A radicalism of fear? The affordances of negative idealism in Judith Shklar and beyond Samuel Bagg University of South Carolina NB: This article was invited by the editors of a special issue of the journal Contemporary Political Theory, with the theme “New Perspectives on Judith Shklar.” It is now published, open access, along with the other contributions for the symposium: please cite the published version, which you can access at this link. What follows is the final pre-publication draft. Negativity is often assumed to stand in stark tension with radical political demands. Fear, after all, is a distinctly conservative emotion (Robin 2004)—steering us away from potentially liberatory experiments, out of concern for the unpredictable forces they may unleash (Hirschman 1991). At best, it limits our ambitions to incremental progress; at worst, it activates our basest reactionary instincts. Therefore, many presume that a properly radical orientation—indeed, even an ordinary progressive one—must be grounded in hope rather than fear. More broadly, it is thought, a properly ambitious ideal should foreground positive goals we can strive for, rather than negative outcomes to avoid. For some critics of negative idealism, the necessity of prioritizing positive ideals is simply a matter of philosophical logic—we cannot know what is bad unless we first know what is good (Stemplowska 2008, 332)—while for others, the key concerns are pragmatic and political (Simmons, 2010, 35). For their part, meanwhile, many ‘realists’ and ‘moderates’ are willing to cede the realm of abstract principles and utopian speculation to radical opponents (Galston 2010; Sleat 2013). A series of interrelated dichotomies thus structures much discourse about the role and purpose of political theorizing: hope vs. fear; utopianism vs. realism; idealism vs. feasibility; ambition vs. moderation; optimism vs. skepticism; full justice vs. basic legitimacy—all of which line up, roughly, with the opposition between ‘radicalism’ and ‘liberalism’ And for many whose