Cruelty as the Worst Vice: Reading *Ordinary Vices* | QDaily's Annual Book Recommendations, No. 11

"Who really knows what is the most fitting way to think about victims? What can we do for them, and what can we do to them?"

A year has passed. China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been pushed around by large questions. In the midst of our bewilderment, the disappearance of intellectual voices — or their drowning in the noise — only deepens the confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to appear. In any era, wise thinking is scarce, and people of insight are the surest guides to the road ahead.

That is why our "2018 Book Recommendations" sets out to introduce, as broadly as we can, books we think are worth reading.

As in past years, every book that came within our view has been read by our editorial staff, who present it to readers in good faith.

We have also drawn on guest contributors, who are usually ahead of the curve and whose insights run deeper. We thank them here.

This is the seventh piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and its subject is human evil. The author, Hong Tao, is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Fudan University and director of Fudan's Center for Political Philosophy. His books include "Gulliver's Travels" and Ancient and Modern Politics, The Art of the Mind and the Way of Governance, and Origins and Events; his translations include The Statesman, On the Origin of Language, and Legislators and Interpreters.

I

Anyone with some knowledge of contemporary American political science will be at least a little surprised on reading Judith N. Shklar's Ordinary Vices (Chinese translation by Qian Yidong, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2018; page numbers below refer to that edition). Shklar can hardly be called marginal in American political science. Born in Latvia in 1928, she fled to the United States, like many American scholars of Jewish descent, to escape political persecution. After taking her doctorate at Harvard, she spent much of her career there as a professor of political science, and at one point served as president of the American Political Science Association. Yet this book, published in 1984, stands sharply apart from mainstream American political science in style. As a work of intellectual history, it dispenses with the familiar classification, comparison, and deduction of political concepts; as an analysis of practice or reality, it does not use concepts as its go-between. Shklar herself explained that she wanted to think about politics in a way "closer to actual people and events, in a more substantive manner" (p. 345). So what, in her view, does it mean to think about politics more substantively? Simply put: telling stories.

This is one of the main reasons the book caught my interest. One of the striking "achievements" of twentieth-century political science is a discourse packed with political concepts and terminology that never touches political reality. Experts often use the technique to look down on "amateur scholars." As political research has grown ever more "academic" and "scientific," it has also grown ever more thoughtless — no longer engaged in substantive political thinking. A person can discuss politics, teach politics, research politics, write about politics, so long as none of it actually concerns politics.

In Ordinary Vices, Shklar does not attack this kind of political science directly. She simply declares that her contemporaries are not the ones she wishes to follow; she follows Montaigne. Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French essayist who lived slightly before the time of Henry IV, in the era that saw the birth of absolutist monarchy. Unlike Descartes, who came after him, Montaigne built no rationalized theoretical system; he simply wrote essays of varying length, telling his readers stories in a casual, warm voice, talking over the problems they faced in life. Mainstream histories of political thought today rarely mention Montaigne, and one important reason is that he belongs not to the modern tradition of political thought but to an ancient philosophical tradition — one that runs back to the Epicureans and Stoics of the Hellenistic period, who took philosophy, or learning, to be a form of relief for a person's actual life. This is what Shklar considers the way to make political theory "more substantive" (p. 348). In her view, the approach has an advantage that rationalized theoretical systems lack: it avoids giving rationalized treatment to what is irrational in real experience and history.

Shklar says cautiously that storytelling cannot replace rationalized, abstract analysis; it can only supplement it. But she also points out that for understanding political phenomena, storytelling may offer a more fitting kind of analysis, because political activity, with no embellishment at all, is already a drama.

I would argue that Shklar is trying to carry on an old tradition that contemporary social science has neglected: storytelling. Ancient historians — China's Sima Qian, Greece's Thucydides — and political philosophers from Plato to Montesquieu were mostly skilled storytellers. In this tradition, the factual record of political events and the exploration of political ideas were fused seamlessly with vivid, concrete literary description. That trait can largely be traced to the performative nature of ancient politics — politics was itself a drama. Rulers not only did not avoid "display," they treated it as their prerogative. Ancient society was like a theater: political men (rulers) acted on a brightly lit stage, while the people looked on from the dark ring of seats.

