LET ME BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION. I promised I would not too long from now give a course on Political Obligation for what we call “the Core.”1 Normally this is the last subject that I would want to talk about at Berkeley or, to be specific, before any audience which included my old friend Hanna Pitkin.2 What has brought me to it is not despair or recklessness but an unexpected discovery, and with it an odd set of reflections on liberty that caught me very much by surprise and that I want, rather tentatively, to present to you for comment. I am not one to waste an opportunity for some real exchange of ideas, especially as I am at work and undecided about these ideas, rather than having them all worked out. This will therefore be less an elegant paper than a first try at thinking two problems through.
The first thing I want to show is that conscience is a very rare and a very odd ground for either obeying or disobeying public authorities. The usual reasons for bringing up the obligation to obey or to disobey is a conflict of loyalties. Being a historian, I ran through the history of the argument, which I will presently repeat, but I was flabbergasted by just how rarely conscience actually appears. Now, one place and time when it does come into its own is in pre–Civil War America in the course of the struggle to abolish slavery, about which I have been thinking and writing for some time now. And as I reflected on its bursting upon our political scene, I inevitably had to think of liberty, since that was what was at stake for the abolitionists, which means inevitably for us yet another look at Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts.3 The conclusion I came to was that the distinction he draws between the two types of liberty has little relevance to that part of our history and to our most typical way of thinking about liberty, that is “rights,” which I believe derive their real significance from the struggle and the transformation of the Constitution it brought about. I do not mean to slight the great Mr. Locke, but from the first, and certainly by the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was the institution that defined liberty for some and fueled natural rights theory for others.
When I began to think about women and men who ask themselves the question “Should I obey?” the first image in my mind was the one you find in most current philosophical literature on the subject, a heroic figure standing up all alone who says, “This is wrong, I won’t stand for it,” or, on mature reflection, “I must obey.” Heroic they are, but as I went on to explore the history of arguments that women and men have given for standing up for what they think is right against public authority or a policy I found this to be the case only very rarely. Mostly it turns out to be less a matter of conscience than of divided loyalties, which is important if we want to separate out conscience from other grounds of moral or political action on the part of groups or of individuals. Let me begin conventionally enough with Antigone.4 As you may recall she insists on burying her brother, whom the king, her uncle, will not allow to be buried because he was a traitor. As we listen to her she insists on her obligations as a sister and on the duties of kin to bury their dead. It is deeply bound up with religion. And it is not at all clear that this is a case of conscience so much as a case of conflict between civic and religious values. Of course we see it her way, but is she asserting an inner voice or a recognized ritual duty? In her aloneness and personal courage we think that we hear the voice of something very personal, but it may not be that at all, and I think Hegel was right when he saw her defending a familial religiosity against political encroachment. I do think we hear that voice in Plato’s Crito when Socrates refuses to escape from the death penalty by an unjust sentence.5 He speaks of his daemon, an inner spirit that commands his assent on such occasions, and I believe that this is the first time someone isolates conscience as a peculiarly nonreligious, simply human moral impulse and tries to explain its primacy for him. Socrates says it is neither convention nor law, but rather his decision to go to his death. And he gives reasons. Some have said that he is only defending the dignity of philosophers by dying nobly, being more heroic than Achilles, as he had said in the Apology,6 but the two are, of course, not incompatible. I’ll stick with this as the first appearance of conscience in a philosophical text, not least isolated in its rejection of the claims of friendship that Crito makes so movingly, and which I am in danger of misrepresenting as mere conventionality. It is a tour de force to underwrite obedience out of gratitude and duty with something as personal as one’s own daemon. Heroes, in epic poetry and in biblical narrative, of course, often defy the powers of kings and overlords, but they do not speak as Socrates does of an inner voice not attached to anything outside himself.
