Francis Oakley

Focuses on the era of the divine right of kings, the last period when kingship was a vital political institution. Identifies the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV of France as the start of serious challenges to royal sovereignty, with the execution of Charles I of England representing the decisiive repudiation of sacral kingship.

Oakley continues his three-part history of the emergence of Western political thought during the Middle Ages with this volume. Here, Oakley explores kingship from the tenth century to the beginning of the 14th, showing how, under the stresses of religious and cultural development, kingship became a secular institution.

"In this book, Francis Oakley explores the roots of secular political thinking by examining the political ideology and institutions of Hellenistic and late Roman antiquity and of the early European Middle Ages. By challenging the popular belief that the ancient Greek and Roman worlds provided the origins of our inherently secular politics, Oakley revises our understanding of the history of political theory in a fundamental and far-reaching manner that will reverberate for decades. This book lays the foundations for Oakley's next two volumes, which will develop his argument that it is in the Latin Middle Ages that we must seek the ideological roots of modern political secularism."--Jacket.

In the past decade, criticism of the state of undergraduate education in America has come from many directions and in various forms, from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, to Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, to Secretary of Education William J. Bennett's 1984 report To Reclaim a Legacy. In his book Tenured Radicals, Roger Kimball derided current instruction in the humanities as "a program of study that has nothing to offer. . .but ideological posturing, pop culture, and hermeneutic word games." And given the intense demands of global competition, others have wondered if liberal arts programs in general should be replaced by more practical, job-oriented courses of study. Has the age-old tradition of education in the liberal arts been betrayed in our lifetime? Is it destined to become a stale vestige of the past? In Community of Learning, Francis Oakley, the president of Williams College, makes a strong case for the values and achievements of the liberal arts in providing a sense of historical continuity and a broader framework in which to come to terms with the problems of the modern world. Noting the "dyspeptic presentism" and "disheveled anecdotalism" characteristic of a good deal of the recent criticism, Oakley attempts to place it in historical perspective. He asserts that the single most important factor shaping the American undergraduate experience today is the unparalleled demographic upheaval of the past thirty years, the nature of the response it evoked, and the energy, imagination, and adaptation going into that response. And, reaching back to a more distant past, he insists that the tradition of education in the liberal arts has always been a highly tension-ridden one that from its very conflictedness has derived much of its enduring vitality. Weaving together historical perspective and recent statistical data, he evaluates current worries about a "flight from the humanities" on the part of students, or from teaching on the part of academics, and addresses such hotly debated issues as curricular coherence, multiculturalism, and the alleged politicization of undergraduate studies. Coming at a time when the age-old tradition of education in the liberal arts is beset by anxious questioning, Community of Learning is a bold affirmation of its established strengths and current efficacy in helping provide students with an enhanced ability to cope with the complex demands of an era of unprecedented change.