Only in the modern era was all this turned upside down. Reversing the ancient pattern, the light no longer falls on the stage but on the audience. The people, though in some sense still onlookers, can see nothing, while their every word and deed falls in exhaustive detail under the ruler's eye. This is the scene Bentham described with the word "panopticon." Perhaps because of that difference, the ruler's true story — history — has become hard to tell in the modern era. History is no longer a record of the present but a study of an already settled past: ancient historians could write the "Basic Annals of the Reigning Sovereign," while today's historians can only study "history." A ruler's present-day words and deeds become "news," and news is not history but propaganda. When politics stops being a drama the public can watch, the nature of politics changes with it. While the ruler stood in the bright center of the stage, story followed history; once the ruler became invisible, story followed imagination instead — and since imagination is not a record of the ruler's words and deeds, can it still be a way of touching what is real?

Shklar's book does not take up this shift from ancient to modern storytelling, perhaps because she was hemmed in by her own political experience. In any case, the moment you tell a story, its core is particular people — above all their character — and that sets it apart from mainstream political theory, whose core is abstract concepts. The aim of the latter is to know an object; the aim of the former is to save the self. Knowing is an intellectual activity; saving is a moral one. Storytelling as "political theory" is therefore better suited to moral questions. But is morality still a "legitimate" topic for modern political science?

II

Beyond its method, the subject of Ordinary Vices is unusual too. "Evil" is a moral concept. Today it is common knowledge in the field that questions of good and evil — of morality — were long ago and rightly expelled from the territory of political science. Amorality, or to be honest immorality, is treated as an attribute of politics. In his works — The Prince and the Discourses on Livy — Machiavelli said that "doing evil" is a "privilege" of the ruler: to hold on to power, rulers may commit any evil at all; an ordinary person unwilling to do evil can simply stay out of politics. Machiavelli split politics from the non-political (morality) as two separate realms, with politics having nothing to do with morality. The distinction has shaped modern political science ever since.

Hobbes no longer treated "doing evil" as the ruler's privilege but as the natural right of everyone. Yet to avoid the greatest evil — annihilation — people entered into a covenant with one another, giving up their natural liberty, that is, the liberty to do evil, and handing it to the state. As a result, only the state keeps natural liberty; in other words, only the state holds the privilege of "doing evil." In Hobbes's own terms, the state stands above good and evil, and good and evil are what the state says they are. But the state is nothing more than a group of people acting in its name, and so, after a long detour, we end up back at Machiavelli: the rulers who act in the name of the state possess the innate freedom to do anything whatever. In the words of our own ancestors: "He who steals a hook is punished; he who steals a state becomes a marquis, and at the marquis's gate, benevolence and righteousness reside." The difference between Machiavelli and Hobbes is this: for the former, the state is a monarch made personal; for the latter, the monarch is a state made impersonal.

Max Weber summed up this modern political tradition, founded by Machiavelli and carried forward by Hobbes:

"Whoever lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers, and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant."

(Weber, Scholarship and Politics, trans. Feng Keli, SDX Joint Publishing, 1998, p. 110)

Once again a division into two: the moral person, who seeks salvation of the soul for himself and others, and the political person, whose basic instrument is violence — the immoral person.

This is the mainstream modern political tradition. Since politics and morality are held to be separate, and immorality is taken to be a defining trait of politics, it is no surprise that modern political science rarely discusses morality. To discuss the morality of politics would sooner or later touch the freedom to "do evil" — a freedom that the ruled, or the rulers who act in the name of the state, regard as an inborn right and as a necessary condition for carrying out their rule. Against that background, Ordinary Vices, with "evil" as its subject, is somewhat surprising.

Ordinary Vices discusses five "vices," one per chapter across its first five chapters: cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy. The five differ in degree — some are pure evils, others less so. Let me take first the three I consider less pure — hypocrisy, snobbery, and betrayal — and then turn to the pure evil, cruelty, and the vice bound up with it, misanthropy.