What I did find out about them and my other examples was that they were engaged in a conflict of loyalties of one kind or another. Even when confronted with the Lord’s anointed kings, God has a prior and greater claim upon these characters’ loyalty. The counsel of Nathan and David, probably the most often-cited biblical characters in Carolingian Europe, puts the claims of faith squarely against those of rulers, yet it is not a matter of personal conscience, but of obedience to another, and primary, authority—another ruler, in effect. The struggle between the church and the state is in principle interminable because it entails a conflict of loyalties. Even if from Saint Paul to Augustine, and even to Luther, Christians were enjoined to suffer the secular powers humbly and unquestioningly, it was not as a matter of conscience but because politics was so insignificant and humility was so great a Christian virtue.7 Obedience as a sign of humility has nothing to do with politics; it is a matter of suffering the scourges of the secular world in their most extreme manifestation. In a case of clear conflict between rival organizations it was obvious who had the greater claim. We may think of promising as a pretty personal commitment, but the oaths that were so central to obligation from the Middle Ages on, and to which we are still addicted, were in no sense like that. They were made to God and were guaranteed by him, and those who really believe this, like Claus von Stauffenberg in our century,8 have a terrible time in trying to decide what God demands of them: their oath to a ruler or their duty to God directly. It may be, as Eliot presents Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, a matter of the honor of God and the honor of man.9 And horrible doubts about self-deception and temptation haunt those who are genuinely torn by these conflicts of obligation to two divinely sanctioned powers, one embodied in the church the other in a ruler. A further complication is added when one has to decide which among several is the true church. When Luther said his “Here I stand,” he was acting upon what he took to be the unmistakable orders of God, not his personal inner voice as such. He was defending the true church against its betrayers.
There are other loyalties involving honor. The honor of the nobility is something that no king can kick around forever, even if he is the Lord’s anointed and even if treason has acquired an especially odious name, with Judas Iscariot in mind and when oaths to God are involved. Remember Shakespeare’s Richard II.10 He is an awful king, he brings all his troubles on himself, but no one refutes his claim that he has a right to the crown that no one else has, and when he is killed Bolingbroke vows to go on a pilgrimage in repentance, though he never does. It is not even clear that Richard II qualified as a tyrant to whom all oaths would be dissolved and all loyalties abrogated. That could only occur if he were a follower of the anti-Christ or had utterly betrayed his coronation oath in a truly scandalous manner. As late as 1775, in the election sermons of the New England clergy one still hears accusations against George III that picture him as a classical tyrant who has made war upon his wholly submissive and good subjects in America and who has fallen into Romish corruption. Nothing less would allow them to appear rebellious, which they were not, in fact; it was the ruler who had betrayed them. They had remained obedient to the laws of God and nature. This was not an aristocratic honor claim any longer, but the latter could come very close to being real expressions of conscience. In the course of the wars of religion in France one does find in some writers, notably Montaigne, a rediscovery, in the very conscious imitation of Socrates, of a moral claim that in disgust at the violence of fanatical sects asks, “What can I believe?” and answers, “Myself” and my friend. And as my friend, to be my friend, can never do anything I would not do, there can be no conflict between me and my friend, my other self, if he should disobey the king. But Montaigne still talks in the voice of honor and friendship between men of honor.11 So while he is as alone as one can be, he is not as isolated as Socrates was. Still it is typical of a morally upright person in a blood-soaked world, much like ours. I mean this century, not here and now. It is neither loyal nor disloyal to voice this personal conscience, but we are likely to choose friends over princes in case of conflict. This is the disenchanted world already, which may well be the one where conscience flourishes, though Montaigne could still appeal to a caste- and class-rooted notion of honor.
Am I being eccentric in seeing conscience in isolation from religion? Probably yes, but not because I want to in any way ignore the importance of religion to arguments about obligation—on the contrary—but because here I want to do some classifying, to get my own ideas clear, and to see whether one can identify pure conscience as distinct from conflicts of loyalty, including loyalty to God. As I said, there is a hint of it in the turmoil of religious warfare, but as you know, the more typical response was to legalize the whole question of obligation in the formal contractual paradigms, which have revived in our own day. The early modern generation of social contract theories was first enfeebled by Hume’s devastating criticism and then more significantly by the rise of modern ideologies after the French Revolution, in which the demands of the future—that is, the promise of history—replaced arguments about obligation.12
Even Hegel’s defense of obedience is grounded in obligation, and it was he who significantly made it his business to single out conscience as irrational and egotistic nonsense.13 Obligation really only returned, in England at least, when it finally became clear that the government was going to have to be an active social services provider and a modest redistributor in order to deal with both the new wealth and the suffering of industrial economies. I think particularly of the idealists such as T. H. Green who made serious arguments for the obligation to obey the modern state, which by definition did its duty.14 Unhappily, since 1914 these have also been states engaged in unceasing war, so that for many a person that obligation could not hold because unconditional military service was the very thing that the liberal democratic state could not demand. Some people come up with “just war” doctrines, but some do not, and they are the ones most likely to claim conscience as their guide. As you know, the law in this country recognizes this claim. But I’m not now at all interested in the law and its present vacillations. What does strike me is that it is really only in the twentieth century, when social justice made moral rather than historical claims, that obligations to society became a respectable topic of philosophical discussion again, and that when the welfare state became the warfare state it returned to where it should have been all along—in front of our eyes as a big and difficult question. And more for those who live under acceptable governments than anyone else. That does not, of course, imply that fascism and Nazism did not eventually thrust the issue of obedience to the forefront. I merely want to say that philosophically it had arrived there already.
