for citizens to live a
decent life. The liberal justification for abjuring torture or arbitrary detention
is that citizens could enjoy a substantively better (as freer) life in a society
27
Neibuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society. 81.
28
Ibid, 271.
29
Taylor, Charles. 1979. “What’s Wrong With Negative Liberty?” In The Idea of
Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan, New York: Oxford University Press. 175-193.
2
not characterized by such practices, but less clear-cut instances will demand
more discerning standards, especially when dilemmas related to stability and
security demand trade-offs with individual rights. Any argument as to which
social-institutional arrangements would best facilitate the living of the good
life must be very nearly utopian insofar as it demands the theoretical
elaboration of alternative social structures. Even in less speculative modes,
critique and reform are grounded in the notion that institutions ought to
embody principles of right action, making them normatively thick if not yet
wholly utopian.
But even if the importance of institutional norms is conceded, such
principles will not motivate action in specific contexts absent a foundation in
the virtues and relationships which broadly constitute the “political culture”
of a democratic society. Here I am talking about the patterns of interaction,
behavior, and communication which members of a political community
expect from one another. Where political evil is concerned, the prevalence of
sympathy in a political culture is especially important. For example, the
extent to which legislators will have reason to constrain the executive’s
power to torture, arrest, or inflict injury will depend on how broadly they
conceive of their moral community and how vividly they can imagine the
suffering of the people who are likely to be abused. If the legislators are
xenophobic, callous, or unimaginative, they will have little reason to refuse
even excessive requests by the executive. It is not good enough, then, to say
that excessive power must be constrained, or even to specify a system for
2
the review and allocation of powers, because what will be judged excessive
in any given situation depends entirely on the ability of the decision-maker to
identify and sympathize with the people who stand to be victimized. This
remains true of citizens who lack any special influence in state decision-
making, in whose case we could ask whether they will demand that their
representatives support the existing constraints or whether they will protest
in case those demands are ignored. What kinds of institutional constraints
exist may ultimately matter less than whether or not citizens feel a sense of
solidarity with the likely victims of political evil, and in what they are willing
to risk in standing up for their ideals and for one another. Any prescriptive
theory which would address such norms of relational activity cannot be
subsumed under the thin, institutional rubric.
The sufficiency of an institutional theory can also be challenged by
reversing this line of argument: asking not how habits of thought and action
shape institutions, but investigating the implicit pedagogy of those
institutions and the problem-solving strategies which they encourage.
Certain institutions might contribute to political evil less in how they
distribute power, more in how they encourage their participants to think. This
concern is dramatized in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, when her
protagonist considers the utility of military organization:
Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the
sergeants could give the private orders, how the lieutenants could give
the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains… and so on up
to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take
them from none, except the commander in chief… He explained to Atro
that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was
2
indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve

