已故哈佛大学茱迪·史珂拉(Judith N. Shklar)教授是当代美国学界罕见的同时得到斯特劳斯派和罗尔斯派交口称誉的政治哲学家和政治思想史家。《政治思想与政治思想家》和《兑现美国政治思想》是在她去世后由她的同事和朋友斯坦利·霍夫曼(Stanley Hoffmann)等人编撰的两部论文集,其中既包括她的名作宏论,也搜罗了她的遗稿残篇。大约五六年前,我在北京东方出版社筹划“当代实践哲学译丛”时,除了在与刘训练君合编的《第三种自由》一书中收入她的“消极自由和积极自由在美国”(由本人翻译,文章标题改为“两种自由在美国”)一文,还计划从这两本论文集中遴选十余篇文章组成一个题为《恐惧的自由主义》的文集。由于此类选集的版权问题相当复杂,此事不幸半途而废。但我并未从此死心,而还是想把“恐惧的自由主义”这个史珂拉的名篇译出来,纳入我计划编纂的一部有关自由主义历史与理论的专集。只是由于近年头绪太多,一直顾不上这项工作。因此,当看到《政治思想与政治思想家》一书由在学界颇有声誉的“世纪文景”整体引进出版时,我的兴奋之情是可想而知的。我几乎是毫不犹豫地买下了这个其实定价不菲的译本,并多次在不同场合向我的学生和朋友大力推荐这本书。
原文: The cruelties of the religious wars had the effect of turning many Christians away from the public policies of the churches to a morality that saw toleration as an expression of Christian charity.
原文: Limited and responsible government may be implicit in the claim for personal autonomy, but without an explicit political commitment to such institutions, liberalism is still doctrinally incomplete.
原文:Berlins negative liberty of “not being forced” and its later version of “open doors” is kept conceptually pure and separate from “the conditions of liberty,” that is, the social and political institutions that make personal freedom possible. That is entirely necessary if negative liberty is to be fully distinguished from what Berlin calls “positive liberty,” which is the freedom of ones higher from ones lower self.
原文:If negative freedom is to have any political significance at all, it must specify at least some of the institutional characteristics of a relatively free regime. Socially that also means a dispersion of power among a plurality of politically empowered groups, pluralism, in short, as well as the elimination of such forms and degrees of social inequality as expose people to oppressive practices.
原文:Moreover, there is no particular reason to accept the moral theory on which Berlins negative freedom rests……Whatever the truth of this metapolitical assumption may be, liberalism can do without of it. The liberalism of fear in fact does not rest on a theory of moral pluralism.
原文:The importance of voluntary associations from this perspective is not the satisfaction that their members may derive from joining in cooperative endeavors, but their ability to become significant units of social power and influence that can check, or at least alter, the assertions of other organized agents, both voluntary and governmental.
原文:There is nothing “reductive” about building a political order on the avoidance of fear and cruelty unless one begins with a contempt for physical experience.
原文:To judge inherited habits by standards that purport to be general, even though they are alien to a people, is said to be an arrogant imposition of false as well as partial principles. For there are no generally valid social prohibitions or rules, and the task of the social critic is at most to articulate socially immanent values.
原文:To those American political theorists who long for either more communal or more expansively individualistic personalities, I now offer a reminder that these are the concerns of an exceptionally privileged liberal society, and that until the institutions of primary freedom are in place these longings cannot even arise. Indeed the extent to which both the communitarian and the romantic take free public institutions for granted is a tribute to the United States, but not to their sense of history.