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PART ONE: IDEAS

Historical Failures and Political Aspirations: Judith Shklar Places Hegel in 1970s America

Moa Spegel

Abstract

At the time for the U.S. Bicentennial, the American political theorist Judith Shklar turned to the political thought of Hegel. By focusing on how she came to conceptualize The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) as a history of failures, this article argues that she adopted Hegel’s ideas by adapting them in order to reflect on 1970s America. Moreover, it demonstrates how she activated his ideas to develop an approach to two centuries of American history that differed from the two historical accounts prevalent at the time. The article concludes that Shklar, by drawing on the idea of a history of failures found in Hegel’s thought, presented a conception of American democracy as based on failures that was far from pessimistic.

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1. Introduction

1The year 1976 was the bicentennial of the United States. Not only was it a great celebratory and commemorative event perceived as an opportunity to alleviate the political and social unrest of the past decade. It was marked by considerable disputes. There were disagreements on whether recognition of historical injustices should have a place in the bicentennial events, and whether American history was to be seen as a plurality of histories of various ethnic groups or celebrated as a successful historical progression evolved from a heroic founding. The bicentennial was a time for celebration, but marked by a divide on crucial issues such as the meaning of America and the understanding of its history.

2A far less noticed event of 1976 was the publication of Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind’ (FI), written by the American political theorist Judith Shklar (19281992). In her book, Shklar presents and engages with what according to her was Hegel’s main political arguments. Her explicit purpose was to facilitate the reading of The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) for those who found it puzzling (ixx). However, I argue that she undertook another task, a more unspoken one: she used Hegel to stir reflections on the political and social situation of her contemporary America. Around 1970, the Civil Rights Revolution was countered, and the hopeful belief in an united country freed from racial inequalities was replaced by a perceived national crisis and increased polarization. By contextualizing Shklar’s interpretation of Hegel in relation to these overall events, I show that she, albeit allusively, made Hegel speak to her time and place. Not only do I argue that she adapted political ideas that were formed in and by late eighteenth-century Europe to throw light on late twentieth-century America. I claim that her interpretation of The Phenomenology laid the ground for her approach to American history and understanding of American democracy. By adopting and adapting Hegel’s political ideas, Shklar developed an approach to the entire history of America as an independent nation that departed from the two historical accounts that were predominant at the time. She neither emphasized one heroic historical development nor affirmed the notion of a plurality of distinct histories.

  • 1 When Shklar’s interest in Hegel is addressed, it is rather briefly and with emphasis on how she in (...)

3The scholarly interest in Shklar has increased significantly over the past decade and a half. Studies have challenged the previously held picture of her, derived from a limited focus on her most well-known article The Liberalism of Fear,” as an inherent pessimist deprived of hope for the possibility of democratic change. A considerably more multifaceted political thinker has been brought into light, someone with traits of both pessimism and optimism (see Forrester; Hess; Misra; Ashenden and Hess; Gatta; Kaufmann; Lou). Despite the burgeoning literature on Shklar, surprisingly little attention has been given to her engagement with Hegel, nor has it been noticed by Hegel scholars. Her interest in his thought has not only gone largely unnoticed but been perceived as ”somewhat of a strange case in her own trajectory as a political theorist” (Hess 94).1 This may well be a consequence of what at first glance appears to be an incomparability between Shklar and Hegel’s thought. Shklar is commonly presented as a non-foundational thinker who rejected all-encompassing views and grounded her thought on specific circumstances of actuality (Gatta 8; Misra 78; Hess 9; Stullerova 24; Ashenden and Hess 5). Her thought is depicted as a direct counterpoint to abstract reasoning and notion of an inevitably historical progress, features not rarely attributed to Hegel. This understanding of Hegel is not Shklar’s. From her point of view, he was occupied with remembrance, with recollecting the past and turning the past into a political criticism to shame the present” (FI 74).

  • 2 Before the publication of Freedom and Independence, Shklar wrote five articles on Hegel’s thought, (...)