the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to
enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily
and in great quantities when told to do so.30
More recently, some social psychologists have argued that torture is a crime
of “socialized obedience,” one which members of hierarchical organizations
have proven particularly willing to commit.31 After a century in which mass
crimes have been committed with the participation not only of executive
enforcers, but citizens and bureaucrats as well, those concerned with the
threat of political evil have good cause to demand that, whatever else our
political institutions accomplish, they should not encourage the type of
mindless obedience which LeGuin describes. Thinking about political
institutions solely in terms of what they constrain or allow does not do justice
to the deep causes of some of the worst political evils.
Nor can an institutionalist theory pose a convincing answer to the
problem of complicity, which factors heavily in Card’s discussion of evil.
Many atrocities that might be averted or at least substantially ameliorated
occur not simply because a perpetrator acts cruelly and abusively, but also
because bystanders who have the power to intervene choose not to.
Implicated here are the various psychological and social mechanisms which
humans use to dissociate themselves from the suffering of others. Recent
studies in moral psychology have demonstrated that where citizens believe
30
LeGuin, Urusula K. 1974. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, New York:
Harper’s & Row. 269
31
Kelman, Herbert. 1991. “The Social Context of Torture: Policy Process and
Authority Structure.” In The Politics of Pain: Torturers and Their Masters, Eds.,
Crelinsten, Ronald and Schmidt, Alex, Leiden, Univeristy of Lieden.
2
they are powerless to prevent an injustice, they will instead convince
themselves that no injustice has occurred. It is too hard, it seems, to
acknowledge evil and also to accept one’s own passivity in the face of it.
Better to pretend that whatever the victim has suffered, it could not have
occurred otherwise, was mere misfortune, or else the victims deserves it or
does not mind.32 This should give pause to those who emphasize the
distinction between policies which commit atrocities and those which merely
fail to alleviate them. Whether specific policies are viewed as actively
harmful or passively neglectful depends less on a robust distinction between
action and inaction, and more on the assumptions which precede
institutional decision-making - those which determine who will be consulted
or considered, and the standards by which an action will be judged
necessary, a cost acceptable, or an alternative not worth pursuing. As long
as political theories are tasked with the reform of institutions but not
permitted to theorize the pre-institutional relations between bystanders,
victims and perpetrators even relatively clear institutional prescriptions will
be ineffective guarantees of a tolerable political order.
These criticisms suggest that political evil cannot be addressed by a
theory made to Niebuhr and Shklar’s specifications. They gesture towards an
alternative view in which politics implies substantive moral imperatives,
rooted in norms of behavior and civic virtue from which questions of
32
For an extensive review of the psychological research on mechanisms for
displacing responsibility for injustice, see Hanson, John, and Hanson, Kathleen.
2006. “The Blame Frame: Justifying (Racial) Injustice in America,” The Harvard Civil
Liberties Law Review, Vol. 41. 418-429.
2
institutional design and political procedure cannot be detached. In the
following section I examine two recent formulations of this view, both of
which embrace transformative politics.
II
Richard Rorty and Seyla Benhabib are two contemporary theorists who
have defended the importance of utopian political theory. Their projects
differ in several important respects, especially as concerns what, if any,
epistemic “foundations” politics requires, but they share a commitment to
the realization of a society where political evil – and indeed, many less
severe sorts of injustice – would no longer exist. Rorty describes his
liberalism as a political theory for “people who think that cruelty is the worst
thing we do.”33 He lifts this definition from Shklar, and takes it as the basis
for his liberal utopia, in which social practices and institutions do not inflict
pain or humiliation. Likewise, Benhabib’s communicative ethics aims at
“institutions, practices and ways of life which promote non-violent conflict
resolution strategies and associative problem solving methods” and
therefore seeks to remove the psychological and institutional predicates of
political evil.34 Utopia, on this account, must be actualized through a series
of social and political transformations which would make the psychological
and institutional dispositions described by Niebuhr and Shklar less
33
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. xv.
34
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Geder, Community, and Postmodernism
in Contemporary Ethics, New York: Routledge. 49.
2
determinative of – and eventually, irrelevant to – associational life. Some of
the trappings of the rights-based and educative liberalisms discussed above
remain in the transformative theories of politics, but there are crucial
differences which suggest that theories like Banhabib’s and Rorty’s might
make more convincing responses to political evil.
Benhabib argues that utopian politics need not suppose that “when
individuals stop deceiving themselves and others, and discover what their
‘true’ needs are, they will discover them to be identical with those of others,
or at least in harmony with them.”35 She finds this description as sentimental
and unrealistic as Niebuhr and Shklar. In her vision political communication
aims not to uncover a pre-political identity of interest, but to establish such
an interest through a process that is “moral-transformative.”36 Conversation
and debate in a political context require citizens to engage in “enlarged
thought,” that is, to think about social conflict from alternative perspectives
as they find expression in public debate.37 Political participation transforms
the process of normative judgment so that citizens become better at
identifying with the needs and interests of people unlike themselves.
Democracy is not valuable simply as a political antidote to unchecked power,
but as a moral antidote to unchecked selfishness “in which the self-centered
perspective of the individual is constantly challenged by the multiplicity and
diversity of perspectives that constitute public life.” Associational life is
35
Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of
Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. 312.
36
Ibid. 313.
37
Benhabib. Situating the Self. 140-141.
2
sustained by the fostering of “civic friendship and solidarity… the extension
of sympathy and affection we naturally feel toward those closest to us unto
larger human groups, and thus personalize justice.”
The expanded moral perspective is also a crucial aspect of Rorty’s liberal
utopia. He acknowledges, in a move that recalls Niebuhr, that “our sense of
solidarity is strongest when those with who solidarity is expressed are
thought of as ‘one of us,’ where ‘us’ means something smaller and more
local than the human race.”38 The liberal project nonetheless depend on the
willingness of citizens to remain vigilant on behalf of marginalized people
and increase their sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of those who they
may be inclined to “think of as ‘they’ rather than ‘us.’”39 Tolerance and
compassion make the best correctives to political evil, and therefore
liberalism must be concerned with their cultivation.
These theorists’ best hopes for liberalism have less to do with its
institutional effects than with the habits it instills. Their vision of political life
repudiates purely instrumental politics, as it justifies political participation in
terms of its transformative effects on individual citizens and their social
group identities. The utopians maintain genuine hope that the ontological
causes of political evil may yet be dissolved. In Rorty’s inclusive liberal
utopia, the fear of “group egoism” need not be maintained as it is in Niebuhr
and Shklar’s social-institutional ontology, because it becomes possible to
imagine a group in which there is no marginalized party to suffer from the
38
Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 191.
39
Ibid. 196.
2
ambitions of some narrowly conceived “we” group. And in Benhabib’s
communicative liberal utopia, decisions may ultimately be arrived at through
rational persuasion as against coercion, rendering unnecessary the unequal
distribution of coercive power which tempts leaders to do evil.
To assess the extent to which politics in the utopian, transformative
mode provides a viable response to political evil, I will now present a set of
criticisms from the vantage point of Niebuhr and Shklar's theory. I aim to see
what possible points of convergence exist between the two views of politics,
and whether transformative politics can be reconstructed so as to take
seriously the psychological and social sources of political evil identified by
Niebuhr and Shklar.
The first criticism addresses utopian absolutism. Given that citizens will
form disparate views of the good life and the ideal society is it not
excessively authoritarian to attempt a program of total reform directed
toward “a wholly new world order”? 40