Hypocrisy is common. Modern society prizes "sincerity," hypocrisy is widely despised, and the charge is a favorite weapon against political enemies and non-enemies alike. But the author also points out that if one is strict about it, few people escape the accusation, because "any attempt to conceal one's feelings, any social etiquette, role-playing, or conformity to convention, or even simply a failure to recognize one's own character and latent tendencies" can be counted as hypocrisy (p. 72). As a result, "hypocrisy can be found everywhere" (p. 71), and modern people are left with something close to a panic about it. That is probably why keeping a low profile, or running yourself down, is so popular in modern society.

Shklar points out that hypocrisy is not a pure evil; it arises precisely out of the pursuit of good — except that the pursuit takes the form of a moral demand backed by force: "Hypocrisy is a form of coercion" (p. 75). Indeed, in a society that enforces morality through coercive power, two phenomena readily appear together: on one side, power-holders using power with no moral sense at all — so long as it is said to serve moral ends — and on the other, hypocrisy among the ruled who live under that power.

"Hypocrisy is the inevitable companion of stringent demands" (p. 74). Under the despotic rule of political moralists, subjects can only remain stuck in a state of immaturity. They become cowardly, snobbish, hypocritical; they act furtively, because they do not know what has to be hidden — trembling, as if walking on thin ice, as if standing at the edge of an abyss. They cannot possibly have an open, generous spirit. But is that not exactly the spirit the ruler is trying to snuff out in the people? Watching his subjects act with shaking hands and broken nerve, the ruler smiles from the heart; his chest swells, and his confidence grows. Tyranny in the name of morality is the best way to corrupt people — and, wonderfully enough, it is corruption carried out in the name of improvement. A well-informed ruler could hardly fail to see what harsh rule produces. But once the people are corrupted, the ruler looks all the more "wise and capable."

Hypocrisy comes in large part from the self-love of the power-holder. They merely use moral reasons to justify the unlimited exercise of their power.

Subjects under all-encompassing surveillance are hurt at the slightest move and still do not grasp the mechanism behind it. How clever this is. Power thereby has ample justification to seep, without limit, into every corner of social life, private life included.

Whether a ruler truly loves morality can be seen by asking one thing: is he strict with himself first and lenient toward others, or does he claim the greatest benefits for himself while turning the harshest power on everyone else?

In short, as Shklar puts it, "the character of a government may well be closely related to the incidence of hypocrisy" (p. 77). Under a government that requires no wisdom yet can persecute people all the more casually, hypocrisy runs rampant.

Snobbery, like hypocrisy, is common, and to some degree also connected to the pursuit of good. Both are related to a kind of "ambition to rise," and once that rise depends on power, snobbery is born. Is it not "ambition" when a young person already knows how to curry favor, already knows to stand on the side of the powerful? The snob flatters those above him, and those above him hold power. Do power-holders dislike being flattered? No wonder a society driven by power turns out snobs in abundance.

Like hypocrisy, snobbery comes from a misdirected pursuit of the good.

Betrayal, as a vice, is ambiguous too. It is not a pure evil, because betrayal is usually tied to loyalty: loyalty to one side is betrayal of another. Han Fei said: "A filial son to his father is a traitorous subject to his ruler." So the key to betrayal as an evil lies not in the act of betrayal but in what is betrayed, and different eras have taken different views of that "what." Antiquity found betrayal of friends and kin harder to tolerate, and minded betrayal of the state much less. Thucydides shows no particular shock at Pausanias, Themistocles, and Alcibiades betraying their own city-states; nor did Sima Qian offer any reproach when Wu Zixu persuaded the state of Wu to attack Chu, his own mother country. Modern people do not much mind betrayal of friends and kin, but cannot tolerate betrayal of the state. And rulers ancient and modern alike have been especially sensitive to being betrayed: better, they think, to keep everyone under watch, from their actions down to the thoughts in their heads.

As vices, hypocrisy, snobbery, and betrayal each take on a different character depending on context and circumstance: hypocrisy sometimes comes from good intentions, snobbery is not always malicious, and betrayal often means a choice made among conflicting loyalties. All three carry a certain ambiguity. Cruelty is different. Physical cruelty is the deliberate infliction of bodily pain on a victim, provoking suffering and fear — a deliberate evil with consequences. Moral cruelty is the conscious destruction of a person's sense of self, or of society's recognition of him. Whether or not it is judged necessary, there is no doubt that it turns its victim "bad" or "evil." Misanthropy, in Shklar's view, is to some extent bound up with cruelty. I will take up these two vices in the next section.