4Shklar spent half a decade writing about The Phenomenology.2 To conceive those years as a peculiar detour in her professional trajectory misses not only the extent in which her account on Hegel was informed by the recent political events, and thus in accord with her consistent emphasis on that political thought should be based on experiences of actuality (Shklar, After Utopia xx; Legalism 5; Ordinary Vices 228; American Citizenship 9). It dismisses that an engagement with the history of ideas can, as Shklar stressed, be about bringing the past into the present” (FI 52). As this article shows, that was what she did with Hegel: she let his political ideas travel in time and space. What I take as central in Shklar’s illumination and presentation of Hegel’s political ideas for the way in which she used them to stir reflections on contemporary America and American history is how she conceptualized The Phenomenology as a history of failures.

5The article is divided into two sections. I begin by focusing on how Shklar, in Freedom and Independence, came to conceive The Phenomenology as a history of failures. Attention is drawn to how her interpretation was formed by the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and how it served as an indirect comment on her contemporary political situation. In the second section, I argue for the influence of Hegel on the historical approach that Shklar developed in the late 1970s. I show how she advanced the notion of a history of failures and used it as a framework for interpreting the history of America. A history of failures certainly does not seem to be filled with hope. But as I make evident throughout this article, by using Hegel to reflect on America’s past and present, Shklar managed to balance between pessimism and optimism. The article concludes that Shklar, in and with her engagement with Hegel, presented the view that it is by constantly failing that America can live up to its promise of democracy.

2. The Phenomenology as a History of Failures

6It is to be mentioned that Shklar was far from the first to make Hegel speak to American circumstances. His ideas had great impact on the American transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century, and was a significant source of influence to American pragmatism and its development the decades following the Civil War (Kaag and Jensen). Moreover, his ideas were subject to renewed interest in the late 1960s. He was embraced as the predecessor of Marx and incorporated in the critique of American liberalism expressed by the civil rights movement, the protests against the Vietnam War, and the women’s liberation movement (Bernstein 36; Jay 127128; King 176177). How Shklar’s interpretation of Hegel is to be situated in the history of American reception of his ideas warrants more attention, though beyond the scope of this article. My focus is on how Shklar activated and used Hegel as a means to stir reflections on America’s past and present. Those who are familiar with Hegel will notice that some of her interpretations are somewhat odd. However, of concern here is how she adopted and adapted what she perceived as the main political ideas of The Phenomenology, not to judge or evaluate the plausibility of her presented account on Hegel.

7When Freedom and Independence was published in 1976, freedom and independence were words that had been called upon in streets across America for over a decade. They had been written on banners and invoked in appeals to the government to take action to improve the lives of the so-called second-class citizens. Freedom and independence are what Shklar takes to be Hegel’s central political theme. These two terms are not rarely considered as synonyms. But when it comes to Hegel’s conception, Shklar stresses a stark contrast between them. Freedom is a communal matter, independence an individual one. The essence of Hegel’s argument is, she writes, that freedom is the identity of the personal goals of individual citizens and the public ends of the polity as a whole. This is a dynamic process in which the laws are created by each and all, and are in turn expressed and realized in the minds and actions of every member of the society” (xiv).

8As a consequence of Shklar’s approach to The Phenomenology from the perspective of its expressed political ideas, considerably more attention is brought to the conception of freedom than to the coming to be of knowledge,” as Hegel describes the subject of his book (Hegel 468). It is commonly acknowledged that Hegel conceived himself as situated in a time and place where philosophy had reached its goal of absolute knowing. Seen from that perspective, The Phenomenology is a history of success. As argued, what I take as central in Shklar’s interpretation of Hegel is how she apprehends his work as a history of failures. In her account, there is a great difference between what she calls freedom as ethics” and freedom of knowledge” (FI 208). For her, to focus on political ideas is to focus on freedom as ethics.” And this focus allows Shklar to conceive The Phenomenology as a non-successful history.

9The notion of freedom that Shklar places at the center of Hegel’s political argument is understood as something that can emerge only in and through the relationships between individuals in a society composed of a plurality of types and groups” (74). This relational and social conception of freedom is what makes independence to be its very opposite. According to Shklar, a state of independence implies self-oriented” individuals unaware of the social bonds that bring them together (98). The historical narrative presented in The Phenomenology is interpreted as a history of different stages of independence. She recounts how each stage of the historical development is characterized by experiences of a particular form of dependence which are overcome and independence attained. As history continues to develop into new historical stages, the independence held is lost and new forms of dependence arise. From Shklar’s point of view, Hegel’s historical narrative is constituted by a constant oscillation between dependence and independence that repeats itself through in different ways and under other circumstances” (68). This swinging back and forth between different forms of dependence and independence is what makes her conclude that the political dimension of The Phenomenology takes the form of a historical drama marked by failures at every turn” (7).

