Books by Francis Oakley

Part personal memoir and part participant-observer's educational history. As president emeritus at Williams College in Massachusetts, Francis Oakley details its progression from a fraternity-dominated institution in the 1950s to the leading liberal arts college it is today.

Focuses on three bodies of theory that developed between the 13th and 17th centuries: the foundational belief in the existence of a moral/juridical natural law, the understanding of (scientific) uniformities of nature as divinely imposed laws, and the notion that individuals are bearers of inalienable natural or human rights.

In this bookthe first volume in his groundbreaking trilogy on the emergence of western political thoughtFrancis 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.

Francis Oakley addresses late-medieval church history in its own terms, pointing out not only discontinuities but also continuities with earlier medieval experience. "By doing so," he writes, "I hope to have avoided the distortions and refractions...