Shklar argues that all that is useful in
such endeavors can be captured by normative theories which
presentimmanent critiques based on “pictures not quite of a good state, but
the conditions that such a state would have to meet.” By way of reply, a
proponent of transformative politics might say that all their program entails
is an elaboration of the conditions that a polity – understood as
encompassing both citizens and institutions – would need to meet in order to
respond thoughtfully and effectively to political evil. The purpose of utopia is
40
Shklar, Judith. 1998. “What Is the Use of Utopia?” 189.
2
not to outline a revolutionary program for the total overhaul of society and
politics, but rather to provide an image of a better society to guide and
motivate the transformations that can be made in public life. Neither Rorty
nor Benhabib propose a coercive pedagogy or a mandated national
character. They are instead concerned with the gradual and purposive shift
towards a society of tolerant and sympathetic citizens. They would agree
with Shklar that the value of some social and personal characteristics to
liberal aims “does not imply the liberal state can ever have an educative
government that aims at creating specific kinds of character and enforces its
own beliefs.”41 Their substantive disagreement would come in the belief that
the “inclinations and habits that procedural fairness and responsible
government are likely [to] encourage” are not merely accidental to their
function, but one of the important means by which societies actually become
freer as greater tolerance and responsivity on the part of the citizens ensures
that the principles codified in law and governance are not cruel or unjust.
The important point to take from Shklar is that civic virtues, however useful
to liberal politics, cannot be conflated with models of human moral
perfection.
The second criticism draws on Niebuhr's psychology to argue that even
if broad sympathies could be cultivated, they would be inadequate to
overcome self-interest. To say that a citizen may consider or even
sympathize with a principle or interest is not yet to say the citizen will be
41
2
motivated by it. One might draw on the same type of social-psychological
evidence discussed at the end of the first section to argue that even where
the case for an institution's being cruel or unjust is hard to refute, many
citizens would rather alter their standards of evaluation or deprive
themselves of information than be forced to admit that their own actions
ought to be revised. This is one way in which the intractability of, to use
Niebuhr’s phrase, “inordinate self-love”, manifest as egoism and pride,
corrupts even those actions which proceed from deeply convicting ideals.42
But one need not adopt Niebuhr’s condemnatory language to understand
this problem. Rorty acknowledges that people need to “think of themselves
as being a certain good sort of human being.”43 That reasonable desire can
encourage people to defend their actions and principles out of pride even
when it becomes evident that other people suffer greatly as a result. It can
also encourage them to shore up their sense of self-worth by denigrating
others as “perverted or deformed examples of humanity.”44 Both tendencies
have played important roles in motivating political evil.
Before considering how the utopian theorist might respond to that
objection, I want to present a third criticism under which it can be subsumed:
that the human character is not infinitely malleable, that the extent to which
the moral outlook of a person can be transformed is ultimately limited. Rorty
and Benhabib dodge one kind of Rousseauian error – that which presumes an
42
43
Rorty, Richard. 1998. “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In Truth
and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. 178.
44
Ibid. 179.
2
identity of human interests – and fall into another, namely, to invest too
much faith in the ability of socialization to cultivate the moral qualities. If
one’s view of human nature more closely resembles Niebuhr’s, or if one’s
sense of political prudence inclines one to Shklar’s skepticism, then liberal
societies would do better to work from the assumption that some causes of
evil and injustice will never be transformed, and to instead consider what
arrangements of power and law would best constrain them.
The best rejoinder the utopian can make here is that this pessimistic
description of human morality proceeds from too narrow a view of moral
progress. The transformations which are most relevant to moral progress
occur over spans of generations, not within individual lives. And when one
pursues social change from that vantage point, one may well be impressed
with how much progress does occur within a lifetime. The invention, over the
last half-century, of a political order in which humans rights have become a
powerful consideration in constraining and motivating political actors would
surprise anyone who only considered changes in the perspectives of isolated
citizens. The utopian could also return to the argument that even if their
ideal society is never achieved, there is no demonstrated harm in trying to
pursue it. There is nothing about Rorty or Benhabib’s view that implies that
checks on power ought to be done away with, and there is nothing about the
persistence of selfishness in some or many aspects of human life that makes
the types of partial transformations described above less useful in mitigating
political evil. However, one inclined to Niebuhr and Shklar’s chastised view of
2
political life might think there is, in fact, a danger beyond mere
disappointment courted in utopian thinking. I will return to this issue shortly.
The stakes of that discussion, though, should first be complicated by a
fourth criticism, which would challenge the utopian notion that a universal
moral community could exist. The starting point for this line of attack is
Niebuhr and Shklar’s arguments that when groups select their ends based on
principles of morality, necessity, or ideology, deliberation is always rooted in
self-interest. Both theorists have made the case that there is no principle of
rational argumentation or critique which can be a pure instrument of justice.
Further, because social and political groups must define themselves, at least
in part, by reference to those who they exclude and come into conflict with,
the utopians will always belong to that class of sensitive individuals who hold
“purer and broader ideals of brotherhood than any which are realized in any
actual community.”45 This line of reasoning suggests that no process of
enlargement or sensitivization will lead to a social order which does not
exclude some from equal consideration.
Here, the issue returns as to whether or not an intermediary solidarity –
one which establishes strong bonds of loyalty and mutuality between some
but fails to be truly universalized – should be considered a danger or a
valuable, if imperfect, achievement. Niebuhr and Shklar’s description
suggests that moral investment in an exclusive and egoistic community
45
2
jeopardizes the principles of liberal democracy. Niebuhr explains one way this
might occur:
For defiance of a community, which is in control not only of the police