III

People can tolerate hypocrisy, and even see it as necessary up to a point, because hypocrisy at least signals that the good is recognized as good. People can tolerate snobbery, because the good so often depends on power. Today's people are not much bothered by betrayal, because in this atomized society loyalty has largely become hard to find. In any relationship between two people, given that there is always a "Heaven" above, watching and able to step in at any moment, can the bond between the two ever be stronger than that powerful third party? Give all loyalty to the boss. But cruelty is absolutely unacceptable, because cruelty is direct injury to body or spirit. Cruelty is a direct threat to self-preservation. In modern society, the preservation of the solitary self is the last line of defense, the one thing a person can hold on to. That is why, among the five vices, cruelty is ranked the worst. This is not merely a difference of rank; it is a difference of kind.

The book's first chapter, on cruelty, is what drew me in. Perhaps it is because I have some experience of it myself, or because I am a Chinese reader: in the Chinese tradition, cruelty was clearly recognized very early as the gravest of evils, and that is one point where the Chinese and Western traditions part.

In the Western classical tradition, cruelty received little attention; Plato and Aristotle barely discussed it. Nor did cruelty make Christianity's seven deadly sins, perhaps because sins against God were held to be the ones that mattered, while cruelty is a sin one person commits against another. Shklar points out that in the West it was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans generally began to "take cruelty seriously."

The Chinese "took cruelty seriously" much earlier. After the winds of Westernization arrived, some Westernized Chinese came to see this as an inherent weakness of Chinese culture, one that supposedly explained China's backwardness — even though, by that "reasoning," their own cruelty has so far still been directed at other Chinese. The Confucian tradition advocated "benevolent government," or "government that cannot bear to see others suffer," and the opposite of "cannot bear" is cruelty. When King Hui of Liang saw an ox and "could not bear its frightened trembling" and so "spared it," Mencius called this "the art of benevolence." Confucius championed "virtue and ritual propriety" and opposed "government by punishment" — that too was opposition to cruelty, since "punishment" meant corporal punishment, the mutilation of the punished body. China's idea of humaneness thus arose quite early. This does not mean, of course, that ancient Chinese society and politics did away with cruelty: foot-binding was a cruelty; the eunuch system, which lasted for millennia, was a cruelty; not to mention the endless varieties of corporal and capital punishment, and the countless city-massacres recorded in the histories, "feats" carried out in times of order as much as chaos, by Han Chinese against each other and against other ethnic groups. But China indeed had nothing like the slavery of classical Western society, emerged from aristocratic hierarchy relatively early, and had a comparatively weaker sense of the social group — these may all be among the reasons the Chinese idea of humaneness arose earlier than Europe's.

Shklar holds that in Europe the view of cruelty as the first of the vices is connected to Montaigne. And Montaigne arrived at that view as a response to Machiavelli's idea that cruelty is necessary to politics. As noted above, Machiavelli believed cruelty was necessary for a new prince to consolidate power. In Book 1, Chapter 26 of the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli wrote:

"If he is a new prince, whose position is not yet secure, and who has no wish to restore civilized life in the manner of a kingdom or a republic, he should act all the more this way: renew entirely the city-state's government, titles, powers, and personnel; make the rich poor and the poor rich… In this way, whatever rank, institution, status, or wealth anyone comes to hold, he cannot help but acknowledge that it came from you. … These methods are extremely cruel, contrary to any way of life, offending not only Christianity but human nature itself; anyone would rather avoid them at all costs, preferring to remain a commoner than to become the kind of ruler who harms his own people. But those unwilling to walk the path of goodness must, if they wish to preserve themselves, do evil."