10Failure then was Hegel’s topic,” Shklar contends (7). The Phenomenology is a history of failures, of the recurring failures of breaking loose from the repetitive fluctuations between dependence and independence. To overcome this repetitive cycle would be to surpass the tensions between individual desires and the demands of society, thus to reach a state of freedom. The history of failures is the history of failures to reach freedom, which is why Hegel is argued to have used the idea of freedom in order to assign an aim to [the historical] voyage” (95). The historical development is kept in motion by the recurring failures of attaining a state of freedom in which there would be no tension between the private and the public self, the inner and the external world” (74). What Shklar does here is to place an aspiration towards freedom at the core of Hegel’s political ideas. An aspiring freedom that constantly fails realization functions as the motor of history. This is not to be conflated with freedom being the predefined goal of history. She underlines that Hegel used freedom as a judgement” (73). The conception of freedom claimed to be at the center of his main political argument functions as an aspirational force grounded in an awareness of the shortcomings of the present rather than on the pursuit of a vision of the future. The historical narrative provided in The Phenomenology ended in Hegel’s own time, in the late eighteenth century, with philosophy reaching its goal of absolute knowledge. But the quest for freedom remained just as unfulfilled as it had been in the past.

11Shklar gave an account of what she took to be a history of failures, the repeated failures to create a situation in which the conflicting beliefs of individuals did not hamper a care for society as a whole and the emergence of a sense of belonging to one and the same political community. She thus engaged with themes that have been addressed and discussed throughout the entire history of political thought. But she did so informed by experiences of historically specific circumstances. She began to write about Hegel in the early 1970s, at a time when Americans had been forced to realize the naivety of the hopefulness that had been attached to the civil rights legislations. The initiative to and discussions about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, had been accompanied with the belief that the passing of these new laws would lead to an end of a centuries long struggle for freedom. One had hoped that a legal strengthening and expansion of rights and political freedoms would free marginalized groups from oppression and exclusion. One had been optimistic that America would finally become in accord with the promise inscribed in the Constitution: freedom, justice, and equality for all citizens (Foner, The Story, 278; Hartman 103).

12By the early 1970s, it had become all too evident that the optimistic belief in an end to the struggle for freedom did not correspond with reality, which continued to be heavily marked by racial oppression and inequalities (Wall 287). After the passing of the new civil rights laws, the struggle continued and intensified. In the late 1960s, the civil rights movement departed from its former non-violence principle, and its general focus shifted. What had started as a struggle for freedom in terms of equal legal rights, a struggle for integration as opposed to racial segregation, transformed into a struggle for freedom from assimilation. It was a shift from a quest for political participation to a struggle against domination. The majority culture began to be perceived as a threat to the unique ethnic, cultural and racial identities of various groups. Rather than a call for recognition as equal parts of the societal whole, emphasis was on self-sufficiency and what distinguished one group from another (Stears 145146, 196; Engels 318319). The hope to unite the nation, very much alive in the 1960s, had dissolved. In the early 1970s, rather than coming closer to each other, people seemed to be drifting further apart (Barke et al. 565). Instead of responding to the social and political situation by trying to evoke a sense of civic belonging and responsibility, the Nixon administration took advantage of the deepened polarization and fuelled it. When speaking of and to the silent majority,” Nixon cultivated an anger and evoked a sense of fear in white citizens of the tyranny of the minorities” (Engels 305306; Preston 70; Hodgson 423). Rather than strengthening bonds between people, a thicker wall was built between them. It was perceived to be a domestic culture war to fight (Stears 207). Notably, freedom for some was perceived as a threat to the freedom of others. That notion of freedom was nothing like the understanding of freedom that Shklar highlighted by drawing on Hegel.

13Was Shklar then, by stressing a history of failures to attain freedom, just stating that the struggle for freedom was doomed to fail? For sure, she underlined how Hegel conceived freedom as an ideal that would never be fulfilled. Likewise, she regarded any belief in a definitive end to the racial struggles as a mere delusion, and stressed that new laws could not undo history (Shklar, ”The Education” 61) However, despite the bleak view that seems to surround the notion of a history of failures, Shklar was not an inherent pessimist. She did not, I argue, engage with Hegel to express and evoke resignation.

