Wilson Carey Mc Williams - Biography

Biography

McWilliams served in the 11th Airborne Division of the United States Army from 1955–1961, after which he took his Masters and Ph.D. degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. There he studied under Sheldon Wolin, John Schaar and Norman Jacobson, and also recognized the influences of political theorists Leo Strauss and Bertrand de Jouvenel. He wrote a Masters thesis on the political realism of Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. He was also active in the early stages of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the student activist group SLATE.

Prior to teaching at Rutgers University he taught at Oberlin College and Brooklyn College. He was also a visiting professor at Yale University, Harvard University and Haverford College. He came to Yale in the Spring of 1969 with a timely and provocative seminar on "American Radical Thought". At Harvard he taught the evening seminar "American Political Theory in the 19th Century" during the spring of 1998, a popular course attended by several professors including Harvey Mansfield. As a visiting professor he went out of his way to connect with the students in his courses (and sometimes in nearby bars).

McWilliams was the recipient of the John Witherspoon Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities, conferred by the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, and also served as a Vice-President of the American Political Science Association.

Recordings are available of his last class, American Political Thought since the Civil War, which was continued after his death by his daughter, Susan Jane McWilliams, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of politics at Princeton University at the time and currently a professor of politics at Pomona College.

At the time of his death, McWilliams had been married for more than 30 years to the psychoanalyst and author Nancy Riley McWilliams. Their daughter Helen McWilliams is the lead singer of VAGIANT Boston.