The French police began their round-up of stateless Jews in the summer of 1942. In Occupied France, thousands were brought to the Vélodrome d’hiver in Paris on 16 July pending their removal, first to the transit camp at Drancy, then to the death camps in Poland. In the Unoccupied Zone, the arrest of refugees by the Vichy authorities and their handover to the Germans began in August. In November, the demarcation line vanished when German and Italian forces invaded Vichy France as an immediate response to Allied landings in French North Africa. Isaac Wochiler was a refugee from Köln, who had left Germany in 1934, and, after working in Italy and Turkey, had come to France in 1938. Ilona Hoffer had been born in Budapest and grew up in Vienna, escaping from Austria after the Anschluss. They met in Paris—he was a dentist and she his patient—and, after being separated when Isaac joined a machine-gun unit to fight the German invasion, they were reunited in the south of France. They married in Marseilles, but fled from there in November 1942 when they learned that their names were on a list of Jews to be arrested, and their son Robert Lucien was born in Auch, not far from Toulouse, on 6 December 1942. Having been denounced by neighbours, the family fled to Grenoble, from where they crossed the Swiss frontier in a hay wagon. ‘We cannot turn our country into a sponge for Europe and take in for example 80 or 90 percent of the Jewish refugees’, the head of the Federal Justice and Police Department had said.1 But in early 1943 the Swiss were still prepared to grant sanctuary to a four-month-old stateless Jewish baby, together with his parents. Not all the family escaped the Holocaust: Robert’s maternal grandparents were among the millions murdered by the Nazis.
Robert Wokler, as he came to call himself, grew up in Paris and, later, San Francisco. He was a talented violinist and enrolled at the University of Chicago on a music scholarship. There, however, the charismatic Leo Strauss diverted him towards the study of the history of political ideas, which would engage him for the rest of his life. He graduated in 1964 and came to England to study, first, for a master’s degree with Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Cranston at the London School of Economics and, second, for a D.Phil at Nuffield College, Oxford, under the guidance of Isaiah Berlin and John Plamenatz. In 1971 he was appointed to a lectureship in the Government Department at the University of Manchester, which was to be his base for more than a quarter of a century. There were, however, significant visits elsewhere. In the 1970s, there were two spells in Cambridge, in 1973–75 at Sidney Sussex College and in 1978–79 at Trinity, where he was close to Ralph Leigh, who was working on his epic edition of Rousseau’s correspondence. In the 1990s, a more sustained period of migration began. His final years at Manchester were punctuated by visiting stints at the institutes for advanced research at Canberra, Princeton, Uppsala and Budapest; and, after taking early retirement in 1998, there were posts at Exeter, the Central European University in Budapest, the European University Institute in Florence and, finally, a senior lectureship at Yale. He died of cancer on 30 July 2006, aged sixty-three.
In an impressive doctoral dissertation, ‘The Social Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Historical Interpretation of His Early Writings’, Wokler set out a framework for thinking about Rousseau that would sustain him over the course of his career. He was somewhat dismissive of the importance of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, which he judged a relatively trivial and derivative piece, and in the closing sections he argued that the crucible for the development of Rousseau’s mature thought was not so much the composition of this First Discourse but rather the public debate that followed its sensational appearance in 1751, to which Rousseau himself made several contributions in reply to some of his critics, and through which he clarified and considerably sharpened many of his key ideas.2 Those ideas found expression, above all, in four pieces written in the wake of this controversy—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 text known as the ‘Geneva Manuscript’, an early draft of what was eventually published as The Social Contract. The thesis argued that these four texts were the product of Rousseau’s critical reflection on the writings of a number of his contemporaries, including the naturalist Buffon, the Encyclopédiste Diderot and the composer Rameau—and the violinist-turned-historian was ideally placed to make sense of the extensive writings on music, the subject on which Rousseau published more words than any other. Through his study of the surviving manuscripts and fragments in the archives in Switzerland, Wokler was able to construct a confident chronology of the development of Rousseau’s ideas over this decisive period and to show just how intricately and intimately woven together were the various strands of his thinking about the origins of humankind, language, music and politics.
