“The Science of feeling and of suffering”
moral psychology, experience and injustice in Rousseau and Shklar
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47456/sofia.v15i1.49531Keywords:
Judith Shklar, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, moral psychology, sense of injustice, agonistic liberalismAbstract
This article investigates the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Judith Shklar’s political theory. I argue that Shklar inherits from Rousseau not only elements of a moral psychology, but more importantly, a psychological sensibility attuned to the negative experiences of the ordinary individual. The essay begins with Men and citizens (1969), where Shklar presents Rousseau as a reformulator of Lockean introspective psychology, imbuing it with moral and political significance. I then examine, based on Rousseau’s own works, descriptions of the feeling of injustice as an experience both enabled by natural dispositions and mediated by social relations, serving as a psychic foundation for the normative critique of political reality. Finally, I explore how, in The faces of injustice (1990), Shklar draws on this legacy to develop an agonistic defense of liberal democracy, rooted in the articulation of situated experiences of fear, injustice, and suffering.
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