power but of the potent force of public approval and disapproval, in the
name of a community, which exists only in the moral imagination of
the individual (a the community of mankind for instance) and has no
means of exerting pressure upon him, obviously points to a force of
conscience, more individual than social… Most individuals lack the
intellectual penetration to form independent judgments and therefore
accept the moral opinions of their society. Even when they do form
their own judgments there is no certainty that their sense of obligation
toward moral values, defined by their own mind, will be powerful
enough to overcome the fear of social disapproval.46
This clarifies what is dangerous in pursuing the thick normative and civic ties
which make citizens highly sensitive to the judgments and opinions of their
societies. The stronger the sense of obligation one has to an ultimately
partial community, the more likely one is to approve of cruelty and injustice
targeted at those outside of it, or at least to remain silent when such evils
occur. At best, Shklar argues, the doctrines of group identity are “wholly
apolitical” distractions from proper vigilance against political evil.47 At worst,
they contribute to illiberal and irrational identifications.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Niebuhr and Shklar both
associate solidarity with the risk of collective violence. Niebuhr believes that
group identification simply creates larger units of conflict which are more
strongly convinced of their own righteousness than any individual would be.
Shklar, too, worries about the dispositions of people who are too sensitive to
the demands of their particular communities, and writes that “we must
46
Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society. 36.
47
2
therefore be very suspicious of ideologies of solidarity, precisely because
they are so attractive to those who find liberalism emotionally unsatisfying,
and those who have gone on in our century to create oppressive and cruel
regimes of unparalleled horror.”48 Patriotism and ethnocentrism cannot
qualify as liberal virtues. The dilemma for the utopian, is what to do with an
aspiration for solidarity which can never fulfill its inclusive ambitions.
The utopian theorist can respond that if the origins of organized cruelty
truly do lie with poor individual capacities for moral and political judgment,
or with the overly romantic and uncritical means by which individuals relate
to their groups, then resolving not to theorize about those same capacities
and virtues can promise no solution to the problem of political evil.
Benhabib’s theory of communicative action aims to challenge the aspects of
group decision-making which are dominating, which are unfair or exclusive,
or which try to naturalize their partisan outcomes as the results of impartial
reason. If one believes, with Niebuhr, that group decision-making inclines to
coercion and irrationality, then a theory like Bebhabib’s is just what is
needed. She and Rorty could offer a similar reply to Shklar: that if there is no
stance from which to critique intolerant and anti-democratic collectivisms
except by emphasizing the moral duties that members of those collectives
have to others, and then thinking about what might impel them to
acknowledge those duties. It is clear, though, that the division between
mutuality, solidarity, and ethnocentrism are imperiled ones, and the virtues
48
Ibid. 18.
2
of public life can easily lapse into viciousness when too much pride or zeal
attaches to the aims of a group.
A fifth and final criticism goes that any conception of politics as a moral-
transformative process need presume the existence of the very virtues and
habits it aims to instill. The view of political life common to Benhabib and
Rorty requires a great extent of trust between citizens, as well as a
willingness to be self-critical and open-minded even where important values
and convictions are concerned. Otherwise, it is unlikely that citizens will
debate openly, honestly, or with a willingness to change their views on the
basis of their participation, whether that be in a discursive model fit to
Benhabib’s specifications or something more abstractly conceived, like
Rorty’s notion of sympathetic education. Citizens will also need to be able to
challenge one another through political debate and social criticism, by
advancing new positions and circulating provocative art and literature. None
of these things can happen in an atmosphere where citizens are intimidated
by one another or their rulers. The deeper issue suggested in their analysis is
that even a virtuous political culture is a fragile one. Citizens will not
“possess” or “not possess” the capacities I have discussed here – it is likely
that they will be more honest, trusting, critical, or compassionate in some
instances and far less so in others. The situations in which they abdicate
their democratic virtues will likely result from the pressure of a social group
which is of great importance to their sense of self, or else from fear.
All of these criticisms center around two political dilemmas. One
2
encompasses, roughly, the first three criticisms presented here, all of which
relate to moral transformation of the individual citizen. The dilemma here is
how, without lapsing into coercive pedagogy rooted in moral perfectionism, a
free society might inculcate the values and dispositions which need to exist
for political evil to be confronted. To that end, transformative politics cannot
overestimate the malleability of individual dispositions to benevolent social
objectives. And in encouraging the development of a sensitive and socially-
minded citizenry, there must still be a measure of skepticism. Enlarged
consciousness cannot be a replacement for the critical distance of the
individual from socially approved ends. Preventing cruelty requires that
individuals support their fellow citizens where appropriate but, in other
cases, challenge them vehemently.
If the individual level of analysis suggests a balance between sociality
and skepticism, then analysis at the social level demands a balance between
utopian ambition and realist humility. The intentional construction and
expansion of a moral community needs to be approached with an awareness
that the highest aspirations of collective life can turn, often quickly, into
crass excuses for favoritism or ethnocentrism, or, worse still, provide
exhortations to conflict and bigotry. The dispositions of trust, honesty, self-
criticism, and flexibility which are necessary for common life are fragile
dispositions which can be brought to ruin by poor politics. The line between
healthy political antagonism and genuine enmity, for example, is not a broad
one.
2
In considering these dilemmas and their varied philosophical, political,
and psychological implications, I have tried not to stray too far from the topic
of political evil. Though evil does not preoccupy Benhabib and Rorty as it
does Niebuhr and Shklar, their transformative-utopian theory deals explicitly
with the weaknesses which, I argued, seriously inhibit the institutionalist
theory’s ability to respond to political evil. What I have tried to elucidate in
turning Niebuhr and Shklar’s social and psychological arguments against the
utopian-transformative view are the types of revisions that it would require
to address seriously the causes of political evil. What unites these four
theorists is their attempt to envision politics as a defense against cruelty and
injustice. At the heart of the matter is whether this aim should invite a
chastened political theory which aims to mitigate political evil through
institutional means, or a transformative theory which pursues a society free
of the moral and institutional dispositions that culminate in atrocities. So far,
I have argued that the instrumental, institutionalist, normatively thin and
non-utopian vision of political life cannot speak to the important causes of
political evil; Niebuhr and Shklar astutely identify the moral-psychological
and social-institutional causes of political evil but then demand that they not
be addressed by political theory. To make the case otherwise, proponents of
a utopian-transformative view need to demonstrate both the possibility and
prudence of attempting such deep reforms.
2
III
Rather than attempting to mediate these impasses directly, I want to put
forward a third description of political evil, and, working from there, discuss
how a political principle of “critical engagement” might be able to capture
what is useful in the theories which focus on institutional power and the
theories which focus on moral transformation without succumbing to spare
institutionalism or overconfident utopianism. The definition of political evil
with which I began this paper, taken from Card’s study, testifies to a few of
the important dilemmas of contemporary politics, relevant, I believe, even to
those for whom the language of “evil” or “atrocity” does not resonate. In
specifying that evil is “reasonably foreseeable” rather than foreseen, she
suggests that ignorance, perhaps more so than willful cruelty, can motivate
inhumane policies. Further, she argues that evil implicates not only those
actors who directly inflict harm on others, but those who tolerate and
maintain those harms as well. The problem of political evil implies a
permanent uneasiness for citizens of liberal democracies, regarding the
knowledge we lack but might reasonably be expected to obtain, the policies
we authorize but also those we fail to protest against, and the principles and
institutions to which we give our assent.
Coming to recognize, or even to seriously suspect, our own complicity in
political evils can be deeply unsettling. Consider the character of Tarrou from
Albert Camus’ The Plague, who, after witnessing an execution, begins to view
2
the death penalty a kind of political evil – one which he has been complicit in
all his life. This is the confession he makes to the doctor, Rieux:
And thus I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through
all those long years in which, paradoxically, enough, I’d believed with
all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had an indirect hand in
the deaths of thousands of people; that I’d even brought about their
deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end that
way... For many years I’ve been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having
been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a
murderer in my turn.49
Though critical awareness of this kind can border on despair, for Tarrou the
revelation of complicity does not culminate in fear or paralysis, but in a
positive ethic. Tarrou’s experience impresses on him the value of sympathy.
Citizens will do the least evil, he concludes, when they suffer “the fewest
lapses in attention.”50 The inattentiveness which is the object of Camus’
critique returns us, in a way, to the problem of egoism. Humans often act
with distorted notions of their actions’ likely outcomes because they do not
care enough about the victims to think critically in terms of consequences or
justifications. Moral insensitivity and factual ignorance sustain one another.
The emphasis of Niebuhr and Shklar on selfishness, and of Rorty and
Benhabib on insufficient solidarity, amount to two different descriptions of
the same problem: the failure to extend moral and political consideration to
others. Aggressive abuses are most likely to occur when a class, group, or
ruler is given broad coercive power to pursue their partial interests, but
disinterest may be more accurately termed political evil’s necessary
condition.
49
Camus, Albert. 1950. The Plague, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 227
50
Ibid. 229.
2
In emphasizing the importance of institutional constraint in preventing
political evil, Niebuhr and Shklar extend one tradition of liberal thought,
which includes Locke and Madison and has Montesquieu as its most notable
figure. These theorists argue that institutionalized cruelty follows from the
concentration of power, and is best prevented by institutions which distribute
power widely. Sheldon Wolin has labeled this approach “constitutionalism”
and summarizes its program as consisting of: “restraints upon power,
recognition or authorization of sufficient power to govern effectively, and
regulation or non-arbitrariness in the actual exercise of power.”51
Constitutionalism prevents political evil by “limiting the purposes for which
power may be used and specifying certain areas from which power is
restrained” and further, “identifies what persons or bodies are legally
authorized to exercise certain enumerated powers” and “indicates the
specific forms to be observed if power is to translate into binding laws,
decisions, or actions.”52 Constitutional rules and institutional procedures
force decision-makers to be more attentive than they might otherwise be,a
and they do this by formalizing the rights of those with competing interests
to make demands on and against the decision-makers. Liberalism, Niebuhr
and Shklar might say, could not give Tarrou’s victim a sympathetic society,
but it could (and should) have given him a better process of appeals, and
thereby delivered him from cruelty.
51
Wolin, Sheldon. 2004. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, Expanded Edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 494.
52
Ibid. 494.
2
There is a second way of thinking about the problem, though, which
emphasizes the social conditions of political evil over the institutional
conditions. Though it is frequently associated with Rousseau, this tradition
also has its origins in Montesquieu’s writing. According to Hannah Arendt,
Montesquieu’s important insight is that tyranny rests not only “on the
isolation of the tyrant from his subjects” but at also on “the isolation of the
subjects from one another through mutual fear and suspicion.”53 This
approach leads naturally to the conclusion that certain moral and relational
habits are necessary if political evil is to be prevented, and therefore it
should be little surprise to find that it bears a family relation to the moral-
transformative view of politics. Arendt’s own work on the relationship
between political action and moral judgment is a touchstone for Benhabib’s
reconstructed discourse theory. Rorty, for his part, owes his greatest debt to
John Dewey, who also considers social isolation the gravest threat to the
democratic public. Arendt and Dewey, even more so than their followers, are
philosophers of the public. They hold that patterns of participation and
interaction between citizens make all the difference between a political order
that is cruel and oppressive and one that is free and just. The type of
attentiveness their theories consider most important is the attentiveness of
citizens to each other’s needs and experiences.
Theorizing citizenship as engagement, then, promises more than a
counter-measure against complicity. It indicates the common ground
53
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 202.
2
between a theory of institutional power and a theory of civic virtue, by
conceptualizing the bonds between attentive citizens as important sources of
power. One of the classic statements of engaged citizenship comes from
Alexis de Tocqueville, himself an avid reader of Montesquieu. In Democracy
in America, Tocqueville advances a rich description of the complex
relationship between power, virtue, self-interest and abuse:
No vice of the human heart suits [despotism] better than egoism:

a despot will be quick to forgive the people he governs for not
loving him, provided they do not love one another. He does not
ask for their help in conducting the state; it is enough that they
do not seek to run it themselves. Minds that aspire to combine
their efforts to promote the common prosperity he calls
disruptive and restless, and altering the natural meaning of the
words, he calls those who keep strictly to themselves ‘good
citizens.’54
Disengagement and domination are closely related in Tocqueville’s view,
because both lead to a society in which the state apparatus administers the
lives of its subjects, who in turn lose their capacity for critical thought and
increasingly concern themselves with the pursuit of private distractions.55
The political order “inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies… reduces
each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals.”56
Tocqueville did not witness the bureaucratic terrors of the last century, but
his fears seem all the more prescient in light of them. Over one hundred
years after the publication of Democracy in America, Arendt’s famous
observations on the trial of Adolf Eichmann suggested that it was exactly this
54
Tocqueville, Alexis. 2004. Democracy In America, Trans. Goldhammer, Arthur, New
York: Library of America. 590
55
Ibid. 818.
56
Ibid. 819.
2
kind of system which had allowed the Nazis to implement their genocidal
program: they did not need citizens to be cruel, only to be thoughtless.57
To prevent political evil, at least two conditions need to be in place. First,
citizens must have institutional means by which to limit the types of actions
their rulers can take. Second, citizens must be responsive to one another and
concerned with the welfare of others. Tocqueville’s enthusiasm for the sphere
of free associations– what many contemporary theorists now refer to as civil
society – owes to his conviction that it provides the best means of securing
each of these conditions. Free associations can constrain power by allowing
citizens to pool their resources and political power into representative bodies
which can effectively exert pressure against the state. Private federations
like Amnesty International or the NAACP, and democratic social movements
of many kinds, demonstrate how actions in the civil sphere, which have
elements of both spontaneity and coordination, can allow citizens to levy
power against rulers who are cruel, oppressive, or unresponsive. This is the
point that Shklar makes when she argues that the right of free association
falls within the “class of licenses and empowerments which citizens must
have in order to preserve their freedom and to protect themselves against
abuse,” in this case by creating “a pluralist order with multiple centers of
power.”58 The element of spontaneity is especially important for the reasons
discussed in my critique of the institutional view: no institutional
57
Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Viking Press: New York.
58
2
configuration can predict all of the avenues along which citizens may need to
exert power in order to prevent or end abuse.
There is a second, perhaps less apparent, means by which free
associations function as constraints. By expanding the capacity of citizens to
solve problems without recourse to government power, engagement in civil
society obviates some of need for coercive, regulatory solutions. Citizens
need not “appeal to an authority prior to that of the interested parties” if
they can accomplish their ends “through the free action of the collective
power of individuals.” 59
But Tocqueville is typically aware of the relationship
between an arrangement of institutional power and its social and educative
effects, and this awareness is an important part of his case for free
associations. Solving problems through voluntary action instills in citizens a
taste for freedom and a suspicion towards coercion. It also encourages the
habit of face-to-face interaction and civil deliberation. That sort of active
engagement makes for sharp contrast with the stultifying effects of the soft
despotism which Tocqueville fears, and it encourages the exact
characteristics of democratic citizenship which authoritarian decision-making
deforms.
In Tocqueville’s estimation, free associations make their most important
contribution to the prevention of abuses by working against the tendency of
despots to raise barriers between citizens and encourage their indifference
to one another. Participating in civil society draws citizens “beyond the
59
Tocqueville. Democracy in America. 215-216.
2
sphere of their individual interests”, with each venture providing evidence for
the dependence of their own interests on the support of their communities.60
But civic ties are not merely instrumental - engagement also encourages
citizens to “value the affection of their neighbors and relatives,” to earn their
friendship and respect.61 By establishing a domain of action where affective,
cooperative networks replace coercive, administrative logics, engagement
develops “the morals and intelligence of a democratic people.” Political
engagement, understood in a Tocquevillean sense, aims at the generation of
a non-violent community power that can be brought to bear against the
state, and which, less confrontationally, can counteract bureaucratization
and the expansion of state power. The power of the community grows and
diminishes to the extent that citizens engage cooperatively with one another,
making it dependent on practices of reciprocity and mutual commitment.
Whatever potential power lies within civil society can only be accessed and
utilized to the extent that citizens think in terms of the common good.
William Connolly correctly identifies the scope of political engagement, and
its stakes, when he writes that:
The task is to reestablish a practice of citizenship that raises

