Robert Lucien Wokler (6 December 1942 – 30 July 2006) was a British historian who was a leading scholar of the political thought of the Enlightenment.
He was born in Auch, France, to Isaac and Ilona Wochiler, both war refugees; the family was allowed entry to Switzerland several months later because he was an infant.[1] They would later move to Paris and San Francisco during his childhood.
Wokler found an interest in political thought after meeting political philosopher Leo Strauss.[2] He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1964, his master's from the London School of Economics in 1966, and DPhil from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1968. John Plamenatz and Isaiah Berlin, both refugees themselves, served as his supervisors at Oxford and were significant influences. Wokler wrote his doctoral thesis on the thought of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a topic that would be a focus for much of his career. 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."
Beginning in 1971, he taught at the University of Manchester, becoming a reader in 1994. He held fellowships at Trinity and Sidney Sussex colleges at the University of Cambridge. Wokler later became a senior lecturer at Yale University, retiring in 1998.
He died of cancer in Cambridge in 2006.[3]
A number of works from his collection on Rousseau and Diderot are held by the University of Cambridge.[4]
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), Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century (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.