Product Description

The seven deadly sins of Christianity represent the abysses of character, whereas Shklar's "ordinary vices"--cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy--are merely treacherous shoals, flawing our characters with mean-spiritedness and inhumanity.

Shklar draws from a brilliant array of writers--Moliere and Dickens on hypocrisy, Jane Austen on snobbery, Shakespeare and Montesquieu on misanthropy, Hawthorne and Nietzsche on cruelty, Conrad and Faulkner on betrayal--to reveal the nature and effects of the vices. She examines their destructive effects, the ambiguities of the moral problems they pose to the liberal ethos, and their implications for government and citizens: liberalism is a difficult and challenging doctrine that demands a tolerance of contradiction, complexity, and the risks of freedom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #268950 in Books
• Published on: 1985-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 278 pages

Review
The book is a delight to read. At every turn of the argument it spurs one to think, and gives added pleasure with each new perplexity it raises. Readers who relish thinking for its own sake will be happy to join in the sheer exuberance of it.
--Ronald Beiner (Times Higher Education Supplement )

These are civilized excursions, literate and sensitive, and I cherish the book for its effort to move us out of the metalanguage and into the heart of darkness. Once we acknowledge the ordinariness of ordinary vices, the banality of normal badness, we may find ourselves not so distant from the moral monsters of human history, who may simply be us, writ large.
--A. C. Danto (Times Literary Supplement )

A distinguished book, full of wit, humanity, and insight...It is also, and more importantly, a moral psychology for liberals.
--Michael Walzer

About the Author
Judith Shklar was, before her death, John Cowles Professor of Government, Harvard University, and a MacArthur Fellow.

Customer Reviews

A serious look at what vices are worst.
This marvelous book takes after Montaigne and asks what vices should we avoid . She points out that if you hate all vice, you hate mankind - a vice in itself. One must then, she argues, choose which of the ordinary everyday vices are really the worst. She nominates cruelty as the vice to best avoid, but points out that this is not the same at all as avoiding hipocracy as the worst, and that working hardest at avoiding the sin of pride - which basically is the scorn of God - also will produce different priorities and results.