(Discourses on Livy, trans. Feng Keli, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2005, p. 116)

Mainstream modern histories of political thought are written from the perspective of the one who inflicts cruelty — that is, from the perspective of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Weber. They argue that the political realm differs from other realms, such as the ethical, and show that politics has its own autonomous principle, above morality, cruelty, and the rest. This leads people to overlook an obvious problem. Machiavellians separate politics from other realms only in order to argue that political men enjoy a privilege of immorality; when they actually exercise power, they never respect the boundary. Political men have never kept cruelty to themselves. They apply it indiscriminately — even more readily — to non-political people who want no part of cruelty at all. In short, a person who, to avoid committing cruelty, chooses, as Machiavelli would put it, to remain a commoner, cannot thereby avoid becoming its object. If someone must inflict cruelty, someone else must bear it. Political men have the privilege of meeting cruelty with cruelty. What about everyone else?

This is Montaigne's perspective. Why must people suffer cruelty? Why is the victim's suffering necessary? Machiavelli looked at the question from the prince's standpoint, the perpetrator's standpoint. Montaigne "inverted Machiavelli's question," asking it from the victim's standpoint instead: facing cruelty, should one plead for mercy or rise up in resistance? (p. 17)

Montaigne gives no definite answer. He only makes clear his attitude toward the cruelty Machiavelli deemed necessary for a prince: he regards cruelty as the "worst of vices." Shklar calls this Montaigne's "timely response" to Machiavelli's new political science (p. 18).

If Machiavelli's view has a certain originality — after all, practicing cruelty and arguing in theory that it is necessary are two different things — then Montaigne's response has an originality of another kind: treating cruelty, in theory, as the worst of all vices. The very concept of the "victim" arose alongside Machiavelli's idea that cruelty was necessary. One insight of Ordinary Vices is that it points out Montaigne's important place in the history of modern Western political thought: he achieved a shift of perspective, from the viewpoint of the perpetrator to the viewpoint of the victim. Wherever there is cruelty, there must be a victim. If cruelty is necessary, does that make victimhood necessary too?

Traditional Chinese thought took up the question of victimhood very early. On one hand it treated avoiding the cruelty of the powerful as an important goal of politics — practicing what it called government that "cannot bear to see others suffer" — and on the other it pointed to the moral duty of aiding victims. But appeals to a ruler's mercy, and calls for relief from forces outside the system, however substantial they were, have proved largely useless in the modern bureaucratic, all-powerful state. Rulers dispose of the common people as they please; the moment something displeases them, out come the means, and as for a justification, one can be found — or invented. To hold power without indulging it: would that not turn all under heaven into a fetter upon oneself? Would it not fail to show the ruler's brilliance, wisdom, and superiority?

As to why people are cruel, Machiavelli's answer is simple: it follows inevitably from the struggle for power and gain. And people — rulers at least — always struggle for power and gain; that is their nature. Machiavelli compared them to beasts: the lion and the fox. Hobbes revised this, saying it is not only rulers but everyone who are beasts, all of them wolves. Hobbes's account is further from reality than Machiavelli's: most people are not wolves but sheep. Believers in Hobbes, followers of one -ism or another, set out to make his theory come true. Like the teacher in Battle Royale, they rig up every kind of scheme of necessity, and even so they can hardly force everyone into becoming a wolf. They only sacrifice a great many sheep for nothing. (Now that I have written that sentence, will it only intensify the forcing?)

On this question Shklar turns to Montesquieu's novel Persian Letters to argue that human cruelty is bound up with excessive self-love. In the novel, the Persian nobleman Usbek, who likes to control and manipulate others tyrannically, believes the tormented women of his harem are all deeply in love with him. Those who love themselves too much always feel that when others fail to give them what they want, it is a serious offense against them: why haven't "you" yet let "me" have my way? The excessively self-loving believe that anyone, so long as they wish it, should satisfy their desires unprompted, before those desires are even expressed. And if they are not satisfied, then all manpower, materials, resources, and technology — in short, the entire apparatus of the state — must be mobilized to fulfill their desires, and this is when cruelty follows.

But excessive self-love does not necessarily lead to cruelty. Many people love themselves too much; only those who hold the power to impose force on others can be cruel. Cruelty needs means and instruments. Cruelty is therefore the privilege of the powerful. The powerful have an abundance of resources, wealth, and manpower ready to hand, and so, in pursuit of their desires, can be cruel effortlessly and at will.