14As shown, Shklar’s notion of a history of failures is inseparable from the idea of freedom as a historical aspiration and what involves relationships between a plurality of individuals. With that in mind, the issue at stake in 1970s America was not so much the absence of freedom and the disharmony in a pluralistic society. Freedom was an unrealizable ideal that would never become an actuality. Though that is not a reason for abandoning the idea of it. As had been manifested by the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, freedom as an aspiration could bring together a plurality of people in a shared political and social project. In a shared aspiration, a number of groups of people had joined force and demanded an expansion of democratic participation. Together, they had spurred democratic change (Stears 159; Hollinger 148) At a time when people and groups of people were turned against one another, thrown into a mindset that revolved around dependence and independence, the idea of democracy as a common political project had dwindled. The problem was not so much that the struggle for freedom had failed, but that there was a waning aspirational force. Americans had become, as the historian David Hollinger puts it, too unwilling to take up the task of building a common future” (157).

15Shklar’s engagement with Hegel was not simply a way to put forth a conception of freedom, and of democracy, as a common project. The Phenomenology is argued to be an incomplete map which we are free to fill out and redraw in our time and place” (FI 56). The task is not merely about filling out a historical gap of two centuries, but to redraw his work. I mean that is precisely what Shklar did. On the basis of her experiences of 1970s America, she adjusted his ideas and thereby rendered Hegel more contemporary and relevant.

16We can recall what is taken as Hegel’s core argument, that freedom is a process in which the laws are created by each and all, and are in turn expressed and realized in the minds and actions of every member of the society” (xiv). Considerable emphasis is placed on laws, in the judiciary form, and its positive function. In The Phenomenology, Hegel was not interested in laws, legal systems, or governmental institutions. For him, Shklar states, they were manifestations of permanence,” and his subject was social and political change (143). Moreover, recurrently she brings attention to how Hegel perceived laws as an obstacle to freedom, as what caused social disintegration and cultivated an inherently individualistic culture. As Shklar sees it, this notion of law was heavily informed by his experiences of the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, by him having witnessed that democracy did not establish a state of freedom (178, 205).

  • 3 Shklar invokes a “reforming democratic energy” not explicitly in the context of the civil rights mo (...)

17Writing a few years after the passing of the most significant piece of civil rights legislation in a hundred years” (Gerstle 579), Shklar had other experiences. She had witnessed a civil rights revolution, a reforming democratic energy” as she later would call it (Shklar, Keeping the Founding Fathers Promises” 268).3 She knew the significance of law in the struggle for freedom. Hegel’s notion of law as disintegrating simply did not correspond with the circumstances of 1970s America. The claim that his core argument acknowledged law as a productive agency in the struggle for freedom and democracy was a product of Shklar’s redrawing of his work in and for her own time and place. This redrawing was made in a dialogue with Hegel’s later writings. In the last pages of Freedom and Independence, attention is brought to how Hegel, in Philosophy of Right, began to emphasize the socializing function of law. She argues how he came to conceive law as what could help furnish bonds between individuals and contribute to some kind of freedom, though nothing like the notion of freedom at the center of The Phenomenology. He had closed the door to that aspiration, Shklar contends. Rather than telling us to hold on to the idea of an unrealizable freedom, he asked us to just accept things as they were. She advocates for a rather radical shift in Hegel’s thought. Not only did his notion of law and the relation of law to society change. Shklar connects this shift with an abandonment of the critical mindset expressed in his earlier writings (FI 205208). The abandonment of the ideal of freedom is thus seen as concomitant with an inclination to rest in the already established.

18Shklar did not want to rest too comfortably on convention and simply accept the prevailing order of things (Shklar, After Utopia, xx; Facing Up” 293; Men and Citizens 2; The Faces of Injustice 20). Arguably, to simply accept things as they were would imply a notion of an end of the history of failures. It would imply abandoning the aspiration towards freedom without which there would be nothing to fail. As we are about to see, doing so would, according to Shklar, be to depart from America’s fraught history—to really lose touch with the principles and promises inscribed in the founding documents. I argue that Shklar, when she issued the American founding and historical development, elaborated a historical approach by activating the notion of a history of failures identified in The Phenomenology. She furthered her adaptation and redrawing of Hegel’s work, using his thought to reflect not only on the political circumstances of the present but on two centuries of history.

