Enlightenment and Rousseau
Robert Wokler, a senior lecturer in political science and directed studies who was a leading interpreter of 18th-century political thought, died of cancer on July 30. He was 63.
Wokler is known for showing how the political thought of the Enlightenment was influenced by developments in anthropology, linguistics and music. He was a scholar of the thought of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was the subject of Wokler's doctoral thesis, two of his books and two collections of essays, as well as of many of his numerous scholarly articles. Other articles refute claims by some thinkers that the Enlightenment is the source of many modern societal ills.
Wokler is the co-editor of the collections "Rousseau and Liberty," "Inventing Human Science" and "The Enlightenment and Modernity," as well as of an edition of Diderot's political writings and the soon-to-be published "History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought." He re-edited John Plamenatz' three-volume "Man and Society." At the time of his death he was editing Plamenatz' unpublished lectures. He was also interested in social historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, and contributed to his 1979 festschrift "The Idea of Freedom."
Wokler was born in 1942 in Auch, France, to Isaac and Ilona Wochiler. His birth helped to save his parents: his infant status gained the family entry to Switzerland, enabling Wokler and his parents to escape deportation to the Nazi death camps, where his maternal grandparents had been murdered. He was educated in Paris and then in California, where the family settled. A prodigious violinist, Wokler gained a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Chicago to study under Walter Piston, but soon switched to social sciences after an encounter with the famed scholar Leo Strauss, graduating in 1964.
At Strauss' suggestion, Wokler went to study with Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Cranston at the London School of Economics, where he earned a master's degree in 1966. From there he went to Nuffield College, Oxford, where he earned his doctorate in politics. His supervisors at Oxford were Berlin and Plamenatz, who were fellow refugees. Wokler eventually became Plamenatz' literary executor.
After appointments at Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Reading, Wokler began teaching in 1971 at the University of Manchester, where he became a reader in the history of political thought in 1994. He also held fellowships at Sidney Sussex and Trinity colleges, Cambridge, where he assisted with (and completed) Ralph Leigh's edition of Rousseau's correspondence. Wokler also held visiting appointments at Princeton and Uppsala universities. After taking early retirement in 1998, he spent his later years first at Exeter, then at Yale, with regular visits to Budapest, Hungary.
"He became renowned among students and colleagues for presenting subtle and original scholarship accessibly and stylishly, lecturing with virtually no notes and without hesitation, deviation or repetition," says his friend Joshua Cherniss '02, who is now a doctoral student at Oxford.
"His writings elegantly combine empathic insight and unequalled erudition with a deep love for the intellectual culture about which he wrote, and an often implicit political and moral passion; politically active in his youth, he was later outspoken in his calls for intervention against genocide in Bosnia," Cherniss continues. "He saw in the Enlightenment a profound response to experiences of religiously inspired violence all too similar to the events of his own time; he believed that the Enlightenment's calls for toleration and personal freedom, and its opposition to sectarianism and fanaticism, remained urgently needed."
Wokler is survived by his mother and a sister.
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