Wilson Carey McWilliams (1933–2005)
Rutgers political theorist; communitarian; author of The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), a 700-page study of the non-liberal “counter-tradition” of fraternity, friendship, and citizenship in American political thought; left-leaning in his own politics; the dominant intellectual influence on the undergraduate and graduate Patrick Deneen (Rutgers BA 1986, PhD). Son of the leftist journalist Carey McWilliams (interrogated by HUAC).
McWilliams is significant for the wiki only insofar as Deneen’s intellectual formation depends on him. The communitarian counter-tradition McWilliams built his career describing — emphasizing solidarity, shared norms, religious and ethnic subcultures, and the limits of liberal individualism — is the ground from which Deneen later launches his postliberal critique. McWilliams himself, however, was a left-democrat; his daughter (Susan McWilliams Barndt, who studied under Deneen at Princeton) has publicly worried that Deneen’s recent trajectory loses sight of an essential McWilliams commitment: that “while there were limitations to the desirability of the liberal order, there were alternatives that are much more frightening.”
McWilliams died of a heart attack in March 2005, the same year Deneen left Princeton (after being denied tenure) for Georgetown. Deneen’s friend Joseph Romance: “When Carey died, he lost something that centered him.” The wiki treats McWilliams’s death as one inflection point in Deneen’s drift from left-communitarianism toward Catholic postliberalism.
Cross-References
- Patrick Deneen — Deneen’s mentor at Rutgers; foundational influence
- Postliberalism — the movement that has institutionalized one-half of McWilliams’s framework while abandoning the other
- I Don’t Want to Violently Overthrow the Government — Ward’s profile is the wiki’s primary source on this relationship