3. The History of America as a History of Failures

19Freedom and Independence was published in the bicentennial year. The anniversary celebration had been planned for half a decade, and great attention had been given to the question of the meaning of America. During the planning, the bicentenary was widely seen as an opportunity to revitalise the values and principles that had inspired the founding of the nation. By looking back at the event of 1776, one was perceived to be able to be reminded of what America was all about. The belief was that the celebration could serve as a means to mitigate the feelings of disorientation engendered by the political and social turmoil of the last decade. The revolutionary years were thus perceived to represent a set of true and inherent values that could be reestablished and, by doing so, put the country back on track (Gordon 23, 8; Zaretsky 144).

20Although there was a general agreement that the celebration was a great opportunity to revive American values, disagreement marked the question of how the conceived inherent values were to be understood and what it would mean to reawaken them. Two opposing views arose. Some saw the bicentennial as an opportunity to draw attention to slavery, the continuation of historical injustice and oppression of minority groups. Others wanted a celebration without any mentioning of slavery or other wrongdoings. They argued that those who looked to what was wrong with America were the ones responsible for the country going astray (Lepore 73). The debate surrounding the anniversary is an illustrative example of the discord over the question of the meaning of America and understanding of its history. One side of the debate saw the history of America as a history of histories, of different ethnic, cultural, and racial groups and their distinct experiences of marginalization. From the other perspective, there was one glorious nation with a heroic foundation and successful historical progression (Jacobson 5556; Zaretsky 148; Hartman 10, 18; Higham 240241).

21Shklar adhered to neither of the two historical perspectives. In the article Rethinking the Past,” published in spring 1977, she addressed the American founding and two centuries of history and thus engaged with an issue that was very much in the air. With this article, which was published as a contribution to a theme issue on Hannah Arendt, Shklar implicitly entered the debate on the understanding of American history. By engaging with Arendt’s account on revolutions, particularly the American, Shklar developed a historical approach that departed both from the conception of one heroic history and from the idea of a plurality of distinct histories. Without mentioning Hegel, her activation of his thought continued. She used the idea of a history of failures as a perspective from which to understand two centuries of American history.

22In On Revolution, Arendt provides an exceptionalist interpretation of the American Revolution. She argues that, unlike the history of revolutions in general, the American succeeded. It managed to settle the conditions for political freedom and establish a polity of free public association (Arendt 56, 92). Shklar finds this success story unsettling,total silence covers its failures, the fact that a long and bloody Civil War had to be fought to remedy its defects and to refound and complete it” (Shklar, Rethinking the Past” 86). Besides Arendt’s claimed ignorance of the problem of slavery, the core of Shklar’s criticism lies in how Arendt presents the revolution as a completed event, an event fulfilled with the ratification of the Constitution (Lou 332; Bajhor 108). However, Shklar was not only critical but appreciated two aspects of Arendt’s more overall approach. First, Arendt had provided an account on a tradition of revolutions, a tradition that Shklar understands as a tradition of almost complete failure” (Shklar, Rethinking the Past” 88). The second aspect enhanced is how Arendt encouraged one to think about the founding of nations from the perspective of a revolutionary mindset, not from a set of written documents. For Shklar, to understand a founding as an outcome of a revolutionary mindset means to consider freedom again” (8687). As will be shown, the two welcomed aspects of Arendt’s account are central for how Shklar came to conceptualize the history of America as a history of failures. Moreover, already now we can see the underlying presence of the arguments put forth in Freedom and Independence.

23Extracted from Arendt and clearly tinted by her interpretation of Hegel, Shklar takes the idea of a history of a revolutionary mindset and develops it into an approach to the American founding and two centuries of history. The American founding, Shklar states, proved unkind to the [revolutionary] spirit. A memorable series of heroic failures is, however, better than no remembrances at all” (88). What I take as crucial here is the fact that Shklar turns the notion of a tradition of revolutions into an American tradition. The history of America becomes a history of revolutionary failures. To emphasize failures does not seem optimistic, though the historical understanding that she engenders is not stamped by pessimism. In the quotation, a recurrence of revolutionary activity and its recurrent failures is highlighted. This implies that the revolutionary mindset is not located to one single event of a distant past. It has broken into the course of history multiple times and brought about a series of heroic failures”.