In America it had never quit. That was due to the great anomaly of American politics: the prevalence of chattel slavery in a modern constitutional state that professed to be based on natural rights. For American abolitionists religion was often very important, but often it must be said that it was a church with a single member, as in the case of William Lloyd Garrison.15 And in Thoreau we do have the pure man of conscience, which is why he has become so important today, when conscience is no longer tied to religion and does not represent another social loyalty. Such claimants are in many ways disruptive and politically rarely successful people. They are very hard to defend. They seem egotistical, hyper-individualistic, a throwback to a heroic past now transmuted from war to morality. Did not Socrates compare himself rather favorably to Achilles? What could a Rousseau offer except to say we have divine instinct and that is that? What if it’s just yours; what sort of claim is that? The classic answer is Thoreau’s “Why not?” Why is a collective voice more valid, except that it is more powerful? I cannot see why Michael Walzer, for instance, says that a claim for “we” is inherently superior to one made in the name of “I.”16 We are just as often wrong, only more audible. Why is my conscience less relevant than a group ideology when I refuse to do what seems to me patently evil? If I have a duty to myself, then this is what that means. Is it a form of self-perfection? Perhaps it is, but whom am I supposed to perfect if not myself first of all?
The case I am going to present is not along these lines at all but is part of our history considered in terms of liberty. There is a good possibility that in some cases conscience perceived as a form of self-liberation can justify itself as a necessary step in the liberation of others. Its justification then becomes liberty as a spiritual as well as a political good. It does not answer all the questions, but it is an interesting possibility, and I’ll try it out on you. I am less interested in making a case for the abolitionists here, since I take it for granted that they were right, than in investigating the thorny problem of conscience when you do have a lot of choices, and when there is a government you do not want to overthrow entirely or hurl into turmoil but you are convinced that in some extremely central way is absolutely and completely unjust, not just a little wrong—that is, it enforces slavery. What I am concerned with is that a theory of liberty which I think is right nevertheless does put some difficulties in the way of conscience. The conscientious person as I have described her does not say, “I should be free to do as I choose.” She says, “I am right, and I am oppressed not because I am going to jail—which I expected to do—but I would feel, and do feel, oppressed because even in jail I am forced to do something I regard as evil.” Even the person who sews cotton sacks in jail may feel implicated in slavery. And it is oppression as being implicated in not being able to get out of doing what is regarded as a serious evil that is so problematic. In New England the underground railway people felt that way. Every time they put on a shirt they knew that a slave had picked the cotton. What they felt they were subjected to was a denial of what is now called “negative liberty,” and it is to this topic that I now want to turn, because it is really about the relation between conscience and liberty.
As you know, since 1958 most talk about liberty has turned around a very famous essay by Sir Isaiah Berlin called Two Concepts of Liberty. Before I turn to it, a debt and a story. The text has been much criticized and yet canonized. Why? Due to the mood of a time: the Age of Ideologies. Also Berlin gave a very clear definition of negative liberty and defended it ably against all alternatives. Negative liberty consists in our ability to do what we wish without constraint by others. It is not what we do or why we do it, but the fact of not being hindered, or, as he put it later, having open doors. Against this he posed positive liberty. This comprises the victory of the higher over the lower self, the feeling of being liberated from lower passions in favor of an inner sense of freedom. This he rejected. He argued this was used by educative and authoritarian regimes to constrain us, to make us into new beings, or to allow us to withdraw, like Epictetus, who claimed that since he was rational he was free in his chains, while the tyrant was the real prisoner. This just devalues real liberty, in an athletics of moral anti-politics. Clearly, Berlin wanted to secure the definition of liberalism in its long struggle versus totalitarian regimes. His was a case against fanaticism at a time when the prestige of the word liberty was appropriated by the most repressive governments, the age of Orwell’s 1984. In this context it was important to get things right, to provide a narrow definition, not subject to vacillation and misrepresentation. No fudging! The liberty of liberals consists in not being interfered with. My liberty is as great as the space in which I may act as I choose, most especially with no interference from public powers. Nor will it do to say this is of no importance to poor people; they do not like being pushed around—this is just one more privation.
