STORIA DEL PENSIERO POLITICO 2/2018, 261-282 ISSN 2279-9818 © Società editrice il Mulino Giunia Valeria Gatta, Università Bocconi, Dipartimento di scienze sociali e politiche, Via Roentgen 1, 20136 Milano, giunia.gatta@unibocconi.it. «Shklar made me do it!» The liberalism of fear and international intervention GIUNIA VALERIA GATTA In this article, I draw on Judith Shklar to provide an alternative to the liberal model of military intervention proposed in the last few years by intellectuals such as Michael Ignatieff. I suggest that Ignatieff misunderstands Shklar’s liberalism of fear when he appropriates it as a foundation for military intervention on behalf of human rights. Through a reading of his Tanner Lectures Human Rights as Politics. Human Rights as Idolatry on one hand, and drawing on Shklar’s entire body of work on the other, I highlight the profound differences separating these authors with regard to: their stance on natural law; the question of foundations and moral universals; the question of voice (Who speaks on behalf of the op- pressed?); and their general stance with respect to the legacy of colonialism. I pit what I call Shklar’s activism against Ignatieff’s interventionism, and put forward a reading of «putting cruelty first» as opening a forum for contestation across nations and cultures. Keywords: humanitarian intervention, Shklar, Ignatieff, human rights, liberalism of fear 1. Introduction Judith Shklar’s The Liberalism of Fear has proved to be – for better or worse – her most relayed contribution to contemporary political theory 1 . In this paper, I argue that this essay has been read out of the context of Shklar’s entire body of work, and profoundly misun- derstood as domestically conservative and internationally imperial- istic. Liberal interventionists wrongly appropriate Shklar as an ally. In fact, she provides an insightful alternative to their arguments for intervention. 1 J. Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear, in N. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 1989.