Robert Wokler was renowned for his brilliant oral performances at academic colloquia and for the elegant essays that often resulted when he set those performances, and the research behind them, down in prose. Too much of that prose has been difficult to find—dispersed in a whole variety of publications, many of which remain difficult to access even with modern technology. Near the end of his life, once it became clear that he would not have a chance to finish writing the books he had planned, Wokler conceived the idea of putting a number of his articles and essays together into one volume, so that they might together make their cumulative argument defending the Enlightenment and Rousseau’s rightful place in it. He asked me to ensure that the project came to fruition.
In preparing these articles for re-publication, I have changed hardly anything in the prose—a few small revisions have been made, often on the basis of Wokler’s own handwritten corrections to the published versions. The citations, however, have been edited a bit more assertively. Since the chapters were originally published in different venues and over a long period of time, the citation formats varied widely; in this volume they have been standardized. Since Wokler sometimes cited French editions of Rousseau’s works that are now difficult to find, references to the standard Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes have been added. In addition, since not all readers can be presumed to have Wokler’s fluency in various languages, citations of Rousseau’s works in French have been supplemented with references to the corresponding pages of accessible English translations, using, whenever possible, editions that Wokler himself endorsed. And where Wokler quoted passages in the original French, German or Latin, this volume has added English translations, usually in the notes. These translations are drawn from existing English editions when possible, but if no source is given the translation is new. There were, in addition, several mistakes in the original citations that have been corrected in this re-publication. Editorial additions and translations appear in square brackets while minor corrections have simply been incorporated into the text.
The volume that you are holding represents our best effort to produce the book that Wokler envisioned. I say ‘our’ best effort because this project was very much a collaborative one. Ian Malcolm at Princeton University Press was quick to see the worth of the proposal and guided the project’s first stages with his well-known insight and efficiency. Kimberly Williams at the Press put in many hours getting the essays into shape for re-publication, and Dale Cotton, Hannah Paul, Al Bertrand and Lauren Lepow all provided wonderful assistance in bringing the project to completion. Tom Broughton-Willett skillfully prepared the index. Jeremy Jennings offered detailed reflections on the whole manuscript and helped to determine its final shape. Henry Hardy offered valuable advice drawn from his experience in publishing Isaiah Berlin’s essays. Ryan Hanley and Jennifer Pitts, two historians of political thought whom Robert generously befriended and mentored at Yale, helped with the selection of articles and gave feedback on the Introduction. Stefan Eich, a Ph.D. student at Yale, found citations to English versions of passages that Wokler had cited, provided new translations of German quotations, and proofread the entire manuscript with great care. Christopher Brooke played a key role throughout, offering insightful advice on the structure of the volume, helping with editorial matters and translations, and, of course, writing the Introduction. Finally and crucially, Robert’s sister Ann Wochiler was really nothing less than an editor herself; she put in countless hours of painstaking work on the manuscript and brought considerable insight into her brother’s work to bear at every stage of the project. She also granted me access to her brother’s papers, drafts and correspondence. The cooperation that propelled this volume forward is a testament to the generous scholar who inspired it and a sign of how important all of us think it is that his best thoughts reach the wide audience they deserve.
The essays in this volume are graceful, sinuous and rich, and so cannot easily be summarized. When taken all together, however, they make a coherent and forceful argument, one that Wokler may have articulated most sharply in his remarks on Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings (reproduced here as chapter 15), where he wrote a sentence that might serve not only as a thesis statement for this volume, but also as a synopsis of his deepest conviction as a scholar: ‘The moral chaos of the modern world’, he remarked, ‘stems not from the failure of the Enlightenment Project but from its neglect and abandonment’.
Bryan Garsten
Yale University
July 2011