Shklar, Judith N.

Judith Nisse Shklar was an eminent political theorist and a pioneering female faculty member at Harvard University.

Shklar earned her Harvard PhD in 1955.

Judith Nisse Shklar (1928-1992) was an eminent political theorist and a pioneering female faculty member at Harvard.

Born in Riga, Latvia in 1928 to German-speaking Jews, Shklar arrived in the United States during World War II. Her childhood experiences were a strong influence on her career as a political theorist. Her area of expertise was eighteenth-century politics, especially Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Although she herself was reluctant to be categorized, her politics could perhaps best be termed "liberalism of fear," or "liberalism of permanent minorities." "Dita" received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from McGill University in 1949 and 1950, and earned her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1955.

Shklar taught government at Harvard in the following capacities: Instructor (1956-1959), Assistant Professor (1959-1963), Lecturer (1963-1970), Professor of Government (1970-1992) and John Cowles Professor of Government (1980-1992). She served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England from 1983-1984. She was the Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford (1986), the Storrs Lecturer at Yale University (1988), and the Tanner Lecturer at the University of Utah (1989). She was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching prize in 1985, and was a senior fellow of the Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions.

Shklar held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and All Souls College, Oxford. She served as President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (1982), as Vice President of the American Political Science Association (1983), and as the first female President of the American Political Science Association (1989).

She was the author or editor of nine books, including After Utopia, (1957), Legalism, (1964), Political Theory and Ideology, (1966), Men and Citizens: A study of Rousseau's Social Theory, (1969), Freedom and Independence: A study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, (1976), Ordinary Vices, (1984), Montesquieu, (1987), The Faces of Injustice, (1990), and American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, (1991). Shklar died in September 1992 at the age of sixty-three. In the words of former Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine, Shklar "was the inventor of her own poetics: powerful, vivacious, pointed, and inimitable."