Most critics have objected that this is too narrow, that surely at least some ideal of self-development, of freedom to do something for oneself is part of individual freedom. To be left alone is too empty. To this Berlin’s defenders have cried, “Slippery slope!” But there is no argument that cannot be twisted or be set rolling down some unwanted path. Slippery slope arguments are slippery too. A more adequate defense, and one Berlin himself offered, is that politics is about choice, and that one has to get things right for that, as in politics no single harmonizing good is possible. Public health, education, raising the standard of living, security, encouraging the arts and sciences, protecting the environment: all are worthy ends, but they are not liberty, and they limit our freedom. They may also make liberty more likely; however, while they can be the conditions of liberty, they are not liberty itself. This is clearly a design for a pluralist society, since so many fundamental choices confront us. As such it has been close to American hearts. Pluralism is not something we sneeze at. Yet is pluralism enough? Is it in and of itself enough to ensure toleration and liberty? Surely not. Moreover, a plurality of values and our acknowledgement of them does not privilege freedom simply. We still have to choose. By calling things by their right name Berlin has made it clear that we must indeed choose. But the fact of many choices is not necessarily an incentive for liberty or even an argument for it. I would like to suggest that when we make these choices our conscience, as I have described it, not as a conflict of loyalties but as a personal conviction, may be involved, and we may then have to look at the question of negative freedom again. But not in the horrific form that Berlin paints it. On the other hand I do not want to follow most of his critics, either, who simply ignore his definition of positive liberty, define it in some other way—as self-development or whatever.
Instead I want to make a case for the higher self in politics under some circumstances and argue that it can be a genuine form of liberty and one which is necessary to sustain negative liberty at its best. Moreover, I think a strong notion of rights renders the distinction irrelevant. For while Berlin is right to remind us that national self-determination is not negative liberty, self-government can also mean that “I am master in my own land” in a way that is not at all nationalist but refers to being able to be an active citizen and to have some part in the decisions that affect me and mine. Is the opportunity to take part in politics not a part of liberty in a sense that is not positive as a victory over one’s baser inclinations or as the rule of reason, but as a way through an open door? If I want to rule myself to as great a degree as is compatible with a like aspiration on the part of others, then I have moved beyond the distinction between negative and positive liberty. Here I think lines get blurred. “I want to be my own master” and “I do not want to be interfered with” are not very distant demands, after all. I do not deny that a perversion of the desire for self-mastery can lead to illusions of liberty, but what cannot? In politics negative liberty can also be turned upside down. Not being interfered with can mean total immobility in politics, since every change interferes with someone’s expectations, even when that would significantly increase the liberty of many other persons whose liberty is not a question of negative or positive liberty at all. This is something Berlin actually recognizes, though he cannot do much with conflicts between negative liberties. I cast these doubts upon Berlin’s negative liberty to show that in politics nothing is as pure as it is when we just define things to get them clear, but what I really want to suggest is that his dichotomy is not all that relevant to U.S. history and the historic choices we have had to make.17 In the United States, liberty takes the form of rights, and this is overwhelmingly due to slavery since the middle of the nineteenth century. For us liberty is to be realized against obstacles, not just the open door. It is a demand to governments to act to protect the liberty of one group against another. It takes the form of positive action to assure liberty. Rights are not conditions of liberty; they have independent value. This is not liberation but a constant process that recognizes that we have a past of enslavement and an impulse to perpetuate it in various guises, against identified groups—initially, black slaves. It is a liberty expressed in rights, and whoever claims them knows that liberty exists in counterpoint to slavery. There is no question but that the choice between majority rule and minority rights is the choice, yet it is not just a choice between justice and freedom, but also between two freedoms, that of the master and that of the slave. It may also involve an inner struggle between two parts of ourselves. To think that the conquest of one’s base impulses must end in totalitarian rules is a perversion of positive liberty, as Berlin admits, in fact. It is not a threat to freedom, but, as I shall try to say, an inspiration to it.