The doctorate provided a solid anchor for Wokler’s later research career, and the themes he had explored in its pages resonated throughout his subsequent writings. He broadened out his examination of the Rousseau–Rameau debate, for example, to consider the whole of the so-called Querelle des Bouffons, the pamphlet war over the rival merits of French and Italian opera that raged in Paris between 1752 and 1754.3 Wokler also continued to develop his interest in the intersection between the Enlightenment’s anthropology and its primatology. He was gripped by the thought that Rousseau’s idea in the Second Discourse was not so much the received view that what appeared to be eighteenth-century orang-utans might in fact be savage humans in the state of nature, so much as that the earliest humans might themselves have been orang-utans—and he was delighted by the way in which some of the inferences that Rousseau had made about the lives of orang-utans would in the end come to be vindicated by post-war primatology. To his earlier work on the French context of Rousseau’s speculations, Wokler would later add research on the analogous debates in the Scottish Enlightenment, where James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, had engaged in extensive and sometimes eccentric reflection on Rousseau’s puzzles concerning orang-utans, the origins of language and the question of just what it was that made human beings distinctive from other animals.4 Wokler would come to have things to say about Rousseau’s other major works—Julie, Emile and, especially, The Social Contract—but it was the writings from the middle of the 1750s to which he would return again and again, the Second Discourse and the Essay on the Origins of Languages in particular, and it was these that formed the intellectual and spiritual core of what we might call Wokler’s Rousseau.
Although they disagreed fundamentally about the nature and significance of Rousseau’s theoretical achievement, Wokler was very much Isaiah Berlin’s student, and he shared Berlin’s instinct that the history of ideas could aspire to the highest standards of scholarship without ever losing touch with the extraordinarily rich human drama that it sought to describe. He also took after his teacher in another respect, for while both men struggled to present a systematic statement of their main ideas in book form, essays poured from their pens, with Wokler’s appearing in a remarkable array of publications from History of Political Thought and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century to Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities and the Jewish Studies Yearbook of the Central European University. Even the power of the Internet has not really managed to restore unity to this scattered collection, for only a small number of his major pieces are easily available through the major academic databases. The fact that so many of Wokler’s published essays were the fruits of performances at various international academic gatherings, furthermore, may help to explain why some of them can be read aloud with considerable pleasure, but it also helps to illuminate yet another feature they share with Berlin’s writings, which is their tendency towards the repetition of key ideas and arguments.5
Berlin’s great never-to-be-completed book was his study of The Roots of Romanticism—and, as it happens, a manuscript from around 1950 that was posthumously published as Political Ideas in the Romantic Age was the subject of one of Wokler’s final essays.6 No single unfinished project seems to have haunted Wokler in quite the way that The Roots of Romanticism had haunted Berlin, but there were a number of books that he wanted to write and never managed to complete. One was Rousseau’s Enlightenment, which was to have examined the diverse intellectual contexts of Rousseau’s writings; another was on The Enlightenment Roots of Anthropology; a third was The Transfiguration of the Body Politic, in two volumes, a study of a conception of state power as the people’s ghostly representative, with discussion ranging from the golem of Jewish folklore through Thomas Hobbes’s fear of ghosts to the ritual mysteries surrounding the ballot in contemporary democratic elections.
Other projects had a more urgent political charge. Appalled by the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and by the inaction of the European powers, Wokler wanted to write the story of his mother’s experiences during the Second World War as an indictment of indifference to suffering. He also planned to write on the academic careers of refugees from fascism and communism (including Berlin, as well as Ernst Cassirer and others), in a book that would have explored the parallels between this intellectual diaspora and that following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Enlightenment did have a unifying principle, Wokler contended, in its championing of toleration and its opposition to Louis XIV’s attempt to produce a religiously cleansed Catholic France, and another unfinished book, The Enlightenment Project and Its Critics, was to have insisted on the importance of this point in opposition to the arguments deriving from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment that have presented the philosophy of the eighteenth century as somehow making possible the genocides and ethnic cleansings of the twentieth. In Wokler’s view, the various fashionable criticisms of the Enlightenment, whether post-structuralist or ‘communitarian’, generally rested on an almost bottomless historical ignorance of the vitality and diversity of eighteenth-century thought; and the moment on which he focused his critical attention was 17 June 1789, the day the Third Estate in revolutionary Paris transformed itself into the National Assembly, and which he considered to be the day on which the internationalist promise of the Enlightenment was betrayed and the modern nation-state inaugurated, ushering in a world in which ‘whole peoples without states—above all the Jews—would be doomed if ever such a creature should rise up against them’.7