people above the particular roles they play in work, family,
investment, consumption, and religion. The urgency of the task is
clear, for it is “the political order that is making fateful decisions
about man’s survival in an age haunted by the possibility of
unlimited destruction.62
60
Ibid. 590.
61
Ibid. 592.
62
Connolly, William. 2001. “Politics and Vision.” In Politics and Vision: Sheldon Wolin
and the Vicissitudes of the Political, Eds. Botwinick, Aryeh, and Connolly, William,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2
Emphasizing the importance of critical engagement as both a political
bulwark and a system of moral development has two consequences for the
debate between the theorists of constraint and the theorists of
transformation. At one level, it demands a concession from the institutional,
instrumental, anti-normative view. Conceptually, proponents of this view
cannot hold their ground because political institutions, patterns of social
interaction, and individual modes of ethical reflection are too interrelated.
Some of the interesting things we will want to say about our institutions will
be related to their effects on social and moral dispositions; some of what we
will want our institutions to do will not be feasible if certain social and moral
dispositions are not already in place. More substantively, Tocqueville’s
insights highlight the inadequacy of self-interest – even an enlightened self-
interest – to motivate political activity. Institutions cannot simply aim to
coordinate and constrain the pursuits of selfish agents and thereby produce
just outcomes. To ensure that they do not become passive participants in
political evils, citizens must be concerned with the lives of others.
This returns us directly to the dilemmas sketched out in the previous
section. The argument of Niebuhr and Shklar is not that the selfishness or
sympathy of citizens does not matter, but that there are limits on how
extensively the former can be supplanted by the latter. If selfishness is taken
as a constitutional defect, then at some level constraint must take
precedence over attempts to educate and transform. But debating about
whether selfishness is a psychological feature that is basically permanent or
2
basically revisable presupposes that the subject of the argument is
something like “the human character.” A more fruitful way of thinking about
the issue, which Tocqueville’s view suggests, is in terms of the social and
institutional conditions which will incline citizens to make less selfish
decisions in discrete instances. This approach finds more recent expression
in Dewey’s “Creative Democracy.” As much as Dewey insists that democracy
amounts to a personal, moral attitude, his argument ultimately concerns the
conditions of intelligent judgment and action – “effective guarantees of free
inquiry, free assembly and free communication.”63 Like Toccqueville, Dewey
thinks that divisions between citizens, particularly those fostered by
suspicion and prejudice, work against democratic life, but that where they
are lifted, genuinely democratic habits of mind and conduct can prosper.
Dewey was sensitive to the criticism – which was frequently leveled by
Niebuhr himself – that this faith was overly utopian.64 But if one takes
seriously the idea that the outcomes of individual judgment owe more to
their context than to “constitutional” elements, then the question of moral
transformation can be severed from the question of whether or not people
are naturally selfish, and so one need assume an optimistic conception of
human nature. Contra Niebuhr, consider Arendt’s claim that:
American faith was not at all based in a semireligious faith in human

nature, but on the contrary, on the possibility of checking human
nature in its singularity, by virtue of human bonds and mutual
promises. The hope fir man in his singularity lay in the fact that not
63
Dewey, John. 2008.“Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us.” In The Later
Works of John Dewey, Vol. 14, Ed. Boydston, JoAnn, Carbonsdale: Southern Illinois
University Press. 230.
64
Ibid. 230.
2
man but men inhabit the earth and form a world between them. It is
human worldliness that will save men from the pitfalls of human
nature.65
Of course, Niebuhr argues that it is precisely the “worldliness” of our
communities that inclines them to evil. Where Arendt emphasizes the
expansive character of wordliness – as in world-making – Niebuhr contrasts
wordliness with the genuinely moral visions rooted in faith and
transcendence. In his moral typology, worldiness means fallenness. The
disagreement as to whether sociality redeems or corrupts individuals marks
the second impasse between the skeptics and the utopians. Niebuhr and
Shklar draw our attention to the dark side of seemingly benign concepts like
responsivity and attentiveness. They fear that when citizens become too
sympathetic to the judgments of their society, they are less critical of its
ends and institutions, and more willing to participate in socially sanctioned
evils. Just as civil society constrains the power and partiality of the state, the
same tendencies, as manifested in social judgments, need to be approached
critically and reflexively by individuals. Otherwise, sociality must oscillate
between the numb passivity feared by Tocqueville or the narrow chauvinism
feared by Niebuhr. As I have shown, both sentiments are conducive to
political evil in their way.
I do not think that the moral-transformative view, as exemplified by
Rorty and Benhabib, can offer a convincing response on this point. Rorty’s
view relies on his willingness to reduce all moral and political values to
interchangeable descriptions wherein only our “ethnocentrism” permits us to