Let me leave that difficulty for a moment to go to the next topic. If I do not feel free without having a say, I may also not feel free if I am forced to do what I think is wrong. I am not unfree only if I have to do something I do not want to do; I may feel that what oppresses me is a moral burden. If I am forced, in short, to do something my conscience abhors and which subjects me therefore not to external constraint but to the torment that comes from having to do something wrong, and which causes me to feel self-revulsion, remorse, and so on—in short, I face inner oppression. This was what a lot of abolitionists experienced in the nineteenth century in America, and it makes Berlin’s distinctions in some sense inapplicable to America. They were implicated, embroiled in the systematic enslavement of others, and they could not extricate themselves from this evil. They suffered a deprivation of positive liberty. That is what evoked their conscience, in fact. In some ways the most extreme defenders of negative liberty in our history were the slave-owning planters of the pre–Civil War era. Rights was their favorite word. As every serious observer from Burke on noted, they had an intense sense of the value of liberty because they saw what it meant to be without it all the time.18 To be free was the very essence of their identity, as opposed to that of their slaves. Every abolitionist remarked upon the fierce passion for personal liberty among the masters. As soon as they were challenged in any respect they cried out that they were being enslaved. Whether it was tariffs, taxes, representation, or territorial disputes, they at once saw their rights in jeopardy, and the cry “We are being enslaved” was a constant feature of their rhetoric, as it was of the incipient labor movement in the North where the cry of “wage slavery” was beginning. It was the specter that haunted them all, but which also defined their liberty. To be sure, the chief use of negative liberty was to enslave the black population. But even if they were less free to speak and read than northerners, they felt free, and they certainly were their own masters. How can one say to people who enjoy such liberty that they are not free? Let’s face it, no one ever had more negative freedom than the slave owners within their domain. They had worries, debts, concerns over censorship of abolitionist mail and patrol service, to be sure, but also enormous spheres of discretion. It is, of course, an idea of freedom in which the wolves eat the sheep in a morally unregulated state of nature, but it sure is genuine negative freedom.
Consider, after the Dred Scott case there is a whole people who have no rights any white person need respect.19 If that is not freedom, nothing is. As it turned out over a hundred years later, the masters ceased to have a monopoly of negative liberty, and the doctrine of the equal protection of the laws and a number of other changes redistributed negative liberty to all citizens. Were the masters forced to be free? Yes, and in Rousseau’s sense. They had talked more incessantly of rights than any other part of the American public, and they were now being made, unsuccessfully for the most part, to live up to their professed public commitments and to the laws that they had certainly supported when these applied only to themselves. As you know, the freeing of the slaves was not the original object of the Civil War, but its byproduct. It was never popular, and after the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s it was the courts, not the most majoritarian institution, that preserved some modicum of the rights of the black population.
There were always, however, people who demanded abolition now. Most were, as I noted, religious, even William Lloyd Garrison, who had quarreled with every Boston congregation because of their lack of zeal; but his was a God-centered morality all the same. Lincoln and Thoreau were another matter. The latter was not at all religious, the former probably was, but it was not part of his political reasoning. For both, positive liberty was crucial. Lincoln grew up in the temperance era. He believed in voluntary, not legislated sobriety, and gradual, not sudden abolition of slavery, which he thought simply wrong. The argument is what interests me here. Both alcoholism and slavery are limits on our freedom and in the same way: because they limit our moral capacities. In one I am enslaved to my passion and in the other to a master. Surely, you say, these are not the same at all. But Lincoln thought they were. There was no difference in his mind between being a slave to a passion so compelling as to reduce my choices and having to do what another person commands; not only because I am left with few choices, but because in both cases an evil overwhelms me. To end either requires self-conquest. For Thoreau the self-imposed slavery, worse than a southern overseer, he said, was self-enslavement to the division of labor, to the ridiculous life we inflict upon ourselves, not on each other, when we go around amassing objects we do not need. We work so we can pay the hospital bills we get because we have worked ourselves into a lot of illnesses. Is his a call for positive liberty? I suppose so. But there is more. Is a government that enslaves anyone good enough for me? For a man with a conscience, smart, well to do? Why should I take it? I am being forced into doing wrong, and I won’t bear it anymore. I am not paying taxes to do wrong. If I do I am not free. I am being interfered with by enforced immorality. Negative liberty was ample in Concord. It was the burden of conscience, the higher self, that sent Thoreau to jail. Were the masters the only ones who were forced to be free? In fact the majority of Americans were forced. They were being forced to do what a minority thought to be right when they were forced to redistribute freedom. There is nothing about negative liberty that says it has to be shared. It is just mine. It is that belief in rights that renders the outcome of the Civil War an act not of enforced negative liberty but of a just distribution of liberty under law. It seems to me that this is not an easy case for Berlin’s concept of negative liberty. Sure, one must separate negative liberty from its conditions. But what are those conditions? And is negative liberty itself not merely a condition for other things, such as are demanded by positive liberty?
