Shklar on Hypocrisy
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other authors in this series – including Bentham and Nietzsche – and asks what price we should be willing to pay for putting cruelty first among the vices.
Going Deeper:
- David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy (2008)
- Katrina Forrester, ‘Hope and Memory in the thought of Judith Shklar’, Modern Intellectual History (2011)
- Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, 'The Theorist of Belonging', Aeon (2020)
- [Audio]: 'The Moral Philosophy of the Good Place,' Vox
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week is the final episode in |
| 0:21.0 | the current series of history of ideas for watching and partnership with the London Review |
| 0:25.3 | books. In it, David discusses Judith Shachlar, the philosopher who tried to remind us that being |
| 0:31.2 | cruel is the worst thing we can do. But what did that mean for the other ordinary vices from |
| 0:37.2 | snobbery to hypocrisy? |
| 0:57.2 | This is the last in this series of talks about the history of ideas and in many ways the last book I |
| 1:03.2 | want to talk about is my favourite, but it's also probably the least well known. It's by Judith |
| 1:09.6 | Shachlar, American philosopher, political theorist. She died in 1992. This book, Ordinary Vices, was |
| 1:17.2 | published in 1984. Shachlar was also at Harvard. I hadn't quite appreciated until I saw the list. |
| 1:24.2 | The last three thinkers I'd be talking about, or at the same university at the same time, but this |
| 1:28.8 | isn't about Harvard. And Shachlar was a very different kind of philosopher from Nozick and rules. |
| 1:35.0 | In some ways she wasn't there kind of philosopher at all. She was very interested in history in literature. |
| 1:42.1 | She wrote a lot about fiction. Ordinary vices has as much in it about Mollier and Jane Austen, |
| 1:48.8 | as it does about Russo and Nietzsche. It's probably her best-known book, but it's not that well-known. |
| 1:55.8 | It's quite hard to get hold of. But maybe it's better known than I appreciated. |
| 2:01.6 | I was watching the American comedy show, if that's the word for it. I want to call it a sitcom, |
| 2:06.8 | but it's not really a sitcom. It's a good place. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about |
| 2:11.8 | hell. It's about a group of people who wake up in the afterlife in what looks like heaven, |
| 2:16.9 | presided over by Ted Danson. It seems lovely. It's almost too nice. And slowly they appreciate |
| 2:24.0 | that what looks like heaven is actually hell, because hell is just a tweaked version of heaven, |
| 2:30.3 | doesn't take much to make paradise hellish. In this program, these four people who have lived |
| 2:37.2 | relatively worthless lives on earth, that's one of the reasons they're in hell. One of them has |
... |
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