65
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. 174.
2
select one set over another.66 If Rorty’s view goes too far in aestheticizing
norms, Benhabib’s project remains too committed to their rationality. She
accepts the basic premises of Habermas’ theory of communicative action,
and holds out that, under the proper discursive conditions, a rational
consensus can be arrived at and used to ground universal principles.67 In
taking these approaches, each theorist loses sight of an important part of
their own theoretical tradition. I want to emphasize these resources, derived
from the notions of inquiry and plurality, as what properly distinguishes
engagement as critical engagement.
Dewey’s theory of value, more so than Rorty’s, captures the intersocial
and constructive character of “worldliness” while remaining sensitive to the
related dangers by emphasizing the contingency and fallibility of moral and
political principles. Just as our knowledge about the natural world is
constantly revised through experimentation, moral knowledge is never
certain – at best, it achieves a “precarious probability.”68 But this does not
mean that all moral judgments are equally warranted. Dewey warns that we
cannot be “content with haphazard beliefs about the qualities of objects that
regulate our deepest interests.”69 The critically engaged citizen is perpetually
involved in re-evaluation of norms and institutions. Dogmatism and
chauvinism have no place in conversations about principles since they inhibit
66
Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 47-55.
67
Benhabib. Critique, Norm, and Utopia. 1-15.
68
Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation Between
Knowledge and Action. In The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 4, Ed. Boydston,
JoAnn, Carbonsdale: Souther Illinois University Press. 5.
69
Dewey. The Quest for Certainty. 214.
2
the open and experimental character that rigorous inquiry requires. Like
Camus, Dewey thinks our morals lead us awry when we pay too little
attention to the world around us, so new information and, crucially, new
viewpoints, must always be sought. The particular moral commitments of
social and political groups must always remain open to contestation – a
process which extends well beyond deliberation and “involves nothing less
than the directed reconstruction of economic, political, and religious
institutions.”70
This ethos has a troubled relationship with the idea of consensus, since
it demands recognition that, beyond the partial horizons of community, lie
others who do not yet stand in reciprocal relation to the body politic. On this
point, Arendt’s notion of plurality provides a useful corrective to the
discursive tradition of democracy. On her view, plurality is the beginning
points for politics, since the need for communication and interaction would
be obviated in a society where people did not differ from one another in
important respects.71 Associational life is the mechanism through which
differentiated citizens attend to one another and establish bonds of
mutuality. Civil society is not only a forum for speech and action; it is also
their outcome, the context constituted through those behaviors.72 Rather
than viewing social and political engagement as a way of reaching consensus
between parties in a pre-existent community of interest, the potentiality of
70
Ibid. 207.
71
Arendt. The Human Condition. 175-176.
72
Ibid. 196-198.
2
public engagement lies in its capacity for the continuous reconstruction of
the public sphere, both by expanding solidarities and allowing for the
proliferation of multiple and overlapping networks of mutuality. Imagined in
this sense, engagement speaks to the intentional construction of a
community of mutual defense and reciprocal sensitivity. But just as plurality
is its precondition, it is also its limit, and understanding this should inscribe a
critical awareness of the others whose suffering is not attended to.
Democratic worldliness should never authorize the illusion that a partial
community speaks for the entire world. To forget plurality is to become
disengaged.
IV
What role, if any, should utopian ideals have in directing political
engagement? Thinking of political engagement as intentional and
constructive makes clear the extent to which the activities of citizens are
motivated by visions of a better society – one which the current order can
presumably be made to resemble. Nonetheless, I agree with Benhabib that
“a wholesale restructuring of our social and political universe according to
some rationally worked-out plan” cannot be a viable political project.73 What I
have tried to outline, instead, by commenting on themes from Tocqueville,
Dewey, and Arendt, is a civil politics characterized by the continual
73
Benhabib. Situating the Self. 229.
2
reconstruction of principles and institutions vis-à-vis free communication and
interaction. Utopianism in this sense consists of “articulating the principles of
democratic action and organization in the present” as a “regulative principle
of hope” meant to guide “radical transformation.”74 Even so, such visions
need not overdetermine the course of political action. Allowing them to do so
would replace the hubris of the utopian absolutists with another sort,
believing which imagines that the outcomes of action are always knowable
and known. But political action is, as Arendt insisted, “non-sovereign”: it
always entails “being able to start something new and… not being able to
control or even foretell its consequences.”75 Just as plurality limits moral
certitude, it also limits the sovereign character of action, since the reactions
and divergent agendas of others may frustrate our intended outcomes.
Genuine attentiveness requires that we treat seriously the visions of those
citizens who we encounter in our public lives. As democratic politics reshapes
the public to include new participants, our vision of the good society must
fluxuate as well. It is the combination of uncertainty and intentionality, of
vision and ambiguity, which ought to characterize democratic utopianism.
Utopia, so conceived, is not an absolutist endeavor, nor does it rest on the
wholesale reinvention of the human species which Neibuhr and Shklar
correctly dismiss as a perilous fantasy. If the memory of political evils past
has ended the dream of the modernist utopia, then perhaps, as Ursula
LeGuin has written, “our final loss of faith in that radiant sandcastle may
74
Ibid. 229.
75
Arendt. The Human Condition. 235.
2
enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of
utopia.”76 Before it can again be of political use, utopia needs to be re-
imagined:
Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has
been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, form,
active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing,
and hot. Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination
of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must
involve a reversal… What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet,
obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical,
peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.77
Niebuhr and Shklar go too far in arguing that visions of this kind have no
bearing on political life. Shklar frequently defends her conviction that liberal
philosophy does not rely on any specific vision of the good society, and as
evidence she gestures to the normative philosophies of Jurgen Habermas and
John Rawls. She writes approvingly that, “neither fraternity, nor solidarity,
nor the creation a new man play any part” in their philosophies, which “do
not shake up the present… by forcing us to envision a wholly new world
order.”78 Shklar may be right that liberal philosophy can get along fine in this
mode. As topics in liberal thought, engagement and utopia do not figure
heavily. For that matter, neither do atrocity or evil. But part of what I have
taken to be novel and useful in Niebuhr and Shklar is their view of political
evil as a phenomenon which challenges the moral and psychological
underpinnings of liberalism. They open up the discursive space to talk about
the relationship between freedom and fear, and about what becomes of
76
LeGuin, Ursula. 1990. “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.”
In Dancing at the Edge of the World. 88.
77
Ibid. 90.
78
Shklar. “What is the Use of Utopia?” 189.
2
liberal theory if it takes seriously the tendency of political institutions to
render terrible harms. In an important sense they hold liberalism to its
original task, first embarked on by Locke and Montesquieu, which was to
imagine a political alternative to tyranny. They remind us that the minimal
condition of the free society is freedom from arbitrary power and abuse.
Once this is acknowledged, though, the question of what types of social and
civic relations can actually guard against such abuses becomes an important
topic for liberal theory. Thinking about freedom, and specifically its fragility in
the face of political evil, leads naturally to a discussion of engagement.
After all, it is not only a fear of tyrants which lies behind normative
liberalism. Equally important to its contemporary form is the conviction that
social and political arrangements are revisable, and that a substantively
richer and freer way of living can be opened up if citizens commit to one
another’s well-being. The concern with political freedom characteristic of
liberalism has never been too distant from the concerns with civic virtue and
the good life which have been characteristic of republican theorizing. Without
those concepts, it would be impossible to make sense of the basic idea
underlying Rawl’s theory of justice, that:
The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control

