Robert Lucien Wokler (6 December 1942 – 30 July 2006) was an Anglo-French historian who was a leading scholar of the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Enlightenment.

Biography He was born in Auch, France, to Isaac and Ilona Wochiler, both war refugees; the parents were allowed entry to Switzerland several months later because they were accompanying an infant child. Many members of the family were victims of the Holocaust. He was born into a generation deeply affected by the political and intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century, and these experiences shaped his later interest in the questions of toleration, persecution and political violence. The Guardian writes: "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."

Robert Wokler and his family settled in Paris and later in San Francisco during his childhood. He entered the University of Chicago on a music scholarship but found an interest in political thought after meeting political philosopher Leo Strauss. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1964, followed by his master's from the London School of Economics in 1966. He then completed a DPhil from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1968. At Oxford, John Plamenatz and Isaiah Berlin, both refugees themselves, served as his supervisors, whose approaches to the history of ideas had a lasting influence on him. His doctoral thesis examined the social and political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a topic that would be a focus for much of his career.

Wokler's doctoral research provided the foundation for his later interpretation of Rousseau. Rather than treating Rousseau’s ideas as a series of isolated arguments, Wokler sought to reconstruct the historical and intellectual circumstances in which they developed. He was particularly interested in the period following the publication of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts in 1751. In Wokler’s view, the public controversy that followed the work was especially important because Rousseau used his responses to critics to clarify and develop his ideas. He therefore placed particular emphasis on four works that emerged from this period: the Second Discourse (‘On the Origins of Inequality among Men’), the unpublished Essay on the Origins of Languages, the Letter on French Music and the early version of The Social Contract. Wokler argued that in these texts Rousseau reflected on contemporary literature, including those of the naturalist Buffon, the Encyclopédiste Diderot and the composer Rameau. The violinist-turned-historian was exceptionally well placed to investigate Rousseau’s extensive work on music. Through detailed examination of manuscripts and other historical evidence, Wokler demonstrated how closely Rousseau’s ideas about human nature, language, music and politics were connected.

Wokler's interests extended beyond Rousseau's political philosophy into the wider intellectual debates of the Enlightenment. For example he extended his study of the Rousseau-Rameau debate to investigate the Querelle des Bouffons, the eighteenth-century controversy over French and Italian opera. He was also fascinated by Enlightenment's discussions of human origins and the relationship between humans and other animals. He particularly explored Rousseau's reflections on oragn-utans and the possibility that early humans might have been closely related to them. This interest later led Wokler to examine similar questions in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially the work of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. Although Wokler wrote about other major works such as Julie, Emile and The Social Contract, he repeatedly returned to Rousseau's writings of the mid-1750s, particularly the Second Discourse and the Essay on the Origins of Languages.

Beginning in 1971, he taught in the Government Department at the University of Manchester, which remained his academic base for more than twenty-five years. He became a reader in 1994. During this period, however, he also spent significant amounts of time at other institutions. He held fellowships at Sidney Sussex and Trinity colleges at the University of Cambridge, and during this time at Trinity he was close to Ralph Leigh, who was preparing his major edition of Rousseau's correspondence. Wokler assisted Leigh with this project and later contributed to some of its final volumes after Leigh's death in 1987. He also helped establish the Leigh collection at Cambridge University Library, which was built around eight thousand volumes from Leigh's personal library and became an important collection of eighteenth-century material relating to Rousseau.

Wokler's academic career became increasingly international during the 1990s. Before taking early retirement from Manchester in 1998, he held visiting positions at institutes for advanced research in Canberra, Princeton, Uppsala and Budapest. Following his retirement, he continued to work at a number of leading institutions, including the University of Exeter, the Central European University in Budapest, the European University Institute in Florence and Yale University, where he held a senior lectureship. His wide-ranging academic activity reflected his international reputation and his connections with scholars working across the fields of political thought, intellectual history and Enlightenment studies.