The classic answer in America, and the right one I believe, has been the theory of rights which combines the two liberties, and demands the abandonment of the monopoly on negative freedom held by the slave owners and others. The presence of ex-slaves forced the extension of rights in amendments and court decisions. It is, of course, not the whole story. The rights orientation of the masters was in the end their greatest ideological contribution to negative freedoms in spite of themselves. Nevertheless, I wanted to focus on rights as a moral notion, because they unite the two liberties in themselves. The right itself is not the only exercise of my negative freedom but also a claim against those who would oppress me and others. It demands positive action to constrain oppressors, and it does so because it is wrong to oppress others, and because government exists to prevent such oppression. The law that demands such action is itself, however, an expression of positive liberty in the sense that it is immoral to sit and do nothing when a human being in our midst is abused. The violation of another is an affront to my conscience. If we do not act to assert the negative liberty of all, our conscience is going to bother us. Or at least it should, and when it does we will not feel as free as when it is at rest. We will lack positive liberty.
Talk given at the University of California, Berkeley, 22 March 1990.
1. Shklar refers here to Harvard’s core courses for undergraduate students. Included in the core were various Moral Reasoning courses.
2. Hanna Pitkin is a political theorist best known for her work on representation. Pitkin had published a two-part article, “Obligation and Consent,” in American Political Science Review 59, no. 4 (1965): 990–999, and 60, no. 1 (1966): 39–52, which Shklar would have read or at least known about when she was preparing her lectures on political obligation.
3. Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 inaugural lecture at the University of Oxford, was published soon afterward by Clarendon Press. Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British historian of ideas who had made Oxford his home. Berlin and Shklar were both born in Riga and later met a number of times at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard.
4. Shklar refers here to the heroine of Sophocles’ play of the same name. For a detailed discussion of Antigone’s role and importance see Lecture 2.
5. Crito, in Plato’s dialogue, was the friend who tried to prevent Socrates from accepting the Athenian citizens’ guilty verdict in his capital case and to escape into exile instead. See Lectures 3 and 4.
6. The Apology is Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense before the Athenian citizens.
7. For a detailed account of Christian notions of obedience and disobedience see Lecture 6.
8. Claus von Stauffenberg was a German army officer from a noble family. As a fervent Catholic he became one of the central figures in the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot failed, and Stauffenberg was executed the following day. See Lecture 1, in which Shklar discusses the issue of obedience and resistance to the Hitler regime.
9. For a full discussion of Archbishop Becket’s case and his objections to King Henry II, see Lecture 6.
10. For a full discussion of Shakespeare’s Richard II see Lecture 7.
11. Michel de Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French politician and essayist. The views of his contemporaries are discussed extensively in Lecture 8.
12. See Lectures 9–13.
13. See Shklar’s discussion of Hegel in Lecture 14.
14. T. H. Green was a British social reformer and political theorist. For a discussion of his role and impact see Lecture 15.
15. William Lloyd Garrison was a New England abolitionist. For a discussion of American abolitionism, Thoreau, and civil disobedience see Lecture 19.
16. See Shklar’s discussion of civil disobedience in Lecture 20 and her “The Work of Michael Walzer,” in Shklar, Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 376–385.
17. Shklar had written earlier on Isaiah Berlin’s limited notions of negative liberty. Here she restated some of those arguments but also elaborated further. See Shklar, “Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States,” originally published in French in 1990, translated in Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffmann and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 111–126.
18. Edmund Burke was an Irish-born English politician, political theorist, and author of Reflections of the Revolution in France who took issue with Richard Price, Tom Paine, and the French Revolutionaries’ notion of the rights of man. Despite his polemic against the rights of man as conceived by the new revolutionaries, Burke was a keen defender of acquired and guaranteed rights such as that of an Englishman. Burke abhorred slavery and was an abolitionist before it became popular in Britain.
19. Dred Scott was an enslaved African American who had lived for some time in one of the free American states. He demanded that his rights be acknowledged like those of any white American citizen. In a landmark decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1857), the Supreme Court ruled that neither enslaved nor free African Americans had the standing of citizens, claims to citizenship, or the right to sue in a federal court.