American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion

"Rebecca Buxton: Our next book is Judith Shklar’s American Citizenship . Judith Shklar is actually my favourite woman philosopher, so I had to get her on the list. She was a Harvard political theorist at the same time as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. She was a Jewish refugee who fled Riga, Latvia, with her family in the Second World War and she went through the Soviet Union, Japan, the US, and then eventually settled in Canada. She then ended up going back to school in America after she went to McGill University for undergraduate studies. She eventually became a professor at Harvard and was the first woman to receive tenure in the Department of Government, but she’s never really received as much attention as any of those other post-war political theorists like Rawls and Nozick or even other exile political theorists like Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. She seems to be having a bit of a resurgence recently, and I hope people start paying attention to her work because it really is excellent. “Judith Shklar is actually my favourite woman philosopher” Shklar didn’t ever exactly produce a big overarching theory like Rawls or Nozick. But she had this very interesting methodology which is essentially focusing on questions of injustice and cruelty rather than questions of justice and fairness. So instead of looking at the ideal, like Rawls did, she said that we should instead turn our attention towards the negative, unjust aspects of society, and how to avoid them. Amartya Sen actually says something similar in his work. It seems to me that this is such a good and clear methodological way to do political theory that people don’t really pay enough attention to. American Citizenship is based on Shklar’s contribution to the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. We chose it because it’s a very good introduction to her way of writing. She was a political theorist rather than a political philosopher. The difference is debated, but for me the difference is that she uses history and politics to inform her philosophy—whereas political philosophers can (at least in some sense) ignore history and politics. So Rawls is an archetypal political philosopher and Shklar is very clearly a political theorist. Rebecca Buxton: I agree. It’s disciplinary policing in a way, this distinction. I do political philosophy about migration so I often tread the line between being a political theorist and a philosopher. I think political theory is well-informed, practical, political philosophy, so there’s not a very clear distinction. In American Citizenship , Shklar looks at the historical struggle for enfranchisement in American citizenship both by women and by black Americans. In the essay, she argues that the fight for the vote was never just about the vote. It’s also about this idea that she calls ‘standing’ and recognition of moral equality. She says that the two very important things for standing are the vote and access to the right to work and earn a fair living, which women and black Americans didn’t have. This links back to the Angela Davis book – Shklar looks at the women’s suffrage movement, which originally developed in the United States alongside abolitionism. Then, when it seemed that black men were about to achieve suffrage before white women, the movement very quickly became racist and instead tried to pander to Southern white women. And so she looks at the idea of how standing can be used as a weapon. If you view yourself, wrongly, as being superior to someone who has the vote already, then you feel like you’re entitled to the vote—which you are, but your reasoning is wrong. Well, she says that standing is a really vague notion that we have some idea of. She doesn’t necessarily unpack it as its own philosophical concept. She wants it to be something that the general reader can latch onto as knowing what it means. She says that standing can be unequal, but in a way citizenship is a form of giving equal standing in at least one domain, in that everybody has the vote and everybody has a say. It’s not just about having the vote in order to use it. It’s about having the vote in order to be recognized in a certain way. On work she says that people want a fair wage because it’s valuable as a form of recognition of equality in itself. So, when people lack access to being able to work for a fair wage, they don’t just lack the fair wage, they also lack the recognition that goes along with that."