  • 4 Moreover, slavery as a continuing presence is central in Shklar’s account on American citizenship i (...)
  • 5 This corresponds with the notion expressed by later historians, of there having been not one but th (...)

24By seeing Shklar’s historical approach as an activation of the notion of a history of failures depicted from The Phenomenology, we can draw a parallel between Hegel’s idea of freedom as the driving force of history and her account of the revolutionary mindset. Both have to do with the aspiration to challenge the prevailing order of things. Even though the aspirations of the revolutionary mindset have never been fulfilled, the current order has been altered. Several times, the revolutionary mindset has brought about change. Moreover, Shklar’s approach to the history of America as a history of failures is formed by the understanding of slavery as a continuing plaguing presence in the present (Shklar, ”The Education” 61).4 This allows us to concretize her rather abstract notion of history as unfolding through a series of a revolutionary mindset and its failures. The American Revolution emancipated the thirteen colonies from Great Britain, but was accompanied with the continued enslavement of African Americans. The Civil War brought about the abolition of slavery, but was followed by the Jim Crow system. The civil rights movement generated pivotal legal gains that in many ways improved the social and political conditions for non-white citizens. However, just as previously in history, the achievements made were countered. The revolutionary mindset of the 1960s was met by opposing forces advocating the silent (white) majority.”5 We have here what Shklar conceived to be Hegel’s account of a history of failures to reach a state of freedom, but placed on the American scene. In a similar way as Hegel’s historical narrative was perceived to be constituted by a series of dependence and independence, we can understand Shklar’s account on the historical development of America in terms of a series of liberation and oppression.

25To approach American history from the perspective of a revolutionary mindset is for Shklar to consider freedom again.” The word again” is crucial. To consider freedom again is not equivalent to turning to the notion of freedom expressed by the founding fathers. To seek guidance in the founding event of the past would be, she contends, to ignore all that has happened since” (Shklar, The Federalist as Myth” 944) In contrast, Shklar promotes a remembrance of a series of heroic failures, of a history of failures. Implied here is a remembrance of that history has taken new directions, and that the notion of freedom is historically changing. As circumstances change, the meaning attached to the concept of freedom changes accordingly. To remember a history of failures is to recollect that the quest for freedom has arisen from and responded to specific situations.

  • 6 Forrester has made a similar argument, though not drawing attention to Shklar’s interpretation of H (...)

26The bicentennial was widely taken as an occasion to rediscover America’s foundational and guiding principles, including reviving a tradition of freedom.” However, not only has the notion of freedom, and all the values and principles that are supposed to guide the nation, changed through the course of history. Contradictory notions have coexisted, which was the case not least in the debate surrounding the bicentennial. The debate was marked by different views on what a revival of a tradition of freedom meant. Some conceived minorities’ struggle for freedom as the embodiment of this perceived inherited tradition; others saw their raised demands as the very opposite to freedom (Gordon 133). Which side Shklar sympathized with is quite clear. Some years earlier, she had stated that she wrote out of concern for the permanent minorities” (Shklar, Legalism 224), and she was convinced that the history of those at the margins always remains to be written” (Shklar, Learning without Knowing” 70). Furthermore, the very conception of American history as a history of failures rejects a historical understanding that shields deficiencies and ignores those who suffer and have suffered oppression.6 Nonetheless, with her historical approach, Shklar also departed from the notion of American history as a plurality of histories.

27The history of failures is a master narrative. It acknowledges the cruelties of the past that do not fit into the history of a nation perceived to be the epitome of the free world. But while it does not silence the repeated historical wrongdoings, it does ignore the uniqueness of different ethnic and cultural groups’ various histories. Although the history of failures forgoes the plurality of distinct histories, it has the idea of a plurality within history at its center. If one turns to the founding event, one finds, Shklar argues, conversations, disputes, and deliberations. The founding was a result of the discussions between federalists and anti-federalists that preceded the ratification of the final constitution (Shklar, Publius and the Science of the Past” 1296). Shklar thus argues for the founding as an outcome made possible by federalists and anti-federalists joining together in a common political project, a project formed and driven by open debate and exchange of different opinions.

