MAY 1, 2026
"Another Liberalism of Rights: Judith Shklar on Rights, Citizenship, and Conscience."
Abstract: Recent scholarship on liberalism often identifies liberalism with the conceptual framework of rights. Many ideological critiques of liberalism point to the (putative) limitations or pathologies of rights-based political thinking; in response, some defenders advance a revisionary approach to liberalism and its history, seeking to distinguish between rights-based and “civic” or “political” liberalisms, denigrating the former and advocating the latter.

While there are good reasons to contest the view that liberalism always has been, and should be, defined by a theoretical framework of rights, it is also important to recognize the variety of ways of thinking about rights present within the liberal traditions, as well as the reasons that liberals of very different intellectual stripes have been drawn to rights as a basic political concept, and tool. This paper takes a historical approach with a view to making a (tentatively) normative argument, showing that we can recover another version of rights-based liberalism, which reveals both liberalism and rights in a different light. Specifically, it focuses on Judith Nisse Shklar (1928-1992), whose thinking I reconstruct “another liberalism of rights,” which stresses the ways in which rights-based thinking and argument may inspire political action, restore or redistribute political agency to those with less power or lower status, and contribute to the formation of a more liberal political culture. Such a liberalism of rights may be instructive and fortifying at a moment of democratic retrenchment, intensifying political inequality, and resurgent authoritarianism. 

Bio: Joshua Cherniss is a political theorist whose research interests range over the history of political ideas. His work has mostly focused on European and American political thought in the twentieth century, and gravitates to the interplay between political ethics, philosophies of history, and liberal thought. His teaching reflects these interests, and also draws on his belief that political theory can be best pursued and communicated by drawing on the study of literature, political history, and moral psychology.

Cherniss' book, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, Fall 2021) reinterprets debates between enemies and defenders of liberalism in the twentieth century as centered on questions of political ethics, and particularly on the validity or virtuousness of ruthlessness as a political disposition. Cherniss is also the author of A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin's Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013), and of several articles and book chapters on Berlin, Weber, Niebuhr, and other figures in twentieth-century political thought; and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin (2018). In addition to further work on Berlin's thought, he is currently in the early stages of work on two larger projects: one concerning the theory and practice of political resistance in authoritarian societies, drawing particularly on the experience of Communist Eastern Europe; and another exploring the role of philosophies of history in liberal thought.

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