The twentieth century can be called a century of victims. In this century the number of people harmed or killed by cruelty exceeds the sum of all previous centuries. "Experts" rarely give this obvious problem serious thought. Victims are the defeated and the weak, and "experts" surely know the disadvantage of standing with the defeated and the weak.

Experts more often consider problems from the ruler's side. They supply reasons why rulers should possess powerful means of control and should practice cruelty, but rarely ask: why must the people be controlled? Why should rulers possess the power to harm people unconditionally, and the freedom to harm them at any time? In short, why should rulers do harm, and ordinary people be harmed?

Victimhood points not only to cruelty but to indifference and bystanding. For only an outside force — other people — can rescue a victim. But few will do it. One prominent feature of twentieth-century politics is that it shaped everyone into an indifferent, self-interested bystander, however opposed these various politics were to one another in ideology.

Montaigne belongs to the minority who look at the problem from the victim's side, and so does Shklar. She asks: who really knows what is the most fitting way to think about victims? What can we do for those victims, and what can we do to them? Even though we have so many opportunities and so much time to think about them.

Though she gives no definite answer, she does acknowledge that victimhood ought to become an unavoidable category in political thought, even if it remains a difficult concept to handle.

In Shklar's view, no human being should be treated cruelly: "No one should be subject to fear and cruelty" (p. 29). Victims should not suffer cruelty, and not because they possess some special quality — being "a decent gentleman," say. Even a "pure scoundrel" should not be treated cruelly. Victims should not be idealized. "Our tendency to overrate present victims can unwittingly aid tomorrow's torturers" (p. 29). This attitude of Shklar's is nothing if not wise, because those who practice cruelty always have their reasons. For years, in certain circles of power, has there not always been a "strong man" culture in the making, one that scorns mercy and glorifies cruelty?

Montaigne, who held cruelty to be the worst of vices, and Machiavelli, who held it to be necessary, are not as opposed as they look on the surface. To some degree both are tainted by the fifth vice, misanthropy. Both saw the "cruelty" in politics, and both seem to have thought it unavoidable. Facing this "fact," Montaigne rejected it in value and chose to retreat from politics; Machiavelli, in an almost mischievous way, affirmed it in value, and argued that evil should be met with evil.

Machiavelli, like Montaigne, was a cynic. He witnessed cruelty and experienced it firsthand. When a person comes to see, or believes he sees — human experience always has its limits — that everyone cares only for his own interest, that no true feeling is to be found, and that those who hold power will not hesitate to harm others for even their most trivial desires, he finds it hard not to conclude, as Timon of Athens did, that "the fiercest beasts are kinder than mankind" (p. 305). And so he becomes a misanthrope. Misanthropy often springs from cruelty, but it may also become a new source of cruelty in turn.

Misanthropes do not love people, because in their view people are not worth loving. Kindness, or anything warm and tender, looks to the misanthrope like mere ornament, covering the real cruelty underneath. "Since ancient times, benevolence has only ever harmed people; there has never been a single true instance of righteousness." This cynicism, this despair at the utter impossibility of goodness and beauty and its fundamental renunciation, is not uncommon among bureaucrats who move through the world of power and among police officers who deal regularly with organized crime; and on the faces of political figures grown used to injustice, deception, and killing, that same basic scorn for humanity is easy to detect.

Misanthropes have different paths open to them. Some withdraw from society; some bury their hatred of people deep inside; some, like Machiavelli, hold that cruelty should be met with cruelty. Misanthropes are not necessarily weak. The strong, or those who believe themselves strong — like Xie Xun in The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber — treat life as worthless and see cruelty as the fitting way to deal with a world that is evil at bottom. "In this world the strong have always preyed on the weak; reason counts for nothing." Nietzsche belongs to this type too: he withdrew from society, yet in his books extolled physical cruelty.