Like his teacher Isaiah Berlin Wokler believed that the history of ideas required both rigorous scholarship and an appreciation of the human drama surrounding political and intellectual change. Berlin was an important influence on his approach, although Wokler did not simply reproduce his teacher's interpretation of Rousseau. Instead, he developed his own distinctive account based on close historical research and attention to the relationship between thinkers, texts and wider intellectual controversies. Wokler, like Berlin, also tended to publish his ideas through essays rather than large systematic books. His articles appeared across a wide range of academic journals and collections, sometimes originating as lectures delivered at international conferences. This gave his writing an engaging quality but also meant that certain arguments and examples appeared repeatedly across his work.

The Enlightenment itself was another major concern for Wokler. He rejected interpretations that presented eighteenth-century thought as a straightforward intellectual precursor to the violence and totalitarianism of the twentieth century. Instead, he argued that the Enlightenment had to be understood in the context of its opposition to religious persecution and intolerance. He saw its commitment to toleration, personal freedom and resistance to sectarianism and fanaticism as responses to experiences of religiously motivated violence. These values, he believed, remained important in the modern world. His position was also shaped by contemporary events, particularly the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, which deeply disturbed him. He wanted to write about his mother's experiences during the Second World War as a way of confronting political indifference to human suffering. He was also interested in the intellectual careers of refugees who had fled fascism and communism, including Isaiah Berlin and Ernst Cassirer.

Despite his extensive scholarship, Wokler left several ambitious projects unfinished. Among the books he hoped to write were Rousseau's Enlightenment, which would have explored the intellectual contexts of Rousseau's work; The Enlightenment Roots of Anthropology; and The Transfiguration of the Body Politic, a study of the state power as a ghostly representation of the people. He also planned a work examining the Enlightenment and its critics, in which he would have defended the diversity and vitality of eighteenth-century thought against interpretations influenced by thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The fact that many of these projects remained incomplete reflected not a lack of ideas but the extraordinary range of his scholarly interests and his willingness to devote time to collaborative and editorial projects.

Wokler was deeply involved in the work of other scholars as well. He assisted Maurice Cranston with his multi-volume biography of Rousseau and worked on Ralph Leigh's edition of Rousseau's correspondence. He also re-edited John Plamenatz's Man and Society and, with John Hope Mason, published a selection of Diderot's political writings. One of his major editorial achievements was the Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, which was completed shortly before his death and published posthumously. A number of materials from his collection relating to Rousseau and Diderot are now held by the University of Cambridge, further reflecting his lasting contribution to the preservation and study of eighteenth-century intellectual history.

Wokler's own single-authored publications were relatively few compared with the enormous quantity of his essays and collaborative work. His doctoral thesis was eventually published in 1987 as Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language. His other major book was Rousseau, first published after 1995 for the Oxford Past Masters series and later reissued in 2001 as Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction. Despite its brevity, this book has been regarded as an especially effective introduction to Rousseau's ideas, demonstrating Wokler's ability to combine detailed scholarship with an accessible style.

After becoming seriously ill, Wokler reduced his publishing ambitions and concentrated on preparing collections of his previously published essays. The selection of his papers that appeared after his death originated in a volume he had begun planning while at Yale. Although the final collection could not reproduce his original plan exactly, it brought together many of his most characteristic writings. Some repetition remained, reflecting the fact that Wokler frequently returned to particular passages and ideas in Rousseau that he found especially revealing.

Wokler died of cancer in Cambridge on 30 July 2006, aged sixty-three. His career was marked by a combination of detailed historical scholarship, wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and a strong concern with the political meaning of Enlightenment ideas. Although Rousseau remained at the centre of his work, his scholarship extended to music, anthropology, the history of political thought and the defence of religious and political toleration. His legacy therefore lies not only in his interpretation of Rousseau but also his broader effort to understand the Enlightenment as a diverse intellectual movement whose commitments to freedom, toleration and opposition to fanaticism continued to have significance in the modern world.

Wokler's works include Man and society: political and social theories from Machiavelli to Marx (1992), Rousseau: a very short introduction (1995), Rousseau and Liberty (1998), The Enlightenment: the nation-state and the primal patricide of modernity (1998), and Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies (2012), a collection of essays.

Publications Source:

Books and monographs

Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies, Bryan Garsten (ed.), intro. by Christopher Brooke, Princeton: Princeton University Press (2012). Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language: An Historical Interpretation of his Early Writings, New York: Garland (1987).