but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to
share one another’s fate. In designing institutions they undertake to
avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance
only when doing so is for the common benefit. The two principles are a
fair way of meeting the arbitrariness of fortune.79
79
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 102.
2
Understood in this sense, political liberty means little without political
engagement. The commitments which Rawls describes, to social
transformation and to mutual aid, are not auxiliary to the liberal idea of
freedom. And yet institutions are not enough. They are necessary tenets of
any political theory in which freedom is to have anything more than a
nominal role. Constraining the power of governments has been a major
concern for liberals, but this has only been one part of the broader liberal
aspiration to establish “a realistic utopia… a society in which the greatest
evils of human history – unjust war and oppression, starvation and poverty,
genocide and mass murder – would be eliminated through politically just
institutions.”80 The damming complicities of liberal democracies in political
evils internal and abroad demonstrate the permanent dependence of the
freedoms necessary to live a decent live on a renewal of political
engagement. Taking political evil seriously need not reduce political theory
to a discussion of what members of free societies should fear. Reflecting on
the darker passages of political history, not to mention the headlines of the
day, can also provide insight into what political engagement might help us
to build.
80
Neiman, Susan. 2002. Evil In Modern Thought: An Alternative History of
Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 313-314.

Political Evil and The Limits of Liberal Theory

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Political Evil and The Limits of Liberal Theory

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Political Evil and the Limits of Liberal Theory

I want to begin by assessing two views of political life generally, and of

liberal democracy specifically, in terms of their resources and limitations in

responding to political evil. I will first take up the critical reconstruction of

liberalism developed in the works of Reinhold Niebuhr and Judith Shklar,

“The Liberalism of Fear.” Their view of politics emphasizes the risk of

psychological features that must permanently limit liberal aspirations. In

rationality or self-transcendence should be important aspects of liberal

political philosophy. The two theorists share a conception of politics as a

morality. On their view, liberalism is best conceived as a normatively thin

institutionalism committed to the constraint of arbitrary power via legal and

moral imperatives. Theorists such as Richard Rorty and Seyla Benhabib

unattainable, they cannot imagine a politics which does not contemplate

conceive of political life if the problem of political evil is taken to be central,

beyond their impasses. Neither institutionalism nor utopianism, I will argue,

makes an adequate response to the persistence of political atrocity. For that,

liberalism must incorporate a theory of politics as critical engagement.

persist into this one: genocide, torture, forced starvation, arbitrary

imprisonment, and systematic oppression and persecution of many kinds.

… harm that is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2)

When committed by a social group, institution, or governmental agent, these

actions which motivate their critical approaches to liberalism.2

I consider Niebuhr and Shklar’s critique important for contemporary

political theory because it speaks to the social and psychological origins of

political evil, thereby presenting a multi-dimensional account of its

motivations and consequences. By contrast, a liberal interpretation of

third aspect of Card’s definition – risk/deprivation – while missing what is

These psychological dimensions of political evil have, historically, received

little attention from liberal philosophers. They are attended to in Kant’s

comment on the behavior of social groups or political institutions. In all of the

The basic structure of Niebuhr and Shklar’s critique of liberalism is as

follows. (1) Political evil originates from moral-psychological and social-

institutional charactersitics inherent in political life. (2) Both the

psychological and social origins of political evil describe permanent limits on

capacities for individual and collective morality. (3) Rights-based and

attempting to fulfill moral imperatives through politics, liberals should focus

its ability to secure effective constraints on power, and thereby ameliorate

origins – and once those are understood, liberalism’s foundational

understanding of social character will need to be revised. Insofar as they

mistaking permanent limitations for proximate, recuperable conditions, the

object of their critique is liberalism’s social and political ontology.3

society. According to Niebuhr, “evil is always the assertion of some self-

immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order

be as quick in his aid to remote as to immediately revealed necessities.”5

tendency to prefer the concrete relationship to the pull of principle

“contributes to the moral chaos of civilisation, in which life is related to life

mechanically and not organically, and in which mutual responsibilities

increase and personal contacts decrease.”6 In describing society as

mechanical, Niebuhr attends to the ways in which institutions mediate

relationships and encourage their conceptualization as means rather than as

few of our interactions. The results are especially pronounced in politics,

citizens, are almost entirely institutional.

Shklar is less interested in providing a comprehensive theory of human

institutionalized cruelty, arrives at claims about the likely behaviors of

cruelties on the weak is “amply justified by every page of history,” then

“insuperably dependent on psychology.”8 The definition of cruelty offered in

“The Liberalism of Fear” includes a claim about its motivation: it is inflicted

“in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible” of the perpetrator.9

Shklar’s notion of cruelty parallels Card’s definition of evil insofar as it calls

calculated by the perpetrator. Shklar advises liberals to always suspect that

Both theorists supplement their psychological analysis by considering the

social and institutional practices by which groups of people arrive at and

follow from obvious individual selfishness, those in which the invocation of a