There is also a cruelty of the weak: the slaughter of the innocent. Many who slaughter the innocent are misanthropes themselves. As their own world is being destroyed, they refuse to grant that anyone else has a reason to go on living: no one deserves to live. Their cruelty is no different in kind from the cruelty of mutual retaliation in war — does war not also make civilians, even women and children, targets of revenge? People find the slaughter of innocent women and children more cruel and less bearable only because such acts look more cowardly and take less ability. It is a kind of snobbery in people to kneel at the feet of the great killers — some "great emperor" or other — while despising those who spare them. But precisely because they are cowardly and powerless, they more easily become the object of a higher order of cruelty, which in turn leads to misanthropy. Who forges this chain of cruelty? Is it not the mightiest of all cruel actors, the one who acts in the name of the state? And who is it that makes sure those "cowards" no longer dare to "die together with you," and can only "die together" with women and children?

Shklar believes Montaigne failed to escape the vice of misanthropy; he never worked out an institutional way of avoiding cruelty in politics. But his view of cruelty as the worst of vices was an important starting point for modern politics. The significance of Montaigne's thought found positive expression in his successor, Montesquieu. Montesquieu not only held, as Montaigne did, that cruelty is the worst of vices; he also believed a theory of constitutional government could be built to establish a genuine rule-of-law government, one that could "protect the safety of the innocent" rather than remain a source of cruelty and of the fear cruelty brings. It was in Montesquieu's hands that the view of cruelty as the worst of vices gave rise to an institutionalized political theory.

Today, faced with the all-powerful state, even misanthropes can no longer escape politics — or at least cannot escape becoming its objects of cruelty. After the twentieth century, how much cruelty human beings are capable of is no longer in question. But how to remove cruelty from politics remains a hard problem.

IV

Some objections can be raised to Shklar's discussion of cruelty. Chiefly, the author does not take up the cruelty of the twentieth century and after. What is distinctive about twentieth-century cruelty? To be sure, it remains, as always, an act carried out openly or in secret, against a victim's will or without his knowledge, meant to make him submit or simply to satisfy a wish to inflict suffering, and causing pain to body or mind. Its root cause is the same as ever: the self-importance of the powerful and the absence of any limit on their power. These "worthies" believe that everyone should serve their desires and become tools for satisfying them. In these respects, ancient and modern cruelty are no different.

But by the twentieth century, cruelty had undergone an important change of form. In antiquity, cruelty could not be separated from brutality. Physical cruelty usually caused the victim's bodily suffering, mutilation, even death, with the marks of torture on it. Cruelty left traces. Ancient rulers were even glad to put their cruelty on display. The Nanjing Massacre was cruelty of this type.

As ideas of humaneness developed, however, cruelty has been steadily concealed and leaves fewer and fewer traces — thanks to better technological means and their ever-wider use, punishment and death have become less brutal. Cruelty has increasingly shed the outward look of brutality.

The Nazis killed the Jews mainly through gas chambers, without the savage spectacle of the Japanese army's Nanjing Massacre — which was no different in kind from city massacres of hundreds or a thousand years earlier — but in a refined, rational, efficient way. Jews who were gassed were quickly reduced to ash. Were it not for the mountains of dentures, hair, and shoes left behind, people might scarcely realize a massacre of such horror had taken place. The Holocaust was unprecedented entirely because of new technological and organizational means. This is a landmark: technology changed the form of cruelty. Because of technology, cruelty not only continues but grows in scale, even as its brutal appearance disappears.

What does this mean? Cruelty will become an easier option to choose. It will no longer be shunned for the sensory look of brutality, nor will those who practice it hesitate over it. When fear and cruelty are lodged inside high-tech surveillance and control, when science and technology hand unrestrained power-holders more convenient and more covert means of practicing cruelty, we are fully entitled to doubt the prospects that the progress of civilization may bring.

If human beings remain beasts — at least those battle-hardened rulers Machiavelli spoke of — and technology grants them ever greater capacity, and institutions remain wholly unable to check their willfulness, then misanthropy, as a vice, would seem to become the people's only option. Shklar quotes in her book a chorus from Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, which she calls its finest passage:

"What keeps mankind alive? Mankind lives by bestial acts."

In truth, mere bestial acts are not so bleak. Once a beast has eaten its fill, it stops preying on man. "Man" is different: once he has eaten his fill, he wants all the more to devour his fellow man.

Cover image: a still from the film Battle Royale (also known as Tokyo Holy War), via Douban.