There were various reasons why Wokler never finished the books he longed to write. One of them was that he was frequently caught up in other projects, sometimes other people’s, and many of these were happily brought to publication. Of the collections he edited or co-edited, there were volumes to honour the memories of Berlin and of Ralph Leigh, on Rousseau and freedom, on the origins of the human sciences and on the legacy of the Enlightenment, as well as the very substantial Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, which was completed just before he died and published posthumously.8 Wokler provided help to Maurice Cranston, who was working on a three-volume life of Rousseau, and it seems clear to me that the sections of that book that work best as intellectual biography are those parts that most clearly bear the imprint of that assistance.9 He also worked on some of the final volumes of Leigh’s edition of the Rousseau correspondence after its editor’s death in 1987 and contributed to the creation of the Leigh collection in the Cambridge University Library, which was built around eight thousand volumes from Leigh’s personal library and is now the major collection of eighteenth-century printed books by or about Rousseau outside Geneva. Wokler also re-edited John Plamenatz’s Man and Society and, with John Hope Mason, published a valuable selection of Diderot’s Political Writings.10
The two single-authored books that he did manage to publish were both on Rousseau, and they made a curious pair. One was a photographic reproduction of the text of his Oxford doctorate, which was published years later in 1987 by Garland as Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language, and which I am sure that only a few people will ever have read. The other was his Rousseau for the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series, first published in 1995 and later reissued in 2001 as Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction, a book that remains the best brief treatment of Rousseau’s ideas that we possess. (This volume reproduces its sixth chapter, on ‘Vagabond Reverie’, which Wokler described as being ‘as close to emulating Rousseau’s own style as was in my power, subject also to the constraints of another language and the requirements of a work of contextual interpretation’.)11
Late in life, after he became ill, Wokler’s publishing ambitions were scaled back to concentrate on the preparation of books based on his previously published writings. The selection of papers published here has its origins in a sketch for a volume that he drew up at Yale before he died. It has not been possible, however, to publish that volume just as it was first planned out. For reasons of space, and with considerable regret, we have felt obliged to leave out his long essay on Diderot’s influence on Rousseau;12 other papers that he suggested for inclusion overlapped with one another too much to make their publication between the same covers a sensible option; and there have been one or two other adjustments in order to include as many of his best and most characteristic essays in the selection. The papers by and large are printed as they were originally published, with only a small number of corrections based on remarks found on Wokler’s own copies and in other surviving documents. One consequence of this desire to interfere as little as possible with his texts is that a little repetition remains. There is a small overlap between the essay on ‘Rousseau’s Two Concepts of Liberty’ and on ‘Rousseau and Marx’, for example, but more commonly it is particular details from Rousseau’s own writing that Wokler relished and could not resist reproducing: around half a dozen times in the essays that follow he will remind us that in the Essay on the Origins of Languages it was savages that sang, ‘aimezmoi’ (love me!) and barbarians who muttered, ‘aidezmoi’ (help me!), but that we moderns can only grumble, ‘donnez de l’argent’ (hand over the money!).
The essays presented here cover the length of Wokler’s academic career from the 1970s (‘Rousseau on Rameau and Revolution’ and ‘Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures’) through to some of the last writing that he was able to complete before he died (‘Rousseau’s Reading of the Book of Genesis’ and ‘Rites of Passage and the Grand Tour’). They span the breadth of his writing from methodological reflections in ‘The Manuscript Authority of Political Thoughts’ to what might be thought to be journalism, for ‘The Enlightenment Hostilities of Voltaire and Rousseau’ was a feature written for the Times Higher Educational Supplement on the occasion of the bicentenary of the old antagonists’ deaths. And they include examples both of his various tributes to his mentors, such as ‘Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment’, as well as of his more critical engagements with the scholars of his own time, here represented by ‘Projecting the Enlightenment’, an essay directed against Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential account of ‘the Enlightenment Project’ in his After Virtue. What the volume contains, therefore, can be reasonably considered a representative selection of Wokler’s published writings.
Certainly, it is a selection that shows off his characteristic virtues. In a world where so much academic writing is a thoroughly constipated affair, Wokler wrote prose that could serve as the vehicle for his formidable erudition, but which was always set out with elegance and a surprising lightness of touch. He could bring to life not only the arguments of his eighteenth-century philosophers but also those of the twentieth-century commentators with whom he engaged; and his writing was always quietly but thoroughly infused with that unusual variety of political commitment, the kind that contributes to, rather than gets in the way of, excellence in scholarship. Both Wokler’s Enlightenment and Wokler himself were cosmopolitan and humanitarian to their core; and he was, to my mind—a favourite Woklerian turn of phrase—the finest Rousseau scholar of his generation.
Christopher Brooke
Kings College, Cambridge University
November 2010