Notes Introduction: “The Peculiarity of the Kind of Refugee I Was” 1. There were, so the editors argued, at least two main strands in Shklar’s thought. Accordingly, one volume focused on Europe and transatlantic encounters, dealing with political theory and her writings about other theo- rists through the ages, while the second volume concentrated on American intellectual history. 2. The sociological autobiography of Bourdieu (P. Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), or the new sociology of ideas as practiced by Neil Gross in his biography of Richard Rorty (N. Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)), might serve as examples. For a more detailed discussion of sociological inspired biographies and how they link to the sociology of ideas and intellectual history see Hess (A. Hess, “Making Sense of Individual Creativity: An Attempt to Tresspass the Academic Boundaries of the Sociology of Ideas and Intellectual History,” in Knowledge for Whom? eds. C. Fleck and A. Hess (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014, 27–46). 3. Musil would only later, after marrying his wife who was of Jewish descent, begin to reflect about anti-semitism. For Sahl, who came from a secularized Jewish family, the Berlin of the 1920s and early 1930s seemed relatively safe. Unfolding events would soon demonstrate that this situation was not going to last and that both worlds were doomed. 1 The Formative Years: From Riga to Montreal 1. Judith Nisse Shklar was born in Riga on September 24 as Yudita Nisse. She anglicized her name later to Judith. Unless otherwise indicated most of the biographical information, particu- larly those passages that cover Shklar’s early years, her upbringing in Riga, 204 Notes the conditions of emigration and early exile first in Sweden then in Canada, and the early years in Cambridge stem from a long interview that Judith Walzer conducted with Judith Shklar in 1981. The main purpose of the interview, which is now archived at the Murray Research Centre at Harvard (MRC Log #0709) under the title “An Oral History of the Tenured Women in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University,” (Walzer [1981] 1988) was to find out why women got late tenure at Harvard. Shklar was one out of 13 interviewees. While the interviews were geared toward an expla- nation of the circumstances of why these women were tenured late, they contain a wealth of biographical information, and particularly in Shklar’s case information that cannot be obtained through other sources. As far as possible I have tried to ascertain the main facts, either by comparing cru- cial passages of the interview with Shklar’s only published autobiographical reflections in “A Life of Learning” (“A Life of Learning”, Charles Homer Haskins Lecture, American Council of Learned Societies (1989), reprinted in Liberalism without Illusions—Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar, ed. B. Yack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 263–79), through other evidence such as the Collected Shklar Papers that are available in the Harvard Archives, and through a number of interviews and conversations with people who knew Shklar. However, while I have tried to ascertain most facts, there can be no total insurance of Shklar’s truthful recollection of some of the events. If and when historical and biographical facts could not be totally ascertained or where there was doubt I have used a literary form to say so. 2. It was a sign of the times that in order to circumvent the laws that governed access to the city and the university he had to pretend to be a commercial agent. 3. For all data and background information used, see Wolfgang Benz “Die jüdische Emigration” in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration (1933–45), eds. C. D. Krohn, P. von zur Mühlen, G. Paul and L. Winckler (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998), 5–15. 4. Tragically, the brother-in-law’s fortune and that of his immediate family soon ran out. Following the German invasion he could have escaped with the Russian troops and could have perhaps saved his life and that of his immediate family but in the end he decided to stay in Latvia, mainly because of his gentile wife and their children. The decision to stay proved to be fatal. As the head of the Judenrat he was arrested by the Nazis and murdered. The remaining family members were sent to a concentration camp where they were all killed (J. Walzer [1981] 1988; Session I, Part 2, 11). Of the wider family, Judith Nisse’s immediate family was the only one that managed to escape in time. 5. For data and other background information used, see Einhart Lorenz’s chap- ter “Schweden” in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration (1933–45), eds. C.D. Krohn, P. von zur Mühlen, G. Paul and L. Winckler (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998), 371–74. 6. For data and other background information used, see Waltraud Strickhausen’s chapter “Kanada” in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration (1933–45), Notes 205 eds. C. D. Krohn, P. von zur Mühlen, G. Paul and L. Winckler (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998), 284–96). 7. As it turned out, Judith Nisse’s younger sister followed more in the footsteps of her mother than did Judith. After having first been trained as a cook, the younger sister later retrained in England and began to teach severely handi- capped children. At the time of the interview from which the autobiographi- cal material stems (Walzer [1981] 1988), Shklar’s younger sister was living in Edmonton. According to her own account and reflection Judith was closer to her father, something that the father reciprocated by entrusting her with financial matters and responsibilities from early adulthood onward. 8. In the interview with Judith Walzer, Shklar also mentions that the two were joined by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a fellow student at McGill. Brzezinski, who was born the same year as Shklar (1928), had come to Canada with his father, an exiled Polish diplomat. Brzezinski would later become famous for his work as security advisor to President Carter (Section II, Part 1, 16). 2 In the Aftermath of Totalitarianism 1. For data and other background information I rely here on Claus-Dieter Krohn’s chapter “Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika” in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration (1933–45), eds. C. D. Krohn, P. von zur Mühlen, G. Paul and L. Winckler (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998), 446–66. 2. For data and background information I rely here mainly on Alfons Söllner’s chapter “Politikwissenschaften” in Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration (1933–45), eds. C. D. Krohn, P. von zur Mühlen, G. Paul and L. Winckler (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998), 836–45. 3. For a more detailed account of the larger historical context of this trans- atlantic encounter see C. Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). For a description of what American Social Science looked like before the 1930s see D. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 4. Some scholars like H. Stuart Hughes would even go further in suggesting that the migration of thought in the 1930s went beyond previous cultural experiences and constituted “something new in the history of Western man.” For Hughes it was a “sea change” in the sense that the migration changed not just the receiving society but also impacted on the thought process and intellectual output of the refugee scholars themselves (H. S. Hughes, The Sea Change: the Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York: Harper & Row 1975), 1ff). As to the latter, this is exactly what this monograph on Shklar tries to argue. 5. For obvious reasons this was easier for those of a technical and medical background with a fixed catalogue of technical or medical terms than for those who depended on fine distinctions, as was the case with writers, jour- nalists, social science academics, and humanities scholars. 206 Notes 6. For Lewis Coser, who has studied refugee scholars (L. A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America. Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)), Shklar would have hardly qualified as a refugee due to the academic training she received first in Canada and then in the United States. This position, however, overlooks the complexity of peoples’ lives and reduces the category “refugee” to formal criteria and questions like “qualifica- tion obtained where and when?”—criteria that do not do justice to individu- als’ life trajectories, particularly not those of a younger generation of refugees. As to the concrete case of Shklar, it is of course true that Shklar received her academic training in North America, but the unique conditions of how exactly she approached higher education and under which circumstances, would be obscured if Coser’s criteria were to be applied. Equally, the most important sub- jective and psychological dimensions would be obliterated and become reduced to a mere footnote about achieved formal qualifications in North America. 7. There can be no doubt that Friedrich was charismatic (perhaps too much so) and an intellectually inspiring polymath who combined the history of ideas with a sense of political realism that was mostly couched in the language of the behavioral sciences. Shklar acknowledged Friedrich’s intellectual achievements publicly in an obituary that she wrote together with Arthur Maass (J. N. Shklar and A. Maass, “In Memoriam: Carl Joachim Friedrich,” PS 18 (1985): 109–111). 8. As we will see later, Rawls’s Theory of Justice eventually made her change her mind. 9. Gular, whom Shklar suspected of having links with the British intelligence services, would later die under tragic circumstances in Ghana, presumably murdered.