PROFESSOR Judith Shklar's latest book fails the Government department's long parodied three point test, Conclusions come in the form of question; and these, in pregnant triplets. Ordinary Vices makes a virtue of the necessity not to know.

Shklar, recent recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, could well have spun dross from a theoretical tower or availed herself of that luxury--abstraction--which so often makes political theory no difficult. Instead, and without making it sound like a how to for political pet owners, the book is "for and about us." "I don't pretend," Shklar writes, "that I am writing a letter from some distant ethical galaxy or addressing strangers."

As familials to a political tradition, we are not lectured but read to by a cast of literary and philosophical characters. Shklar simply asks us to think critically, "relentlessly" even, about the 'you and us' that makes up our liberalism.

How one looks at oneself inevitably has a bearing on which of 'us' one plugs into the equation. Montaigne, the skeptical hero of this book, was the most hesitant of pluggers-in; a true plodder. But it is to him that Shklar turns. It is in our wrongdoings--essentially in our response to what we are--that Shklar finds the right clues to the answer we call government; to the question of what we ought to be.

"Putting Cruelty First," the title of Chapter One, provides us with Shklar's point of departure. Cruelty, the mother of Shklar's analysis, nurses some more ordinary foibles--hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy. But in a discussion of politics and character, we must begin with the worst. "What we hate," Montaigne said of cruelty, "we take seriously."

The seriousness of Shklar's proposition hinges on its familiarity. Stripping cruelty of religion's septimum of sinning and politics' pretension to social harmony, Shklar puts it on the reading table, in the streets: empirical and everpresent. Brutality, Shklar before Machiavelli; known to faithless and holy alike.

Putting cruelty first, however, can kill a book--let alone the faith of the political theorist writing it. "Where next?" we might wonder--despairingly. Shklar doesn't give in so easily. Her book resembles a lesson in avoiding the answer of a Hamlet seeking suicide or a Hitler planning genocide. Weaving between the Scylla of simple answers and the Charibdis of complexity, she steers the hull (some would say the corpse) of liberalism along a cautious straight and narrow.

In what is a telling passage for us, Shklar writes:

The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one bewteen classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining solerance that fences in the powerful to project the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white.

Cruelty is insidious to any liberal because fear (its product) is despotism's ingredient. Cruelty destroys freedom; Hamlet's paralysis becomes the lawmaker's as well.

The leap from the private wrongdoer--"the poor friend and domestic tyrant"--to the perpetrators of twentieth century evil is the mental gymnastic that underlies the book's analysis Cruelty and its bedfellows, like our private lives, all have public faces.

The pretensions of public government and the private character of those who comprise it present as with a problem Shklar's challenge. Neither public nor private sphere is any less cruel; yet more is expected of the former. Any liberalism that pits itself against the fear implicit in cruelty's vices has a task set out for itself. Is its power awesome enough to rid us of those vices? Hardly. Yet Shklar insists that it may help keep us from the rot in ourselves that leads us to follow fearful political solutions.

Of course, freedom is the more difficult alternative. It whimpers where fear bangs heavily and suffers from the delicacy of its ambiguities. Yet to those who fear the licence its freedom brings, Shklar (and Montgaigne) can only answer that there is no fear worse than the fear of fear.

Shklar concedes that intolerable private vices may well unmask their public faces under liberalism, but argues that this poses less of a problem than any solution fear might dictate. She insists it's all within a liberal's range. Hypocrisy, hideous in its private forms, might well be necessary in a liberal democracy where politics is half persuasion, and the arts. It is the price we pay for social mobility, just as the exclusivity of cliques are the necessary outcome of a free society's overwhelming diversity. The message: better to be ambiguous in our freedom than fixed in the higher hypocrisy and vices of 'perfect' solutions that spell slavery.

Shklar's implicit message is just as interesting. Liberalism's opponents, she suggests, should not pretend to hold a monopoly on morality. While liberalism may suffer from its own delicacies, it is far from a moral free for all. She writes, "Liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining--for those who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom."

Shklar has little use for the transparent heroics of conservative rhetoric, we are left to our own political devices, honest and ordinary as they may be, Freed from nostalgia's extremism, we are asked to begin our "poor but epic battle" vice, Shklar's "liberal government for bad characters" is no sure thing; her virtue is no slouch. It has got to be fought for freely-and in spite of ourselves.

THE PLAYWRIGHT Moliere, to whom Shklar often turns in her book, wrote that men die less from their illnesses than from the remedies prescribed. Amidst this age's fearful complexity, many of us look for the easier nooks of community, authority and perfectibility. We have neither the stomach, nor sensibility, for Shklar's patient subtlety. She survives her choice over cruelty, but the book lives as an ambiguous challenge to our certainties.

The frustration that nags us in the face of the book's skepticism may be indicative of our more general frustrations with liberalism's inconclusive relevancy--frustration heightened this election year. Shklar seems to revel in such feelings. In Ordinary Vices, she asks us to do the same--while we are still free to do so.