28By stressing the founding as an outcome of discussions and negotiations, Shklar follows Hegel’s approach in The Phenomenology. She claimed he had been uninterested in the organization of the state. In a similar way, she does not address the founding from a constitutional historical approach. She looks beyond the steadiness of the American constitutional system. The Constitution and parliamentary structure have remained quite the same throughout history, but stability does not characterize the rest of history. From Shklar’s point of view, there is no use in turning to the years of the late eighteenth century seeking to rediscover some stable and eternal values. Not that she argues there are simply no values or meaning attributed to America, but she insists on their contested nature. If there is such a thing as an essence of America, negotiation, renegotiation, and discord are at its core, which has to do with an inherent historical pluralism (Shklar, Politics and the Intellect” 140142). At the time of the bicentennial, the understanding of the values and principles supposed to guide America had been subject for discussion and negotiation for two centuries. The event of 1776 was just the beginning of a project with an unpredictable future.

29Following Shklar’s reasoning, the feelings of disorientation that marked the 1970s was not due to America having drifted away from some true historical path. Nor was the way forward about realigning to that imagined track, but to continue discussion and exchange of different opinions. In the polarized debate of the 1970s, on what kind of history could best serve a present seeking to revive the meaning of America, the element of interaction between a plurality of people was downplayed. The idea of one glorious history excluded marginalized groups and their experiences, while a history of separate and unique histories stressed distinctiveness at the expense of commonalities. They both hampered the cultivation of a sense of belonging to one and the same society. Both restrained the idea of a common project shared by a plurality of people, an idea at the center of Shklar’s notion of a history of failures.

30By approaching American history as a history of failures, Shklar provides a metanarrative in which historical change is understood from the perspective of a revolutionary mindset and its crushed aspirations. Recurrently in history, a revolutionary mindset has broken into the course of history and changed the current. Shklar’s Hegel was not the prophet of the future. In a similar way, the outcomes of the revolutionary mindset are not predefined. The history of revolutionary aspirations and its failures is not self-autonomous. The revolutionary mindset does not blossom up by itself; it has no agency of its own but is embodied in and a creation of individuals. It emerges through relationships between individuals and their different opinions and beliefs.

31What I take as central in Shklar’s historical approach is the underlying idea of a common political project. To remember a series of heroic failures is to recollect that people, recurrently throughout history, have joined together and taken control over their shared political and social circumstances. But as circumstances alter, people’s experiences and beliefs change accordingly. Aspirations that once were relevant lose their power as new forms of injustice, inequality, and unfreedom evolve. When society and its people face new problems, new aspirations arise. This is what makes the meaning of America open-ended. Its history is, like The Phenomenology, opened to be redrawn and filled out from the perspective of the present, which was what Shklar did by using the notion of a history of failures to interpret America as an ongoing project.

  • 7 Shklar’s conception of democracy as a process is stressed by her use of the concept of democratizat (...)
  • 8 Shklar stresses the importance of conversation for democratic change (“Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” 20–2 (...)
  • 9 Shklar’s expressed notion of the history of America and American democracy accords well with the co (...)

32Instead of reviving some perceived inherent historical values or emphasizing the uniqueness of every particular group, Shklar stressed plurality and opposed opinions as a historical constant. She called for a remembrance of the historical failures of fulfilling revolutionary aspirations, which can be taken as a reminder that American democracy is an ongoing process without a predefined goal.7 Following Shklar, if something ought to have been revived in order to mitigate the perceived disorientation of the 1970s, it was the idea that a democratic community is constituted and maintained by interaction between a plurality of opinions. That democratic change requires conversation.8 Furthermore, that the freedom aspired is unlikely to be realized is not a reason to surrender to despair and eschew the belief that individuals can come together and reshape the circumstances that condition their common society.9 For America to continue its history of failures presupposes accepting that people, despite their differences, live together with each other—not against one another.

4. Concluding Remarks

33By engaging with the thought of Hegel, Shklar reflected on America’s past and present. She turned to political ideas that had been formed by experiences of the French Revolution and its aftermath, and adapted them on the basis of her experiences of the Civil Rights Revolution and its aftermath. She read The Phenomenology as a history of failures to achieve an unrealizable state of freedom. Failures were thus unavoidable; the unattainable cannot be attained. Nonetheless, she claimed that freedom, as an aspirational ideal, could serve as a vehicle for political and social change. Abandoning it would be to simply accept things as they were, including permeating inequality and injustice, without an aspiring freedom, no history of failures. An end to the history of failures would be a thwarting of American democratization.

34As I have argued, Shklar used and transformed Hegel’s ideas into an approach to American history that challenged both the understanding of history as one smooth and glorious progression and the idea of a plurality of uniqueness histories. By placing negotiation and exchange of different opinions at the center of her historical conception, she expressed what she took to be of greatest concern: that people with opposing beliefs can join together and change the current. And this was stressed at a time when Americans seemed to be drifting further apart. From Shklar’s point of view, the contemporary political problem was not that America had lost touch with some perceived self-evident and eternal values and principles. The problem was not so much that America, once again, had failed to live up to the promise of democracy. It was more that there was a scarcity of interaction and association between groups of people. Groups were approaching other groups as threats to their unique identities rather than recognizing each other as belonging to one shared pluralistic society.

35Shklar followed Hegel by foregoing constitutional history. She argued for the futility of searching for the meaning of America in a set of documents written in the past. Instead, she approached the founding as an outcome of a revolutionary mindset. Furthermore, with the historical approach developed by altering and activating Hegel’s ideas, Shklar indirectly evinced a certain conception of democracy. She expressed the notion of democracy as an ongoing process driven by a plurality of people joining together in an aspiration to change the current. Consequently, Shklar’s notion of American history as a history of failures is about democratic failures. And it is far from a thoroughly pessimistic history. The revolutionary mindset has recurrently failed its aspiration towards an unrealizable democracy, but it has brought pivotal changes. To keep failing is to keep alive the idea of a democracy to come. By adopting and adapting Hegel’s ideas, Shklar developed a historical approach that was to serve a present in its aspirations for a more inclusive democracy and expanded democratic participation. With the notion of a history of failures she emphasized that democratization is a common project, one that requires not fearing failure and, even more important, that people do not fear each other.

36Shklar made Hegel’s ideas speak to 1970s America, and her observations are strikingly relevant today as America celebrates its 250th anniversary. While the White House is decked out in gold, American democracy is being dismantled. The process of democratization is thwarted not only by attacks on democratic institutions, universities, and the press. The very notion of making America great again” implies putting an end to failures, without which there is no democracy to come.

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Notes

1 When Shklar’s interest in Hegel is addressed, it is rather briefly and with emphasis on how she in his thought found an interest in human psychology (see Gatta 32; Ashenden and Hess 11).

2 Before the publication of Freedom and Independence, Shklar wrote five articles on Hegel’s thought, mainly The Phenomenology, which formed the basis for her later book (see Shklar, “Hegel’s Phenomenology: An Elegy for Hellas; “Hegel’s Phenomenology: Paths to Revolution”; “Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Moral Failures of Asocial Man”; “Comment on Avineri”; “The Phenomenology: Beyond Morality”).

3 Shklar invokes a “reforming democratic energy” not explicitly in the context of the civil rights movement, but sees it as connected with the hope that the promises of the Constitution will extend to “those who still do not have their fair share.”

4 Moreover, slavery as a continuing presence is central in Shklar’s account on American citizenship in American Citizenship, which has led some to suggest that American Citizenship was a delayed answer to Arendt’s On Revolution (see Benhabib 138; Bajhor 93).

5 This corresponds with the notion expressed by later historians, of there having been not one but three revolutions in America (Lind 11; Foner, The Second Founding, 11).

6 Forrester has made a similar argument, though not drawing attention to Shklar’s interpretation of Hegel or the conception of American history as a history of failures (66).

7 Shklar’s conception of democracy as a process is stressed by her use of the concept of democratization (Shklar, “Learning without Knowing” 65).

8 Shklar stresses the importance of conversation for democratic change (“Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” 20–21).

9 Shklar’s expressed notion of the history of America and American democracy accords well with the conclusion recently drawn by Samuel Bagg, that “we are better off embracing a view of democracy as a never-ending struggle. If we accept that we live in a fallen and tragic world … we can more easily get down to the business of making it better” (Bagg 243).

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References

Electronic reference

Moa Spegel, Historical Failures and Political Aspirations: Judith Shklar Places Hegel in 1970s AmericaEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-3 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 25 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/24590; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15dm8

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About the author

Moa Spegel

Moa Spegel is a Ph.D. student in history of ideas at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research project analyzes the political thought of Judith Shklar focusing on the act of political theorizing, and seeks to understand what Shklar did when she was thinking politically in and about the United States in the second half of the 20th century.

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